COMPANY
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At a superficial level, here is a film that could perhaps be dismissed as just another well-crafted desi clone of a Hollywood thriller. Mercifully, that isn't the only plane on which Ram Gopal Varma's second cinematic foray into the messy Mumbai underworld works.
Company is a grim, brooding, stylised and ultra-violent film that draws the viewer into the heart of a benighted world where there is nary a glimmer of sunlight, where the dawn of every day represents the beginning of a precarious courtship with death, where every moment is fraught with the danger of a sharp slide into hell. What separates Varma's exploration from countless other similar underworld sagas that we have encountered before is that it manages to skilfully factor a soft moral core into a rugged external crust.
Indeed, in this particular respect, Company goes well beyond Satya. Satya was essentially an outsider's view of Mumbai's criminal underbelly. It was as if the camera's gaze was on a world that was beyond its comprehension, which was why that film had a candid, raw, haphazard feel, and the moral questions were confined to the fringes of the principal narrative space. Company is vastly different and, therefore, all the more powerful.
It provides an insider's take on the lives and times of trigger-happy gangsters who live by the gun and die by it. A far more chiselled and deliberately designed film, it reveals the inner workings of a mafia outfit, equating its functioning with that of a well-oiled but high-risk corporate enterprise. It's the near-newsreel quality that Varma achieves that places Company in a league quite its own in the context of commercial Hindi cinema, making it a sort of an indigenous Godfather of the age of mobile telephony.
Varma uses a crankily fidgety camera, an intrusive background score, frequently distorted angles and defiantly unconventional cutting to create an atmosphere so thick that you could run a knife through it and still not reach the centre. He employs a linear narrative all right, but constantly resorts to ellipses and overlaps, both in terms of visuals and sounds, to suggest the restlessness of the characters who people his gritty underworld saga. Unlike Satya, where Varma allowed moments of humour and a spirit of bonhomie filter into the "outlaw" space to liven up the proceedings, Company is steadfastly bereft of any respite. The film's characters communicate primarily through their cellular phones given the physical distances that separate the. They never touch each other or make body contact except to shake hands occasionally. They grapple with moral and emotional disjunctions at every step. Here are characters we have rarely, if ever, seen on the Indian silver screen. They are clearly awkward and ill-at-ease when they are required to express their innermost emotions, a fact brilliantly captured in a brief sequence in which a mafiosi, the younger of the two male lead characters, is lost for words when the girl who loves him lets him know that she does. Similarly, the only time that the older gangster is allowed any physical proximity with his female partner — the two are in a post-lovemaking clinch in bed — the woman speaks of the "rakshas" (demon) that resides within the man. He does not contradict her. He knows she is right.
Not surprising at all considering the world they inhabit. Company is about a gang headed by the cool and cruel Malik Bhai (Ajay Devgan). He chances upon the young Chandu (Vivek Oberoi), spots his instinct for survival and recruits him as an accomplice. The latter quickly becomes Malik Bhai's right hand man, a fact that is resented by older members of the gang. With cops on their trail, they escape to Hong Kong, from where the deadly duo continues to pull the strings of the Mumbai underworld. But a misunderstanding tears them asunder and the friends turn into sworn enemies. An angry Chandu moves to the seedy backstreets of Nairobi, Kenya, with the lengthening shadows of hatred still in hot pursuit.
Holding the balance in this brutally amoral universe is top cop Srinivasan (Mohanlal), whose mission in life is to eliminate crime. But he increasingly realises that the disease — crime — is too huge for him to weed out completely, so he settles for eradicating the symptoms — the criminals. Company is clearly a larger story than Satya was, but Varma is at pains to eschew big scenes, over-the-top characterisations and flamboyant action sequences. The shootouts are always bloody and unglamorous, and violent death isn't for once lent a halo of glory. Varma lets the characters, even the ones that are just a wee bit larger-than-life, and the action, even when it is particularly explosive, to flow seamlessly within his taut narrative framework. Company has a crisp and lucid feel because there are few commercially inspired diversions — even the sole item song, Khallas, flashes past before you can utter the word.
As for the performances, for a change, it is not about who gets the maximum amount of footage. It's more about each actor living his part. They all do. Especially impressive is Kerala superstar Mohanlal as the intrepid and avuncular policeman who is determined to get to the bottom of the rising urban crime graph. He underplays his part to perfection, penetrating deep into the heart of the moral and professional questions he must answer for his own sake as well as for the sake of the society he is enjoined to protect. In his first screen role, Vivek Oberoi exudes class: he comes across as a young man who is no hurry, as an actor capable of getting into the skin of his on-screen character without letting the effort show, as a star who knows his craft well enough not to let the urge to play to the gallery get the better of him. Ajay Devgan, like everyone else in the cast, lets the overall design of the film determine the pitch and tenor of his performance.
In a man's world, the women are compelled to play second fiddle, but all three in the cast — Manisha Koirala, Antara Mali and Seema Biswas — ensure that the human factor inevitably embedded in the constant battle for survival on the mean streets remains firmly at the centre of the film's vision.
Company is, indeed, a rare Hindi film. The quality of the execution, for the most part, matches Varma's avowed intent.
Saibal Chatterjee
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