There are many ways of stabbing someone in cinema, and each rendition comes with sufficient padding from all technical departments. In such a context, where violence is propped up by bravura, stylisation, and a certain cognitive dissonance from reality, watching Ajay (Abhai Naveen) stab a man early on in the film felt oddly comical. No, I am not talking about how the film eventually goes on to make a mockery of murder. In retrospect, witnessing Ajay stab someone multiple times at the same spot, while you hear many little kach-kach-kach sounds instead of one clean, swooshy sound, should have prepared me for the absurdities the film would go on to present. The act of stabbing itself gets a neat pay-off when a hapless student is asked to chop a corpse in the absence of a birthday cake. And there are quite a few neat moments, including the film’s narrative-twisting second half, that make Raakshasa Kavyam more memorable than your average low-budgeter. That said, the film fails to put trust in its own potential in more ways than one, which leaves the viewer with more what-ifs and I-wishs than aha-s and wow-s.
Cast – Abhai Naveen, Anvesh Michael, Dayanand Reddy, Pawon Ramesh, Rohini Aretty Kushalini, Yadama Raju
Director – Sriman Keerthi
Throughout Raakshasa Kavyam, which has one character get stuck between two celestially doomed siblings out for each other’s throats, we are asked to wonder if the good people are as good as we think they are. Are they any less worse than the ones we deem as bad people? Would a good person even be called good in the absence of bad people (a very interesting question, which also finds a more explicit mention in one of the film’s songs)? These are the conflicts that the film should have dug deeper into, but we mostly find them floating in a narrative that also likes its old-fashioned tropes of abused mothers, alcoholic fathers, and the importance of education above all. I did not mind the whole sarva shiksha abhiyan call-to-arms mission Ajay takes on as a gangster, but having a father who spells out what ideally should have been the film’s biggest reveals felt puerile, to say the least.
Amidst such a narrative, it is hard to say whether Vijay’s (Anvesh Michael) obsession with cinema, particularly bad men in cinema, is a) an ongoing exploration of the film’s good vs bad deep dives or b) the director’s homage to action/gangster films of yore or c) a foolproof way of jazzing up the proceedings of this otherwise shoestring film. After a point, the film’s production (or lack thereof) turns it into a major eyesore. And there is a lot more than the film’s production values that unfortunately deserve the shoestring tag. It is a fool’s errand to speculate how and why a film went awry and yet it is something I cannot help but feel compelled to do after watching Raakshasa Kavyam. Did the story not expand or deepen the way it should have due to budgetary constraints? Or did it shrink of its own accord in the paucity of an adequately sized canvas? It is not the easiest thing to say, “Oh this film should have been made on a higher budget?” because who does not wish they had more money, more resources and more time to change things and make them better? But I guess I have only had these questions, and these impassioned pleas about the shortcomings because there were also things in the film I truly did like. After all, as the film also points out — the good makes its good felt precisely because of the existence of bad also making its bad felt. In a film that glorifies fictitious villains and murderers and for good reason, it is hardly satisfying to watch the film be an antagonist to its own potential and growth.
#Subversions #save #barebones #family #drama #Cinema #express
