Subhash K. Jha speaks about Sarkar Raj 
By Subhash K. Jha, June 7, 2008 - 11:09 IST
Dark deep sinister implosive sinewy and rugged Sarkar Raj is Shakespeare on cocaine. Or the lacerated life of aThackeray-like family with the concept of spatial harmony acquiring a surrealistic meaningless because of the disembodied camera movements.
Ram Gopal Varma just doesn't let the characters be. In Sarkar, he observed studied and pondered on the compelling contexts of political power- play in the Nagre family.
Here he drags the uneasy relationship between patriarch Subhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan) and his Son (Abhishek) kicking screaming and wailing into an arena of heightened….no, exacerbated emotions. You can't get away from your karma. Or the noise. This is a shor-shot flick from the man who gave us the masterly trio Satya, Company and Sarkar.
Amar Mohile's background score doesn't help the cause. Every discernible space in the soundtrack is saturated with tempestuous sounds straight out of a B-grade horror movie.
In contrast, the three main characters maintain poise and serenity that defiantly moves in a direction opposed to the one Ram Gopal Varma has chosen to take this time. Sarkar was a cinema of screaming silences. Sarkar Raj can easily be rechristened Sarkar Rage. Characters bark orders, scream grievances and rave about a socio-political system that fosters inequalities. This is an angry film about an angry young man and his uneasily- calm father who define and demonstrate power in differing ways.
So what's new? Ram Gopal Varma cuts across the life and times of Nagre family slicing their emotions into messy portions of writhing anguish. The camera seems as restless as the characters, stopping only long enough to capture one of the three protagonists in tight evocative close-ups rationalizing the presence of Bollywood's first family's startling transformation into Varma's 'thirst' family.
The Nagres seem determined to bring prosperity to Maharashtra by allowing a foreign returned entrepreneur(Aishwarya Rai) with a ruthlessly acquisitive father (Victor Banerjee, wasted completely) to build a dam that threatens to destroy a pool of famished villages.
Oh dam! Ram Gopal Varma has finally discovered politics. Though how far Sarkar Raj qualifies as a new-rage version Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery Of India is a moot, though certainly not a mute point.
The film's frames scream for attention. As far as sequels go, Sarkar Raj leaps ahead of Sarkar in the sound and fury department. The plot is tense tactile and non-derivative, unless bits and fragments stolen from newspaper headlines would be considered derivative.
The narrative displays a muscular rugged grit though not much grip. What it ruinously and tragically lacks is those reposeful introspective moments that would have made these wounded betrayed characters more dense and believable.
Don't blame the actors if the characters just don't connect with the plot. It's not their fault. Blame it on Varma's characteristic uneasiness with the emotions. The women are either on the silent mode, or bumped off quickly. Or, in Aishwarya's case, "the only man in the cabinet"(to borrow a phrase).
Sarkar and its sequels (there's one more on the anvil for sure) are essentially emotional father-son stories. The emotions when they come in Sarkar Raj converge entirely on Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan's divine face as she becomes towards the end the recipient and beacon of all the pent-up resentment anger anguish and misery that the Nagre family has nurtured over a span of two films and many years.
Aishwarya weeps for the Nagres and for all those dynasties of the world from the Gandhis to the Corleones whose heirs have been brutal casualties of power-play and politics. She weeps perhaps for the film's lost cause too.
Sarkar Raj could have been what Coppola's Godfather 2 was to the Godfather. Instead Varma shrouds the characters' grief and angst in a cryptic chaos that echoes the extrinsic uncertainties of a rudderless narrative more than the pain of the world that the Nagres have inherited embraced and suffered.
Compounding the sense of pounding claustrophobia is the constant flow of humanity. Every frame looks cramped. Ironically, the Nagres seemed more spatially harmonized in the first film though they lived in a smaller home.
In two hours of playing time, there is not one light humorous moment that I can recall. The two turning points in the plot, the vicious slaying of the characters played by Tanishaa (sweet and sari-clad) and Abhishek jolt us although the movie prepares us for anarchy from the first frame.
For the rest, there is no rest from the climate of hectic headlines. The actors do make some interludes very special. Mr Bachchan's sequence with his dying son in the hospital or that hesitant stiff father-son embrace in the study just couldn't go wrong.
They don't.
But you wonder, what sort of a mind would script such abject tragedy for a man who lost his first son in Sarkar and the now his only surviving son. A truly Gandhian tragedy, and I don't mean the Mahatma.
Speaking of Gandhian values they're irredeemably subverted in Sarkar Raj . Dilip Prabhawalkar(who played Gandhi in Munnabhai) is here an Arcadian Machiavellian rural icon . Smiling benevolently at the political excesses of the power-hungry , caring for the hungering masses and looking out for his hysterically-committed grassroot-level surrogate son (Rajesh Shringapure) Prabhawalkar is a bizarre representation of Gandhism in these troubled times when fathers kill daughters and ministers go to prison. The gargoyle of villains, louts, touts and goons give this sequel to Sarkar roomy reverberations of unbridled rage.
One wonders why Varma insists on casting the same set of unpolished loud and theatrical actors in supporting roles in all his films. They implant a sense of dreadful déjà vu to this film.
Amit Roy's cinematography and Sunil Nigevekar's art are a remarkable raga of rusty browns and crusty crumbling visuals.
The three principal players are in splendid form, the senior Bachchan rightfully towering over the rest. Abhishek's preparedness for the part comes from his pensive far-away looks and expensive designers suits. Take your pick.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as the chic industrialist coming to grips with a socio-political order where corruption is a given, could well be seen trying to come to terms with an askew and disembodied world of perverse politics and fragmented family values that Ram Gopal Varma has built.
At the end we see Subhash Nagre's sighing wife (Surpriya Pathak, again criminally wasted) proceeding towards the phone to call their grandson to join the family business.
"Not another sequel," Supriya seems to be thinking.
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