Synccinema Quickie - Republic

 Republic - A Film by “A man who understands human nature”

I sat through the entire end credits of the movie while it was making a grim extension to its point by slapping me on my face about Democracy and how it works? And Why, Where it doesn’t work?. Immediately as the final frame ended, Sid Sriram’s embellished gamakas crawled into my ear as he picked up “Maguva… Maguva..”

At that moment, my mind veneered into the cinematic world of easy solutions, fervent actions and binary characters. A world where it is only right or wrong. In a world where there is only one moral compass and only one unified eye to view what’s good and what’s bad. I suddenly felt nostalgic of the amorality by a choice world of Republic, of the grey by greed world of Prasthanam. 

Here the hero is well educated, a genius in fact, and is well mannered, especially when it comes to being an Indian Citizen. He’s, in a word, coming of age white knight. He’s a hero who’s written when Murugadoss meets Nolan, not for making Ghajini, but for making an Indianized Dark Knight set in the socio-political realm (Sarkar, but with less cartoon). This analogy also goes in hand with most of the design of characters, consequences and creativity. 

You have a Joker-like villain. Not literally, or rather physically resembling him by smearing war paint as makeup with puffed and sliced mouth edges. Here the villain resembles eccentricity, an ahead of curve idealogy about democracy which she truly follows the second her father’s last rituals are performed, because she knows that her father, like our hero, was a betrayed torchbearer.

She knows that torchbearers in this time and age, are too good to be true. This notion is also exactly where even Deva Katta drops his truth bomb when he not only expresses that he too believes in the same ideology but also conveys that this is the ultimate fate for a torchbearer in this country today. 

Deva Katta’s movies are dialogue-heavy and the drama in them casts a spell of crisscrossing lines of one’s definition of something versus the other. These lines slowly fade away as each character is forcefully welcomed into the belief system of the other. In Prasthanam, it was humanity with the aura of Dharma around it, here it’s Republic with the aura of Democracy around it.

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But Prasthanam feels better off than Republic because here it misses the slowly incepted innuendo which makes us question why we even rooted for one character. That mental tension that Deva Katta creates was missing. No doubt he keeps you hooked with his story, especially when it comes to churning out sequences lighting on socio-political comment and barbarian prone state of the nation.

These sequences, at surfaces, are informative, logical and thought-provoking. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the most surreal and convincing responses from all characters. As I am saying again, he knows the best about humans, which easily overarches his burning viewpoint and expertise over democracy. 

That’s why maybe we get a pure white hero, whose revelation I only looked at from a distance, against grey people and black villains. That’s why maybe we get those socio-political scenes, no matter how much good, to feel generic in bringing sympathy. That’s why maybe we get a mixed package of phenomenal sound design and background score ( by Mani Sharma) for a commercial movie that knows when to stay silent, when to lurk beneath and when to blow loud and unnecessary songs which hamper the movie’s pace. 

Paagal Movie Review

Simple Solution to balance out - Either Republic needed a better actor to play its prince ( I appreciate Sai Dharam Tej for picking up such a script, but his actions didn’t share that madcap resolute attitude from his villain) or a dramatically poorer director than Deva Katta. The latter would’ve resulted in an all-around mixed masala package film like Oke Okkadu or Bharath ane Nenu (Just the balance which people can easily digest). 

This is the second Telugu film after last week’s Love Story by Shekhar Kammula, where a filmmaker’s individualistic voice is heard through his/her films. Deva Katta and Shekhar Kammula are torchbearers, and I believe in the truth that their movies will do good.