RRR is a Teluga-language action picture directed by S,S, Rajamouli. Released in 2022, the movie is one of the top-grossing films ever produced in India and has been screened to wide acclaim in many countries. It's a spectacular movie with astonishing, if vastly over-wrought, action sequences. The picture is also brutal and rabidly jingoistic. At the film's outset, a title remarks that this production is not intended to stir up any hatred between people or castes -- this is disingenuous in the extreme. The film's entire raison d'etre is to depict the most horrific forms of violence as justified in the name of patriotism. Rajamouli, the movie's director, cites Mel Gibson as his favorite film artist and the picture concludes with a Busby Berkeley musical number in which the muscular heroes dance in a sort of Indian hip-hop style while chorus girls and boys wave patriotic flags in front of colossal figures of armed giants with bulging cubist pecs and biceps in the best Fascist or Stalinist style. The film is so extreme that a coalition of Tegulu-speaking historians sued to repress the movie on the basis of its garish distortions of the historical record -- the two super-heroes at the center of all this carnage represent real Indian revolutionaries, Komaram Bheem who fought the Nizam elites in the Indian jungles around Hyderabad and Alluri Sitarama Raju, a rebel who lead rebellions against the British Raj and was ultimately executed by firing squad around 1940. Both of these men, who never met in real life, are authentic heroes to Indians, particularly those who speak Tegulu, the kind of figures who appear on postage stamps and stand nobly atop monuments erected to them in public places. The movie, I presume, disgraces their memory although this doesn't seem to bother anyone who waxes enthusiastic about the film -- and this is just about everyone. The movie would be quite disturbing if anything compelled you to take its reactionary and insanely chauvinistic politics seriously. Because the movie is so wildly "over-the-top" and exaggerated in every respect, it's hard to work up much outrage against the film -- it's charming in a sort of primitive way, but the lavishly persuasive special effects and almost continuous ultra-violence, punctuated with episodes of gory torture, creates an unpleasant after-effect in the imagination: there's something profoundly sinister about the film, particularly near the end of its over three-hour running time, when the super-heroes become divine figures, incarnations of Rama and Lord Krishna, slaughtering adversaries with great explosions, inflicting gruesome wounds, and inflicting bloodshed on a truly apocalyptic scale -- the ante keeps getting raised with the intent of working the audience into a blood-lust. The film is too audience-friendly, full of jaunty song-and-dance numbers in the middle of massacres, to take seriously, but the question might be legitimately raised -- what kind of carnage would a movie like this engender if it were not played for shits and giggles?
The action takes place in 1920 in the jungles around Delhi and a great Imperial compound (scenes of the palace were shot in Bulgaria) where the savage and sadistic British overlord, Scott and his brutal blonde wife are oppressing the local folks. Scott's wife kidnaps a little girl named Malli from a Gondi village (these people are a scheduled tribe -- animist jungle-dwellers who are apparently one of India's most exploited and disadvantaged ethnic groups.) When the child's mother protests, one of the British soldiers aims a gun at her head. However, the Neronian General Scott, declares that British bullets are too valuable to waste on native trash and has one of his henchmen bash in the woman's skull with a tree trunk. Akhtar, a big guy with a big beard, fights wolves and tigers in the nearby jungle -- he's like Hercules, dueling with monster carnivores in the green shadows of the forest, sometimes swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan. Akhtar is outraged that the girl has been kidnaped and goes to Delhi to free her. Meanwhile, Raju is working as British native cop. The cops are besieged by a 100,000 enraged rebels. When one of them throws something at General Scott, the brute orders Raju to go into the mob and capture the malefactor. Raju does this feat, armed only with a truncheon -- he knocks about five-thousand rebels senseless and emerges from the melee with the criminal, although he's been beaten half-to-death (Rajamouli's protagonists are always getting pummeled into bloody mush.) Despite these heroics, Raju doesn't get a promotion that he deserves. Apparently, the profoundly racist Brits aren't willing to promote a native to a position of responsibility. But this is prudent. Raju is actually a sleeper agent, working to achieve prominence with the cruel Raj so that he can steal shipments of guns and arm Indian rebels. In order to accomplish this task, Raju is willing to torture and oppress hundreds if not thousands of his fellow Indians. Raju is a man with a mission. The Brits attacked his native village. With his father, he fought off the English beasts, one man with a rifle against five-thousand soldiers. When Raju's father had all his fingers shot off, his plucky son then took over his gun and killed about 200 hapless English soldiers -- this was before Raju's dad marched into the midst of the Brits wearing a terrorist's suicide vest ignited by a shot fired by his son into a huge explosion killing another three- or four-hundred of the nasty red coats.
Raju and Akhtar (really Bheem pretending to be a Muslim) meet and become bosom buddies. Akhtar/Bheem even has a British girlfriend, a convenient relationship that admits him into the enormous Georgian-style compound where General Scott and his wolfish wife are torturing poor Malli and other oppressed Indians. Akhtar/Bheem attends an enormous formal ball with Raju, this soiree thrown by the Scott family -- here Akhtar is insulted and so he engages in a dance-duel with a skinny British aristocrat and racist. The war of the dances has been called "Gene Kelly on steroids" and is staged with lavish production values and fantastically acrobatic dancing by the two buddies -- we are doing our "wild rural dance", the subtitles tell us that Raju says. Later, Akhtar admits to Raju that he's really Bheem, the jungle hero. Bheem attacks the compound during a night-time fireworks festival -- he drives a chariot blazing with flames and unleashes about fifty tigers, seventy enraged stags with razor-sharp horns, a dozen boars and thirty wolves on the Brits. The cameras have a good time luxuriating on the carnage as tigers and wolves eat the English -- I think there may even be a few bears in evidence. The fiery assault with the animals fails and Raju, now still a good British cop, captures Bheem after some more gory hand-to-hand fighting. Bheem is sentenced to a public flogging to be administered by Raju (of course) and this gruesome sequence is staged after the manner of Mel Gibson with a scourge adorned with razor sharp spikes. Bheem refuses to kneel before General Scott and his wife who is sexually aroused by the flogging.(Bheem even sings a mournful ballad as the razor-studded lash rips the flesh from his bones.) His blood runs like a river into the crowd and an uprising occurs -- we see women gouging out the eyes of British soldiers with their nails and men literally biting apart the throats of sentinels. The rebellion is put down and the native are once more savagely brutalized. Then, Raju is discovered to be in league with the rebels. He's tortured by having his knees shattered with sledge hammer blows and, then, thrown into a sort of well with an iron grate over his head. (Raju is fed only once a week and rarely given water, but he spends his time in prison improving his upper body strength by doing pull-ups.) Bheem rescues him, lifting the wounded Raj on his shoulders. Raj gets a couple of carbines and Bheem runs amuck as the hero on his shoulders guns down dozens of Brits. The two men somehow climb a scaffold tower, knock the soldiers a hundred feet to the ground and, then, plunge down to the earth where Bheem carries the crippled Raju into a sacred forest. They come to a shrine: Lord Shiva carrying bronze arrows. Somehow, the spring under the statute of Shiva heals Raju. Then, Raju literally becomes the God, mowing down innumerable soldiers with bronze arrows fired from a mighty bow. Bheem runs amuck and uses a motorcycle as a giant club, smashing battalions of Brits into oblivion. Finally, the two warriors reach the compound which they destroy -- there's lots of grenades and dynamite there: the arrows are like rocket-propelled grenades, The evil General Scott is killed, after being harangued about the value of a British bullet, and Scott's wife dangles upside down with blood pouring out of her like a butchered animal -- she's entangled in barbed wire as a result of one of the cataclysmic explosions. The movie then reunites all the virtuous characters for a big dance finale featuring eye-popping acrobatics performed while montage of real Indian heroes and revolutionaries projected against the sky behind the colossal Fascist muscle-men statuary.
Needless to say this is all exciting and Rajamouli is an effective rabble-rousing director. The film's pace is breakneck and the spectacle never flags. I don't know what it means when Bheem serves as Raju's legs and carries him around in the final battle in the compound -- the image seems to be allegorical, something, I would suspect about the scheduled tribes (low caste) being the brawn on which the upper caste Hindus are supported. But who knows? There's a lot about this movie that is mysterious to someone not from India. Ultimately, I think the film is deplorable, but you can't deny its utterly primitive appeal to the viewer's baser instincts.
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