Movie Review: Guru (Hindi; 2007)
January 13, 2007
Qalandar
Guru
Aishwarya Rai
[Warning: This review contains spoilers]
Ek lo ek muft ("Buy one get one free") appears to be the lot of Gurukant Desai
(Abhishek
Bachchan), that is to say the law of, not unintended consequences, but
unintended benefits.
When as a boy he fails his exams he is able to wrangle permission from his
schoolmaster father
to go to Turkey and sell petrol cans, permission that would not have been
forthcoming had he
passed his school exams.
When he wants a business partner (Jignesh, played by Arya Babbar) he gets a
wife too, none
other than Jignesh's sister Sujatha (Aishwariya Rai). And when he gets his
wife's dowry - the
initial capital for his business - he also gets a devoted spouse who radiates
quiet strength.
When they want a child they get twins. Heck, by film's end we see that in
amassing wealth and
success Guru gets to wear - muft - the mantle of corporate populist, bringing
capitalism and
its benefits to the masses. In fact, when Guru arrives in Bombay he gets a
surrogate father in
"Nanaji" Manikdas Gupta (Mithun Chakraborty), and - also muft - a crusader
adversary (egged on
by newspaper baron Gupta) in Shyam Saxena (Madhavan), a journalist determined
to bring Guru
down. Oh well: five out of six ain't bad.
Mani Ratnam's Guru is the story of Gurukant Desai, a villager from Idhar,
Gujarat, convinced of
his lucky star and determined to succeed in bijness at all costs, no matter the
attempts of the
corporate establishment to keep him out, and the zeal of a leftist newspaper
baron and his
editor in bringing him down. His destiny is already written, Gurukant informs a
skeptic early
on in the film, and there is never any doubt that he is going to end up a
business titan,
second to none.
But Guru is also the story (as Ratnam sees it) of an India in transition, from
colonialism
through license raj to free enterprise. As Ratnam concludes the tale the
journey is a heroic
one indeed, from an India where outsized ambition - in particular, the ambition
of amassing
great wealth - was frowned upon, to an India where the acquisition of wealth is
seen as the
great leveler, representing the best hope of the ordinary man for prosperity
and happiness.
Ratnam is not blind to the warts inherent in an ambition that will stop at
nothing to achieve
its aim, and over the course of the film we see the affable, irrepressibly
optimistic Guru
become less and less accessible, "available" only in private settings or in
orchestrated public
spectacles before the shareholders of his company, Shakti Trading. Guru's
actions too become
ever more obscure, available to the audience only through the prism of Nanaji
and Shyam. The
wide-eyed youth who turned down a coveted job in Turkey to return to India in
order to start
his own business seems like a distant memory indeed.
But in order to shoehorn his own vision into an overarching narrative of Guru
triumphant,
Ratnam has to cut some corners: when the journalistic crusade against Guru
leads to a
government crackdown and a commission of inquiry, Ratnam simply hands over the
film to its
title character, who proceeds to hold forth as the public incarnate, not
bothering to deny any
of the allegations of corruption and fraud leveled against him but justifying
his
transgressions by appealing to a higher law, not God but the public.
"I am the public," Guru rasps in the film's memorable (and troubling)
penultimate sequence, and
it is clear that he feels his actions are justified because he has empowered
the middle
classes, and given them a stake in Indian industry. (He has done so by means of
Shakti
Trading's various public offerings, the polar opposite of the family-run and
closed corporation
that, Guru suggests, held sway prior to his rise). While the film has hitherto
led us to view
such claims a bit askance, there is no trace of directorial irony in this
sequence, carefully
constructed to give Gurukant Desai the last word and to leave him the winner.
It's unclear
whether Ratnam buys into this, but he certainly wants the audience to buy
whatever Guru is
selling.
None of this detracts from the fact that Ratnam remains arguably the least
judgmental of
popular directors in either Hindi or Tamil, and the cinematic magnanimity -
able to take in a
rather wide range of activity without malice or moralizing - that we have come
to expect from
films like Mouna Raagam, Nayakan, Iruvar, Dil Se, Alai Payuthey, Kannathil
Muthamittal, and
Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva is very much a hallmark of Guru.
Thus we see that Gurukant marries Sujatha because of her dowry, and we see that
he is not above
smearing his corporate rivals via the media, or even of whipping up a little
class hatred by
resorting a little too easily to an "us" versus "them" rhetoric - yet we do not
judge him. And
nor is he the only one: we see Nanaji insulting Sujatha after she has come to
his house to show
him her babies; we see that Shyam Saxena is not above a little skullduggery
himself if it makes
for a racier story; and we see that the upright leftist Nanaji's daughter Meenu
(Vidya Balan)
appears to be thrilled that Guru manages to get away with everything - thrilled
just because -
and we do not judge any of them either.
So too with the wider questions raised by Guru. It is surely a fact that, as
Guru caustically
observes, the license raj regime made it incredibly hard for entrepreneurs to
succeed, thereby
enabling the rich to get richer and to keep newcomers out of the market, or at
least to deny
them a seat at the "main" table (though Ratnam should have done more with the
point that the
same entrepreneurs who complained about the license raj also used it to
entrench and enrich
themselves). I can certainly agree with Guru's complaint at film's end that he
is a creature of
the license raj system, and that the latter incentivizes corruption.
But it is also equally a fact that a bureaucrat-heavy system criminalizing
ordinary
entreprenurial activity is one thing, but - as Shyam Saxena points out - at
least some of what
Guru does cannot be classified as ordinary entrepreneurial activity. A case in
point is when
his company commits fraud by getting something for nothing, that is, by sending
empty cartons
abroad and reporting those as polyester exports. Shakti Trading would then use
the export
credits thereby received to secure licenses for importing machinery and goods
that it could
then resell at great profit.
There is something more than a little self-serving about Guru's
self-righteousness, and to his
credit Ratnam sees that too. That Guru gets to win by film's end is not because
he is right but
because the public accepts his position to be right. One might see this as a
shamelessly
commercial decision on Ratnam's part, well aware that the mood of the
moviegoing public - or at
least that portion of the public that may be expected to patronize Ratnam films
in multiplexes
- is unabashedly gung ho about entrepreneurship at present. Iindeed it is
difficult to imagine
a figure more calculated to revolt contemporary India's urban well-heeled than
the manifestly
leftie, ultra-smug journalist Shyam Saxena.
On the other hand, one might also read Guru's vindication by film's end as
logically following
from past Ratnam films, an instance of Ratnam's refusal to pass final judgment.
Thus, in
Iruvar, Anandam (Mohanlal) bests his one-time mentor and friend Tamilchelvam
(Prakashraj) in
politics not because he is better than the latter, but because that's what "the
people" want.
So too in Guru: the public wants what Gurukant Desai sells, and as in Iruvar,
Ratnam bows to
the press of history. Iruvar's Tamilchelvam was left with the memory of a
friendship and of a
historical moment; to the Gurukant Desais of the world belongs the future.
No discussion of a Ratnam film since Roja can be complete without mention of
A.R. Rahman's
music. I have already spoken at length of the album, but the background score
is - even by
Rahman's lofty standards - impressive. The impact of the songs is greatly
heightened by their
use in the film, in particular the ones - "Ae Hairat-e-Aashiqui" being the most
significant of
these - that recur in the background at various points over the course of the
film, binding
together and juxtaposing different stages in the lives of Guru (and Sujatha).
That being said,
Ratnam's visuals in the songs do not match the peaks of "Pachchai Nirame" (from
Alai Payuthey),
"Kannathil Muthamittal" (from the film of the same name), "Narumugaiye" (from
Iruvar), "Goodbye
Nenba/Khuda Hafiz" (from Aayitha Ezhuthu/Yuva), or "Satrangi Re" (from Dil Se),
although there
are some spectacular visuals in "Barso Re", and striking ones in "Ek Lo Ek
Muft", and "Mayya
Mayya".
Rajeev Menon's cinematography is consistently of very high quality in
particular, the film
features several jawdropping landscape and monument shots. While this viewer
did find himself
missing the virtuosity of Kannathil Muthamittal, it is clear that Ratnam has
rather
deliberately gone in a for a far more accessible visual aesthetic, one
reflecting his ambitions
for Guru as an all-India film. In a similar vein, the set of Bombay in the
1950s is a landmark
in Indian cinema, and worthy of the man who directed Thotta Tharani's Dharavi
in Nayakan.
Returning to the film's penultimate scene, if Guru's harangue jars because it
does not really
follow from what has preceded it - Guru has always been in the game to make
money, not to
benefit the middle classes by giving them a stake in his company; indeed Shakti
Trading's first
public offering is simply a consequence of the banks' unwillingness to lend to
the new kid on
the block - the film does not really suffer from it. The reason is Abhishek
Bachchan, who
carries the scene (and the rest of the film) off with a bravura performance
that is surely one
for the ages.
Abhishek exhibits great range in this role, and is convincing and compelling -
in a word,
superb - in all his character's hues, from the wide-eyed youngster to the
determined
businessman to the unctuous, self-satisfied middle-aged tycoon, and finally as
a stroke-riddled
icon, a prophet of the future. Perhaps the finest compliment one can pay his
work here is to
say that Ratnam puts him on terrain previously inhabited by Kamal Haasan in
Nayakan, and
Mohanlal in Iruvar, and Abhishek does not let his director's faith down.
While Iruvar's Anandam remains a class apart for Mohanlal's freakishly natural
yet ineffably
mysterious act, I consider it no exaggeration to put Abhishek's Gurukant on at
least the same
level as Kamal's Velu Naicker - not to mention that Abhishek's screen presence
and charisma
comfortably outdo that of his illustrious forebear. On more than one occasion
one discerns
traces of Amitabh Bachchan's own legendary turn as Vijay Deenanath Chauhan in
Agneepath, yet
the intersection of these two trajectories - Amitabh's legacy and Ratnam's
Tamil cinema -
results in a performance that while owing many debts, is at the same time very
much Abhishek's
own.
It is fortunate - for Guru, which could not otherwise "work" at any level -
that Abhishek is in
such good form, for he needed to be given the presence of Mithun Chakraborty
and Madhavan in
the cast. The former's is the more obvious performance, solid and effective at
all times but
not especially nuanced. In a relative sense, and despite being abruptly written
out of the
film, it is Madhavan who tests Abhishek's dominance the most in this film, with
a quietly
strong performance bordering on the sinister: contempt for Guru and everything
he represents
shines in Madhavan's eyes virtually every time he is on screen. In particular,
Madhavan's entry
scene, featuring Mithun and Abhishek as well, is a masala fan's delight. So is
the only other
meeting between Shyam Saxena and Guru, where Madhavan's understated naturalness
serves as a
great foil to Abhisek's anger.
Aishwariya Rai had a lot more to do in this film than I had initially expected,
and after
Iruvar and Guru it is now clear that Ratnam is able to get more from her than
just about anyone
else. At no point is she less than convincing, first as the spunky village girl
and then as
Guru's wife. Especially welcome is Ratnam's characterization of Sujatha as an
equal partner in
her marriage, a relief given the rampant sexism of so much of our cinema.
Aishwariya's Sujatha
inspires confidence, even when she isn't saying anything.
Vidya Balan's Meenu is an intriguing character, afflicted by multiple sclerosis
and clearly
fascinated by Guru's audacity. While Ratnam does not explore her psychology as
much as I would
have liked, one is left with the distinct impression that to this young woman
who lives with
constant pain and the thought of impending death, there is something immensely
compelling about
Guru's vitality, his hunger for more of everything. Meenu keeps joking that she
wants to marry
Guru, offering a glimpse of her psyche and of the position Guru holds within
it: outsider,
rebel, and possessed of great appetite. In a word: life.
Mani Ratnam is one of my favorite directors when it comes to capturing "little"
scenes of the
sort that other directors either pass over or can only conceptualize in
overwrought terms. Guru
is no exception, and there are a host of private moments that make the
characters human (indeed
Guru far surpasses Nayakan in terms of the number of memorable characters it
features).
Gurukant and Sujatha have several of these (mostly in the film's first half;
one of the
casualties of the second half's focus on Guru's struggles against Nanaji and
Shyam Saxena is
the endearing relationship between husband and wife), including a playful
bedroom scene.
Towards the end the couple re-visit their first home in Bombay to reminisce,
and although
Ratnam inserts this scene somewhat abruptly, the cocktail of affection and
nostalgia - and an
Abhishek-Aishwariya pairing that is very comfortable and effective - is too
strong to resist.
I conclude by noting that Madhavan and Vidya Balan form a strange counterpoint
to the
Abhishek-Aishwariya pair in the film's second half, and I was especially struck
by the charming
romantic scene where Shyam asks Meenu to marry him. The scene is the only
indication we have
that Shyam is more than just a relentless activist, and goes a long way toward
humanizing him.
More significantly, Shyam's response to Meenu's claim that there would be
little purpose to
marriage as she only has four hundred-odd days to live - Shyam says he wants
every single one
of those days - highlights the difference between Gurukant's calculus - he
decides to marry
Sujatha upon hearing of her dowry - and Shyam's own worldview. The four hundred
days Shyam
wants is not a question of calculation, but of incalculable joy. Ratnam's irony
here is dark
indeed: the latter couple is oriented towards death - Meenu will die, and die
childless - while
Guru and Sujatha are oriented towards life - Gurukant will live, and live to
see his children
grow up. The future, that is to say, is Guru's.
http://desicritics.org/2007/01/13/122152.php
