{"id":835,"date":"2010-06-26T22:21:06","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T02:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/?p=835"},"modified":"2016-02-04T13:44:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T17:44:58","slug":"beauteous-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/2010\/06\/26\/beauteous-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Raavan<\/strong><\/em> (2009, dir. Mani Ratnam). Aishwarya Rai\u2019s Ragini remains too little marred by abduction, rock-scaling, near-drowning, food refusal, traumatic witnessing, being dragged from cave to pit to cave and so on. The camera still fondles her face as it might any cover-girl\u2014confirming this face to be as fascinating as that of some infant cyborg. Abhishek Bachchan\u2019s Raavan is a convincing maniac, however, in whom a certain fathomlessness carries forward the fantastical Ramayanan subtext. His hands chopping about his face, acting out the knives in his head<\/a>: a brilliant, dramatically efficient tic.<\/p>\n

Raavan\u2019s forest is vitally extrajurisdictional space. The forest villagers protect him, want to be left alone\u2014and here the bleeding heart may think: alas, the Indian state has trammeled upon these people\u2019s bare but honest subsistence lives. But how suspiciously convenient, for any state in fact inadequate as provider, when the people do not want to be civilized\u2014or therefore subsidized. This is the story\u2019s social pathos: as Ragini asks her police-chief husband Dev (played by Tamil screen stalwart Vikram<\/a>), \u201cIs he Raavan or is he Robin Hood?\u201d<\/p>\n

Thunderous zombie-like rain-dance to the song<\/a> that assaults whatever haute Delhi may think of them: the best song-dance of the film, perhaps of any popular Hindi film of the last decade. Abhishek may not have the liquid flow of Hrithik Roshan\u2019s dance moves\u2014e.g., all cartilage in Krrish<\/em><\/a> opposite J.-Crewish Priyanka Chopra\u2014but ever since Refugee<\/a><\/em>, and even throughout Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna<\/em>, he has grown peerless in transmitting compressed, punctuating intensity.<\/p>\n

However gorgeously cinematographed, Ratnam\u2019s obsession with waterfalls, rainfall, and rotational views, and concession to gratuitous violence during climactic scenes, only venn-diagrams this film with Bollywood\u2019s triter image-sectors. The directorial triumph lies rather in an insistence that Raavan\u2019s attraction to Ragini stay indefinite, as a sort of inter-species gravitation: she pure wife, he bog demon, though each susceptible to the pull of another life. (He is thus a different animal from the Beast or Frog who\u2019s actually an incarcerated prince, say, and from the altogether irredeemable Alberich lusting after Rhinemaidens.) There is a wondrous delicateness to Raavan\u2019s seeming monstrosity; he contemplates possessing her, yet never seems merely to want to ravish her\u2014and yet there\u2019s also nothing chaste about his heated state. That honor-bound Dev cannot imagine forms of close encounter other than the coital, cuckolding kind\u2014and so exacts his crude, cruel revenge\u2014may leave the viewer rather depressed for being human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raavan (2009, dir. Mani Ratnam). Aishwarya Rai\u2019s Ragini remains too little marred by abduction, rock-scaling, near-drowning, food refusal, traumatic witnessing, being dragged from cave to pit to cave and so on. The camera still fondles her face as it might any cover-girl\u2014confirming this face to be as fascinating as that of some infant cyborg. Abhishek […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5752,13879,370,4537],"tags":[19796,1334,5582,19798,19797],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-dance","category-film","category-love","tag-aishwarya","tag-bollywood","tag-hindi","tag-hrithik-roshan","tag-mani-ratnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":983,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dingansich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}