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The sins of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal are many: It glorifies violent masculinity, violates the dignity of women characters and is far too reliant for humour on jokes about sex and scratchy underwear. But its worst sin is that it dares to be the one thing that no film should be — boring.
On the wafer-thin premise of a son’s unhinged love for his emotionally withholding father, Vanga has constructed a 201-minute homage to his favourite directors, Ranbir Kapoor’s body hair and more sunglasses than you’re likely to see on Lenskart dot com. There is an early 2000s music-video quality to the whole film, especially to the much-vaunted action sequences — the stylised slo-mo, perfectly toned bodies in tight suits and, above all, the loud, often deliberately incongruent music that jostles with Kapoor for the audience’s attention. It makes Animal feel less like a movie and more like something that might have played on MTV or VH1.
Animal is only the most recent movie in the last couple of years that features an ultra-macho, “alpha” male in the lead, revelling in an orgy of violence to, somehow, hit a chord with the masses of film viewers. But the film tries to set itself apart from the others in two key ways. The first is by attempting to delve into the psychology of its protagonist — Rannvijay could never get his father’s love, attention, validation and therefore he became what he did. In an interview about the film, Vanga claimed that the film is really the story of fathers and sons and that its plot has been shaped by the longing for absentee fathers that he saw in his friends. Yet, any such analysis remains superficial. In a scene at the end of the film, where Rannvijay asks his father Balbir to roleplay one of the moments when he lets his son down, he tells the older man, “You’re the greatest father. But you were never the best father.” We are expected to believe that this contradiction is what lies at the heart of Rannvijay’s fanatical filial devotion and leads to the violent trajectory of his life, but it never quite comes off. We are never shown a convincing explanation for how Balbir is the “greatest” father while not being the “best” (Balbir lands a few slaps on his son but, unfortunately, it’s not like we haven’t seen worse fathers in Hindi cinema).
The other way in which the film has tried to distinguish itself from the herd is through its self-awareness. With lines that establish the superiority of “alpha men” and reduce women to objects of male violence defined by their capacity to carry healthy babies, Animal is not only aware of its transgressions of the moral codes of our enlightened (some would say “woke”) times, it is constantly, gleefully drawing attention to this. It is the filmmaking equivalent of the bombastic declaration: “I’m not here to make friends”.
There is a history here, familiar to those who followed the polarising reactions to the filmmaker’s last, Kabir Singh (2019), a remake of his Telugu debut Arjun Reddy (2017). The arguments — both for and against. Just like back then, this time too critics have, correctly, picked on the film’s troubling, misogynistic world view and celebration of violence as major weaknesses, while the opposing side — the so-called “Vanga stans” — have used precisely these things to shore up their belief that the film depicts a singular directorial vision rooted in the realities of love and life.
Sadly, Vanga is no genius and Animal is no masterpiece. In fact, in focusing exclusively on the performance of violence without adequately explaining how any man can reach such levels of psychopathy as to slaughter hundreds and feel no remorse, he outs himself as being ill-equipped to tell this story. In the hands of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and, closer home, Ram Gopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap, violence is a tool, used to tell stories of greed, grief and fear — in Animal, it is the whole story. It makes one wonder what proportion of the reactions hailing the film and the director rests on pre-release hype.
Animal takes the age-old, but still promising premise of a man’s daddy issues and squanders it with poorly realised characters and an unwarranted faith in the filmmaker’s ability to provoke. This timidity is, in fact, the most disappointing thing about Animal — after promising to provoke, it cannot even bring itself to commit to that. Its attitude to sex is juvenile and the scenes that supposedly prove the protagonist’s virility are ridiculously tame. The gore is aestheticised and even the admittedly loathsome scene where Rannvijay asks a woman to prove her love by licking his boots cannot bring itself to go to the only end possible in a film that supposedly shows a man’s descent into bestiality. Because that would require artistic honesty to admit that this is not the “toxic love story” of a boy and his father, but a cautionary tale about what living in a “man’s world” does to men.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
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