The film is totally nuts, in a good way. It’s what you get when a bunch of clever cinephiles get together and say: “Let’s have some fun.”
Aashiq Abu’s new film opens in Mangalore, in 1991, where a gun dealer named Daya (Anurag Kashyap) is hosting a birthday party for his son Bichu. The gift is a Ferrari, but Daya won’t just give the keys to Bichu. He makes him act like a dog that has to beg for a bone. The obvious reason for the existence of this scene is to quickly establish the wacko nature of Daya and his sons. But the thing of interest is the subtext, the fact that Bichu acts like a dog. Rifle Club is a movie that compares humans to animals that will do anything for survival. Much later, we will see Daya himself being compared to a tiger, as he wears a yellow jacket with a white-and-black stripe running through it. And… it is stained with human blood!
Rifle Club is what you get when a bunch of clever cinephiles get together and say: “Let’s have some fun.” In this “clever cinephiles” group, I include the writers Syam Pushkaran, Dileesh Karunakaran, and Suhas. I include actors like Darshana Rajendran, who hardly has anything to play and yet – yes – “has fun” in her few scenes with Unnimaya Prasad. I admit it took me a while to get into the movie. I found individual scenes very funny, like the one where Bichu reaches inside his jacket and produces a gun, and you think there’s going to be bloodshed, but… the colour red certainly appears, but in the form of something utterly unexpected and cheesy and hilarious. But I kept wondering if this was going to be a stylish affair with nothing else going for it – and it’s only in the second half that everything comes together with a smart and satisfying click.
Apart from the neon-lit place Daya conducts business in, there are two other “environments”. One of them is in Kannur, where we meet a handsome, lover-boy film star aptly named Shahjahan. (Vineeth Kumar gives a standout performance, gently spoofing this type of hero without a hint of caricature.) The animal reference in this case comes from a mention of IV Sasi’s Mrugaya, where Mammootty “uglified” himself to play a hunter who’s called to kill a man-eating leopard. Shahjahan is advised to do such roles (i.e., get in touch with his animalistic side), and asked to do some “method acting” by going to Rifle Club, a place in the Western Ghats where people gather to shoot animals and eat the kill. This is the film’s third and final “environment”, where the entire second half takes place in a scenario that looks like Varathan (or Straw Dogs) featuring two sets of wild creatures, one attacking and the other defending – justifying their part in the food chain, to use a term used in the movie.
Once we warm up to the fact that Rifle Club is totally nuts, the “story” begins to make sense on its own terms. Daya and his men attack the Rifle Club, and the clannish members of the club retaliate, along with newcomers like Shahjahan and a couple of lovers on the run. That’s it! That’s the story – along with lines like “Great guns don’t have owners” and Rex Vijayan’s twangy music that sounds like a Spaghetti Western score fitted into a Karthik Subbaraj film. There is movie talk, like when Shahjahan is asked about his kissing scenes. There’s gender-bending talk, like a woman holding a gun at waist level and saying she’s as good as a man. Another woman comments on the small size of a wild boar’s genitals. What’s missing is traditional filmmaking, things like explaining how Daya and his men ended up at Rifle Club. I’m not saying this is the screenplay’s fault. I’m saying that the screenplay isn’t even interested in being anything but a blueprint for the film’s style.
And what is this style? Take the Dileesh Pothan character. The actor is brilliant in one of his most uncharacteristic roles as a hunter who says things like, “These are the Western Ghats… home to this animal and that one and that other one.” But this is not a National Geographic documentary. This is about how most of these animals have been captured and cooked and eaten. The style (of both the screenplay and the direction) is to place little value on anything. This is not a movie that makes us “care” about people, simply because there are too many characters and the question of whether someone lives or dies is irrelevant. It’s like the jungle. Kill or be killed. The animal references keep coming. A boar is killed; parallelly, a man is killed. Meanwhile, Daya wears shoes made of reptile skin and pees on a wall, like an animal marking its territory.
For lovers of bloody shootouts, Rifle Club is sheer bliss. Aashiq Abu’s cinematography stylishly contrasts the three environments of the narrative. The second half is practically a music video with killings – and it has some of the quirkiest dialogues and situations, like a priest who endorses violence. The cast includes Vijayaraghavan and Vani Viswanath, to name some of the more known faces. But really, Aashiq Abu and team could have cast a bunch of unknowns and still pulled off this quirky, bonkers movie where the grace note for a wounded man is making him suck his thumb. There is a clear villain in Anurag Kashyap, who chews the scenery with great relish – but there’s no single hero. The duties of the “hero” (i.e., the male) are divided between old and young, men and women, able-bodied and the differently abled. Being nuts has rarely been this subtextual – or this much fun. Would I watch Rifle Club again? I don’t know. I would have liked to see about a half-hour more, where I got to know more about these people. But that is perhaps the point. It’s just a bunch of clever cinephiles having a whole lot of fun, and we are merely along for the (admittedly fun) ride.
