Original art of Shriram Raghavan and Cinephilia

It’s been more than five years since Sriram Raghavan’s films hit the screens. But his presence continues to linger in Hindi cinema like a kindly neighborhood ghost. Everywhere you look, the bricks of his buildings remain, covered in graffiti. If something catches your eye with its retro ingenuity and built-in cinephilia, it could be Raghavan’s Spirit Animals. He’s there even when he’s not around, whether it’s Raj & DK’s shows, Vasan Bala’s films or Vikramaditya Motwane’s films. Given that the director himself has turned homage-making into a sly genre, it’s no surprise that some of today’s most promising voices are the New Age descendants of his legacy. This does not mean that he is the master and others are the disciples. His style leaves room for the artist to reconnect with history and at the same time fashion the future. This is such an ingrained influence that it is impossible to imitate, but it is easy to customize. Perhaps that’s why many of Raghavan’s own films rarely feel like adaptations. The source material is often hidden in form, method, and subtext.

One of my lasting memories of Sriram Raghavan has nothing to do with his films. Or maybe it will.after the release of Andadun In 2018, ‘Sriram Spotting’ trended at the Mumbai Film Festival that year. He was regularly seen lining up to win multiple titles in a day, just like anyone else. There are no special passes, no drama, no fanfare (apart from the confused glances of young festival-goers). There’s something wholesome about seeing a moviegoer wearing a geeky movie T-shirt enjoying downtime in his natural habitat, days after directing this season’s box office hit. there were. This image is closely related to the type of films he makes.

the night before Merry ChristmasSriram Raghavan’s sixth feature film, here is a summary of his 20 years of filmography in the guise of ranking from bottom to top.

Five. Agent Vinod (2012)

the one that got away. Agent Vinod It’s original bombay velvet (2015), simply because a maverick director becomes temporarily co-opted by the very system he once destroyed. Raghavan’s globe-trotting spy action movie is the soulless equivalent of a Hollywood Marvel movie commissioned by a breakout indie filmmaker. For a heated minute, Saif Ali Khan, who produced and headlined the show, seemed to be playing the big-budget superstar game. johnny gaddar Naturally, it attracted a lot of attention, but bigger Movies are mistakenly thought to be the next step.Troubled production heritage Agent Vinod That aside, Raghavan’s voice is clearly out of whack, under the weight of star power, scale, and greed for the story.

But despite its disjointed format, it’s not a bad movie. There are many glimpses of what a clever entertainer he could have been. Raabta sequence, a catchy opening title and soundtrack, an appropriately cool wallet, a spy-satire premise, a large cast, and a nod to the ’70s.Also, who can forget the Twitter trolling for Indian movies? dark knight rising (2012) for “stealing” the climax of the helicopter bombing. Agent Vinod? Insanely great minds think the same way.? Thankfully, this was the director’s only gaffe. It is fitting that his vengeful comeback is called ‘Bhadlapur’.

Four. Ek Hasina Ti (2004)

A young woman is charmed and deceived by her new boyfriend. After hitting rock bottom in her prison, she sets out to exact her bloody revenge. on paper, Ek Hasina Ti It sounds like an amalgamation of every jilted lovers story ever told.There are a few double jeopardy (1989), a lot of Sidney Sheldon, some anjam (1994) and some of the 1987 films. Khun Bali Maan (No crocodile).

But Shriram Raghavan’s feature film debut unfolds much like the origin story of Shriram Raghavan as we know him today. It contains the seeds of his future film landscape. Mouse as a thematic metaphor. A mysterious suitcase. Nosy neighbor. suburban apartment. Characters pretending to be innocent. A performance within a performance. Prison drama. The male-dominated environment is being disrupted by women who don’t see it coming. However, at its technical core, Ek Hasina Ti It was truly Ram Gopal Varma’s work.of boot– Style tone and opening credits.Destruction of Urmila Matondkar’s psychotic act Coun (1999) and peer tune kya kya (2001). Weaponizing bold ways during Saif Ali Khan’s golden era (setting the scene) Omkara). Sudden cuts, odd camera angles, pulpy transitions, and an echoey background score. Raghavan had not yet fully realized his own vision, a vision shaped by the most famous filmmaking school in Hindi cinema.

Badlapur better Raman Raghav 2.0 than Anurag Kashyap Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). This is no surprise considering Sriram Raghavan made his first docudrama about a 60s serial killer after his FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) days. The cat-and-mouse game between a drug-addicted cop and a cold-blooded criminal is reimagined as a snakes-and-ladders chase between a revenge-obsessed civilian (named Raghav, of course) and a seemingly ordinary criminal ( It was ironically named Liaq, meaning “competent”).The blurred line between the victim and the villain of the situation becomes clear Badrapur as a brutal post-mortem of Indian ego and masculinity.

Raghav creates a dark cinematic story in his mind to give authenticity and purpose to his elaborate acts of murder. He brilliantly expressed the futility of fiction, insisting that the deaths of his wife and child were no accident. That they are always worth revenge. But Riak remains heartbreakingly real, like an accidental antihero on the path to moral redemption. His prison scenes are morbidly funny. His desperate freedom is unsettling in how naive it actually is. By recycling Varun Dhawan’s rawness (Badlapur (This is only his second film), the director justifies Raghav’s idealistic descent into evil. It’s like watching a boy throw a violent tantrum in a man’s world.It pits the unconscious adversary against himself, reducing and exalting him to a beast who has discovered a lust for blood. Badlapur It turns into a stylish supervillain origin story that winks at its own catchphrase: “Don’t miss the beginning.” The beginning of the end.

Sriram Raghavan’s biggest hit has sparked an online and offline discourse that most directors could only dream of. It became a cultural moment, a perfect distillation of his Pune-centric noir on film and a culmination of its craft into the language of entertainment.

As a standalone thriller, Andadun It’s huge. Directing suspense is taught in schools: that scene and that one, and that One. The organ-trafficking racket in the second half is anything but ordinary, with many twists and turns, including a Johnny Gaddar-esque swing over a fence. The story is a conveyor belt of one-liners. A veteran character actor famous for dying in movies is killed by his cheating wife. A pianist pretends to be blind and witnesses a murder. An old woman is thrown off a balcony for being noisy. She gets slapped because her child exposed it. A rabbit causes a fatal traffic accident. The filmmaking incorporates the harmony of vision and vision: a man playing blind and a pianist blinded by ambition.

Ayushmann Khurrana redefines his relationship with the camera and taboo is taboo. However, its desolate beauty Andadun — the kind of thriller Sujoy Ghosh always aspires to — lies in its dual identity as the story of a toxic artist. The protagonist Akash (Kurrana) is constantly being punished for fabricating stories surrounding his art. He’s acting blind, so on some level his talent has acquired a higher contextual framework. In the eyes of those who glorify his underdog path, he’s improving rather than improving his skills. (Akash is, in a sense, exploiting the elitism of the disabled-first world). To him, it’s no different than pretending to be poor and downtrodden. He knows that if he does so, society will change the way he is viewed and rewarded. Small crimes keep colliding with big crimes. It is a lie that continues to deceive the unfairness of the truth.

1. johnny gaddar (2007)

very similar Khosra ka Gosra, Maqbool and black friday, johnny gaddar It became a blueprint for generations of future storytellers. Ironically, this film also saw Raghavan step out of Ram Gopal Varma’s shadow and emulate Varma’s ability to inspire a wave of alternative Bollywood talent. The result is a brand of pulp fiction that remains perhaps the purest blend of cinephilia and originality in modern Hindi cinema. Neil Nitin Mukesh’s mean acting debut, unconventional supporting cast and cheeky direction aside. johnny gaddar One giant Easter egg omelet.From Vijay Anand and James Hadley Chase parwaana, scarface, sin city and stanley kubrick, the anti-robbery drama is defined by its clear love for the moving image. Each “murder” is steeped in old metaphors. Trains running, gunshots accompanied by old music, cars being driven off cliffs, bullets in the rain.

This is not homage for homage’s sake, but a story built on the moral ambiguity of romantic heroism. The protagonist is driven more by Italian job-type greed than by love and individualism. In his head, he’s rescuing girlfriends from their violent husbands or stealing from robbers, which makes him a strangely honest villain. It is no coincidence that he succumbs to karma, a story that amounts to divine intervention. That some people find this man’s lack of malice disappointing is a testament to Raghavan’s incredible ability to unearth connections between pop culture and reality. The tragedies of life are unfolding despite or because of the movies.

Special note:

Eight Pillars Incident (1987)

Young Shriram Raghavan’s student diploma film is both a Godardian jab at the surrealism of storytelling and an anthropological portrait of 1980s India. The 29-minute black-and-white short film (edited by FTII alumnus Rajkumar Hirani) uses an innovative premise to convey the cultural relationship between foreground and background.

A marathon runner (Shivkumar Subramanyam) on the front page of a newspaper falls in love with a tennis star (Rachel Rubin) on the back page. He has to run through her various headlines and columns (wars, bank robberies, movie scenes, marriage sections, product ads) to get to her before the next day’s edition goes to print at midnight. It won’t. He is a literal Forrest Gump, inadvertently shaping a snapshot of the nation as he pursues his personal goals. Eight Pillar Incident It’s a work of creative purism, with a nesting-doll ambition reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s first short story. doodle bug (1997). Naturally, a film strip, a Bollywood star (Nana Patekar), a news editor, and a printing press feature in the marathoner’s race against time. What’s impressive is that there are no repeats of the gimmick, aside from his one visual transition that shows a man popping out from within an actual headline. All that remains is for reality to become an imaginary obstacle course. After all, history is only at odds with the ink that records it.