Movie Review: Satya (1998)

Movie poster (Image source: Amazon.com)

Bombay has become Mumbai but the underworld scene still garners the fright of the teeming million denizens. Far from the elite drawing-room ideological clashes, lies a sad and I daresay, a dirty product of poverty. Radicalised poverty, helpless poverty, poverty this, poverty that. 

Film and documentary makers have capitalised on this poverty since ages. Satya puts forth a mirror. A mirror which does not thrive on bankable videography of the slums, but engages the audience with the souls which inhabit the hovels.

We know Satya is about Satya. Indeed in its "truest" sense. As the camera pans from a busy Bombay street to a lanky ragamuffin, it speaks to the audience in poetic cinematography. That man in tatters, that orphan vagabond, that life is our protagonist. Miscible in a mould, yet faltering at the edges due to its prismatic nature. He is truth, he is Satya, he is J. D. Chakravarthy. 

Chakravarthy reminds me of Kamal Hassan: stardom in the South, eccentric accent, intense acting. These could be some of the surface criteria to judge him and could perhaps be perceived as prejudiced in their approach. However, what really stands out for Chakravarthy is his "immersive" rather than "intense" acting. The character of Satya is a lucid dive into the grim-grimy script and landscape of the Bombay badlands. Chakravarthy acts in fair proportions, being vile or vulnerable, as the white paper demands. But Satya cannot be assessed in isolation. Who can forget his despotic chum - Bhiku Mhatre? He who has veritable criminal stealth together with contacts and contracts alike. He, who has his board set. How Satya becomes the King from just a regular pawn forms the crux of the story; a story, driven by Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap in-script but by Bajpai's Bhiku in spirit.

Straight out of a Salim-Javed reverie, Bhiku has the loyalty of Sher Khan and the comic timing of Gabbar Singh. One cannot help but beam as he chuckles at Satya's naïvety or has bittersweet banters with his frustrated better half (played brilliantly by Shefali Shah, who I wish could give me atleast a quarter of that Marathi swag she has.)

Bhiku has been written as a character of epic proportions. Although his crust is tough testosterone, his heart is a hamartia haven. One event after the other leads to an ominous declaration to the sea, "Mumbai ka King kaun? Bhiku Mhatre!" That is fairly obvious for a gang movie. And pretty much every facet of Bhiku's life can be mirrored to that of Satya, except that of family.

Cut off from family; epic; hamartia; comical: where do all these individual phrases have a cogent return? 2012, Wasseypur. The five and a half-hour long movie is divided into a Manoj Bajpai and a Nawazuddin Siddiqui segment. But I prefer to call it a hamartia and hubris divide. A vengeance saga replete with ego clashes and political motives and a dash of lust and romance. In many ways, Gangs of Wasseypur is an advanced and elongated version of Satya. While both the films are fourteen years apart, their blood is the same, that of Anurag Kashyap's ink. The one who made the Musalmanon-ki-Mahabharat with a bardic Piyush Mishra who couldn't be more similar to a Bheeshma Pitamah amidst the clashes. Speaking of Mahabharat, I am reminded of Ved Vyas. And the Ved Vyas of this film also acts in it. Saurabh Shukla. Yes, the same old man who plays the judge in the Jolly LLB series, the same man who played the role of an astrologer in Lage Raho Munnabhai and almost revamped it in PK as a notorious godman. Pardon the filmographic detour, I was just drawing the contours of Kallu Mama and driving a point home that Shukla puts the same theatrical enthusiasm everywhere. A senior Bhiku-like persona, a chilled out criminal existence and a thirst for thrifting the transient life that he has; Kallu Mama is the kind of character that will remind you of one of those psychedelic but softy drunkards featuring in old English novels.

In all this hullabaloo I forgot the dame. What was her name? Vidya! A chirpy singer portrayed sensitively by Urmila Matondkar. Matondkar, I feel, put the "experiment" in the "experimental" and illustrious heydeys of director RGV. From Rangeela to Daud to Satya, the filmography is testimonial to the fact that Matondkar could be as essential to an RGV film as a Lata Mangeshkar track or a Shankar-Jaikishan score to an RK Film.

Back to Vidya; she is the epitome of struggle. She has all the ingredients of, or in a meme-like description, a perfect starter pack for a humble, law-abiding and yet unsuccessful individual trying to make it big someday. Oh and compound her ailing father to that.

Satya and Vidya share introspective moments together. After all, both are a product of the same statem; albeit the latter has some kind of moral support from the quintessential primary group: family. And that's what Satya discovers after meeting Vidya. That is what draws me to Satya. How a chawl can compactly yet infinitely accommodate one nobody with the other. 

Markand Deshpande adds no spice to the movie per se, except that I heard him speak for the first time. He acts intensely (as he did in Sarfarosh, and I say this both for him and Govind Namdeo who also features in Satya) and is a suited booted lawyer in the film. Basically the legal mole.

Paresh Rawal gives way to Aditya Srivastava's character and both of them shed light on a cop's perspective. From raising violent measures to clean sweep the city of criminals to shunning one-sided human rights activists, both play a convincing role as one can sympathise, if not relate with them with every passing frame. 

Pardon me if I have missed some characters. I shall bring up another interesting temporal observation.

Satya is a product of its times. Well, not as if it were the first film to do so. And not as if it were a Tehelka tape of the 90s. It is just that Satya directly or indirectly dramatised two of the most gruesome incidents of 1997: the murder of T-Series founder Gulshan Kumar (as shown in the film through the murderer's perspective) and the Uphaar cinema hall fire and the stampede and asaphyxial deaths that followed (as shown in the scene of Satya's frisking at the cinema where he's watching Border with Vidya). Coincidentally, it was Border only, whose afternoon show was witness to this macabre at Uphar cinema.

Another quirky thing about the film and its times would be the song "Sapne mein milti hai, o'kudi meri sapne mein milti hai". Though, it's a personal favourite, I still have some rather critical and speculative remarks on it. 

What is a Punjabi song doing in a film which focusses entirely on Marathi speaking bhailog? How is Shefali Shah so receptive to the lyrics of the song? As far as the audience know, she is a prolific Marathi speaker. Maybe she's a polymath. 

Maybe the inclusion of the song was to make the movie more massy? Maybe that was an allegory to the debut of large-scale music commercialisation in the late 90s? Corporate pressure to churn out a Daler Mehndi or Gurdas Maan out of any film. This is notwithstanding and not taking into perspective the Punjabi influence looming over Bollywood since inception. 

With all said and done, I would recommend the movie for nothing but it's haunting background score, crisp editing and good songs for a film that makers strive to make songless. What else to expect from RGV,  Vishal Bharadwaj and Gulzar

If you were sticking around till this part of the post, have a review of the ending of the movie: predictable.

But who believes me? I had read its plot on Wiki before and so everything I watched in the fim became dramatic irony for me.

Alright folks, I sign off here, albeit quickly. I'll be more regular by the coming months. Until then, goodnight. I need rest because "bheja shor karta hai".