Vicky Kaushal and Akshaye Khanna play a hero-villain pair made in heaven. But despite some nice touches, the “mass”-flavour film stays at an arm’s length. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
When I watched the mega-blockbuster Jailer, I was startled that a film starring Rajinikanth – the family-friendliest Super Star – would depict a bloody neck after a beheading. Then, we got Animal, Marco, Kill – all of them various levels of hits. And now, with the super-success of Chhaava, I think we can begin to make a case that we, the audience, have begun to demand increasing levels of blood and gore. Gone are the mock fights of the dishoom-dishoom days. In Chhaava, we get close-ups of a fingernail and a tongue being pulled out. The leading man sheds so much blood, with deep prosthetic gashes on his torso, that his skin colour seems to be crimson. Even the suggestions of violence are amped up. We don’t see the end result, but a little shepherd girl is set on fire, and traitors are punished by having an elephant trample them to death. I am not here to say whether this is good or bad. I am just making an observation before I begin talking about the movie.
Chaava, directed by Laxman Utekar, begins with the death of Chhatrapati Shivaji. The information is conveyed to Aurangzeb, who has been yearning for some good news. The Mughal emperor is played by Akshaye Khanna, in a remarkable performance that’s also a remarkable bit of casting. This actor’s name is not the first one that jumps to mind when you think of the tyrant who jailed his father and killed his brother. But the actor’s innate on-screen qualities – his reticence, his sensitivity, his inwardness – redefine Aurangzeb on screen. This is a frail, shrunken man with a slouch. The first time we see him at court, his seat dwarfs him. His eyes are lined with kohl, but the makeup does not help: they are dead eyes. He doesn’t even seem very invested in what’s happening around him. Unless there’s some particularly meaty news, the man looks more interested in non-tyrannical hobbies like knitting. Yes, knitting! The only time we see him energised is when he kills someone, or when he walks towards the enemy his army has just captured. Suddenly, there’s a spring in his step when he walks towards Sambhaji, who’s bound in chains, looking like Christ on the cross.
As Sambhaji, a terrific Vicky Kaushal gives a performance that’s the exact opposite: it’s almost completely external. If Akshaye is the thinker, Vicky is the doer. The character is compared to a lion, and that is exactly how Vicky plays Sambhaji, growling and baring his teeth and with a voice that roars at enemies but turns into a purr in front of his wife and his loved ones. He even fights a lion. He gets a hero-introduction shot on slo-mo – the works – as Sambhaji gatecrashes Burhanpur, a prized city of the Mughal empire, and destroys it. And towards the end, when Sambhaji is overpowered, Vicky makes us see a captured jungle beast. The sheer physicality of the performance is amazing, even in the quieter moments. At one point, Sambhaji walks into the quarters of a dying royal who has plotted against him. (Divya Dutta underplays this character with a welcome touch of dryness in her dialogue delivery.) We see the man torn between being human and hating what this woman has done to him, and rising above these feelings to respect this mother-figure.
With a top-notch hero and a top-notch villain, Chhaava should have been a knockout. There are many touches that work, chiefly the dialogues by Rishi Virmani. The opening credits appear in pure Hindi, in Devnagari script, crediting the producer and director as “nirmata” and “nirdeshak”. To an extent, the lines take a cue from here and showcase the language in all its ornate glory. When Mughals leave bodies hanging from trees, someone says: “Pedon pe patton se zyada laashen latak rahi hain.” The imagery of a tree with corpses for leaves is quietly savage. When Shivaji dies, a Mughal says, “Ab khud bakhud Dakkhan ki zameen hamari zameen se jud jayegi.” There’s the sense of jigsaw pieces of land coming together to form a larger kingdom. When Aurangzeb’s son announces his decision to rebel against his father, Sambhaji exclaims, “Aurang ki chingari mein bhi kam aag nahin…” The son is the spark with as much fire as his father.
But the film stays at an arm’s length. The one time I felt like cheering loudly was when Aurangzeb asks Sambhaji to join the Mughals and gets a “mass” reply. Chhaava, based on the Marathi novel by Shivaji Sawant, needed more such moments. The film is a surface-level “mass” movie. On paper, there’s one big moment after another, like the shock-reveal of a traitor, or a series of attacks by Sambhaji and his men in a variety of disguises, or Sambhaji hearing a lost child’s cry in the midst of the thunderous sounds of battle, or even Sambhaji’s superhuman leap from the ground to the top of a fort. AR Rahman, too, leaves behind all subtlety and goes full-on “mass”. When we first hear about Aurangzeb’s tyranny (in Ajay Devgn’s voiceover), the soundtrack explodes with a scream. And it never stops. Again on paper, I especially loved two concepts: one where Sambhaji and his court poet (a wonderful Vineet Kumar Singh) keep talking in verse in a most unexpected situation, and the other where Sambhaji and his wife seem to be in telepathic communication.
But on screen, a lot of this stays flat, and sometimes turns unintentionally funny. You can excuse the technical aspects (which are competent but not much more), but the character-writing is the film’s biggest enemy. When a junior artist is given a big scene, we know he’s going to die soon, and that the few lines he got were simply so that we remember who he is. Others are even less lucky. So many of Sambhaji’s men die and their names are called out with anguish when they fall, but to us, they are just bodies on the ground. If they’d cut off the Divya Dutta character, the movie wouldn’t lose much. We can sense the role she plays in Sambhaji’s life, but we don’t feel it. It’s the same with the scenes with Rashmika Mandanna, who plays Sambhaji’s wife. The relationship is compared to Shiva-Parvati, Radha-Krishna, but on screen, we just see two actors with awkward chemistry.
Chhaava is not exactly a misfire, but it doesn’t rise above being watchable. The story of a king who dreamt of a “swarajya” – a self-rule – where people of all faiths could coexist in peace deserved a more rousing movie. There are attempts to get into the psyche of Sambhaji with surrealistic nightmares that show the king as a lost little boy with philosophical questions. We get quiet, intimate scenes that show Sambhaji yearning for his mother who died when he was very young. But this sort of delicacy doesn’t fit in with the ethos of a “mass” movie that wants to show Sambhaji as a superhero. “Mass” movies usually work best when they aim low and deliver highs: even the “mother sentiment” has to be pitched high. Chaava, to its credit, aims high. But it doesn’t come together satisfactorily. What we end up with is a violent showcase for two fine actors.
