My Baby Shot Me Down
On the music that makes the films of Sriram Raghavan
Hello Hot Chips gang!
My first piece of the year is one that warrants a playlist, thankfully. Like you might need it as a reference point. I’ve been told by a friend who proofread it that this piece would have been a great video essay, which is interesting because I’ve been toying with the idea of making them under the Hot Chips banner. Unfortunately, I am yet to learn video editing. And it would not be easy to edit the kind of video that this piece would entail.
However, more than the playlist, I would like you to check out the audio file in the end credits of this piece. Instead of video editing (which I should be doing), I have found myself learning how to be a disco jockey. And inevitably, my newsletter and my DJ skills have found a symbiotic relationship where they influence one another.
ALSO — no more hyperlinks! I am now using superscript to indicate that you can check out a certain link or page, so that you’re not hounded by yellow text. I should have done this a while ago, but better late than never.
I hope you have a great time reading this :)
I love In The Hall of the Mountain King.
The song evokes the spooky-scaries. It was originally written to accompany a scene in the Norwegian play Peer Gynt, which had gnomes and goblins and other freakish creations of nature. The song has since found itself in a Sonic game, one of the Forza games, a Mad Men episode, and my personal favorite — a boat race between Harvard and Hollandia Raceclub[1]. The world may have been a better place if the central characters of said race actually pursued a career in the sport[1 p2], as opposed to being Bitcoin shills.
So I was overjoyed to hear the piece again in a movie of this year that I, and many others, really liked. It’s called Merry Christmas, and it surprised me. Not in a “oh my god what a twist ending” way, that’s so yesteryear. But Merry Christmas’ twists are reliant on the idea that fundamentally, it is a work of affection and not mystery. And it represents one culmination (I’m sure there will be more) of the long career of a man who started by making PSA films for the Indian Space Research Organization. A man not really known to make romantic movies.
Sriram Raghavan has proven to be a director who has stretched the boundaries of what is possible in Bollywood, and Indian cinema as a whole. It’s clear from his filmography that he loves making crime capers and pot-boiling edge-of-your-seat thrillers. Everyone will remember him as the man who made a “blind” pianist witness a murder. Or the man who gave Neil Nitin Mukesh a debut break for the ages (that he’s probably never been able to replicate). Or the guy who made Varun Dhawan look good enough to be on Inception.
What really sets him apart, though, is understanding the dynamics of music in film. Raghavan has consistently deviated from the structure of conventional Bollywood movie and music-making. His films are tied by thematic threads underscored by spine-tingling tunes. You may still associate his movies with hit songs / albums from time to time. But when you watch them, you feel like asking yourself if the movie even contains all of the songs in its album release (the answer is no).
That is a deliberation on the part of someone who’s well-versed in the history of murder, music, and murder music. Spoiler alert for the following movies: Badlapur, Johnny Gaddaar, Andhadhun, Agent Vinod.
Retro-bution
Revenge is a dish best served with the “Winter” section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
I’m not sure if someone did Sriram Raghavan wrong in a past life, but revenge is a factor in so many of his movies. Merry Christmas uses “Winter” in its wonderful final climax, bringing to conclusion the eventual result of a vengeful action. The final scene itself isn’t an act of revenge, but few tracks signal climaxes like “Winter”. There’s a lot of back-and-forth happening between the hunter and the hunted in the scene, where the latter is doing everything in their power to avoid being caught. Except, it’s not really doing, but speaking. The entire scene is an exercise in one side lying by omission, and the other trying to figure out the gap in the story.
The most memorable use of “Winter” that I know of was in a movie I should not have watched when I was 14. Oldboy is a revenge movie through and through. It uses “Winter” in an absolutely brutal scene where protagonist Oh Dae-Su is using the wrong end of a hammer to wring out the tooth of one of his captors. The scene has a back-and-forth as well, but there is an obvious imbalance in the power dynamic between the two parties. The track switches into a heightened section right when you start seeing blood oozing from the captor’s incisors. An absolutely bonkers scene, that takes place right before the greatest hallway fight sequence of all time[2]. South Koreans, man.
Merry Christmas is confounding when you consider the tonality of Sriram Raghavan’s preceding work. They’re not very romantic, even though 4 of them have a romantic encounter that is truly central to the plot. And the romance is very likely to take a dark turn — especially with Badlapur, Ek Hasina Thi. With Merry Christmas, it’s a cycle. It opens with sweet songs in Dil Ki Mez, Nazar Teri Toofan, Raat Akeli Thi, all effectively romantic songs. It gives you the perception that this is a man looking to restart his life in a new city and is not opposed to finding love in a corner too. And then you have the violins playing at minor scales and dizzying metronomes, telling you without words that something is amiss in what seems to be all nice and sweet.
With Raghavan, the music is narrative-driven. Varun Grover even quoted[3] this as one reason he took up the job of writing lyrics for the songs. And the lyrics with any Raghavan flick in general, as later examples will also show, say a lot about the movie. However, what I find more impressive is when he achieves the same thing without lyrics. Each of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has sonnets attached — not really sung with, but offered to audiences witnessing the opera as program notes. The sonnet for “Winter” is as follows:
To tremble from cold in the icy snow,
In the harsh breath of a horrid wind;
To run, stamping one's feet every moment,
Our teeth chattering in the extreme cold
Before the fire to pass peaceful,
Contented days while the rain outside pours down.
We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously,
for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and,
rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds course through the home
despite the locked and bolted doors...
this is winter, which nonetheless
brings its own delights.
I don’t know whether Raghavan or his music team knew about this sonnet. But considering the setting (and title) of the movie, one would agree that much of the last section of the poem emulates the second half of the script. We see Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif essentially treading tender glaciers slowly, for fear of cracking. And of course they slip. especially when each discovers the other’s tell. But much like the aforementioned winter, the end brought its own delight for both of them. The metaphorical rain in this movie pours inside the house in which a lot takes place.
In contrast, Badlapur doesn’t have a lot of score. It’s a great movie by any means, but it’s not extremely subtle. Its songs are narrative-driven, but more obvious. Jeena is about someone trying to find reasons to live after a tragic event. Jee Karda is the opposite of Jeena — a beckoning to have oneself ripped to shreds because they have no purpose beyond the people that inhabited their life and are now no more. The song is also about someone trying to replace a legitimate reason to live with the need to avenge. Judaai is heartbreaking, and may function as a good post-breakup song, despite its context being different.
Interestingly enough, none of these songs are overtly about revenge. They do not directly allude to a human perpetrator, but a vague cause that is related to a loved one. The interpretation of a movie could also be less in the fashion of the predator-prey cycle, and more in that of someone who is unable to deal with loss. Notably, the movie also doesn’t end with an act of revenge. Varun Dhawan never actually kills Nawazuddin Siddiqui, as so much of the film’s marketing seemed to indicate would happen. In fact, it’s Siddiqui’s character who gives Dhawan a second chance at finding a purpose in life by turning himself in.
Raghavan knows how to fit standard Bollywood frameworks of making music into his eclectic visions of moviemaking, both through the movie’s own music and that of older Bollywood movies. It’s no secret that Raghavan is extremely nostalgic about the movies of yesteryear. There are always multiple allusions to older Bollywood movies in each of his movies, and Badlapur is no different. In that context, the “15 Years Later” segue of Badlapur is a masterclass that deserves its own dissection.
After Liak (played by Siddiqui) fails to escape, we see his prison inmates mocking him by invoking Charles Sobhraj who apparently escaped jail 14 times. The camera then moves to an older Liak, with the same inmates singing Kaun Kisiko Bandh Saka from Kaalia, where they’re singing about an eccentric hunter and the hunted trying to break free. Of course, the original song was also sung in the context of being jailed[4].
And yet, it’s when he uses non-Bollywood conventions of making music that really kills. The prison scene switches to Varun Dhawan walking in the rain towards his new, smaller house. Next to his place, there’s a small temple. A music trainer is sitting with her young trainees and singing a Marathi folk song calling on the rain to drench oneself (that I've heard before but couldn't place where / find a viable reference online to it). But, of course, it’s a metaphor for a soul-cleanse, the kind Varun Dhawan’s character needs:
Wash over me and cleanse my mind
Come over and drench me, o rain!
How long can I hold back?
The flute yearns to sing
Raghavan says that the “15 Years Later” sequence is actually inspired by what Sergio Leone pulled off in Once Upon A Time in America[5]. De Niro is escaping New York after enraging lots of people, and we see him at the Coney Island Railway Station. And then you find yourself seeing the same location, but a much older De Niro who is back in NY after exile. In the midst of all of this, a depressingly beautiful cover of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” is playing. There are no spoilers in this scene, so I think you should watch it for the cover alone[6].
Even the song Sone Ka Paani from the album is not overtly about any of the running themes of Badlapur. The track plays when Raghav (Varun Dhawan) meets Jhimli (Huma Qureshi), who is a sex worker[6 p1]. He is there to extract information about Liak, who she grew up with and loved for a while. Quite obviously, the song’s sounds like it was solely made to seduce. But the lyrics tell her story. She was forced to grow up too soon because of her social circumstance, and now the world wants her body:
Sone ka paani chadhake piya hui gori jawaani
Resham se mere badan ki piya saari duniya deewani
O meri khata kya hai bata piya
Meri khata kya hai bata piya
Baali umar mein joh ho gayi sayani[translation here]
Ek Hasina Thi is an exercise in the restraint of use of music. Only 2 songs play in it — one at the very beginning, and one well into the second half. For the life of me I can’t find them on YouTube. There’s plenty of background score, which is mostly a generic use of chilling synth sounds and subtle drums. It was also Raghavan’s mainstream debut, so one could assume that it wouldn’t have a huge music budget. The title track is a dark dance-y track with a killer bassline — a rarity in Bollywood music for a long time. The other track, Neend Na Aaye, was sung by Pandit Jasraj.
(Of course, we all know that Ek Hasina Thi was followed by a remake of Karz where Himesh Reshammiya takes on Kishore Kumar to sing an iconic song of the same name[6 p2]. And the casting of Urmila Matondkar was no coincidence.)
Old music, references to old movies, and revenge / violence are Sriram Raghavan’s premier cocktail mix. But more than revenge, it’s dark comedy where that cocktail of his is most potent.
Capos and Capers
Johnny Gaddaar is one of my favorite Bollywood films ever.
Not least because it’s Russian roulette in cinematic form, but also because within the first 20 minutes, you see Neil Nitin Mukesh dancing to the hit Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (+ Hard Kaur) track, Move Your Body.
What’s insane is a party banger like that would, by conventional Bollywood standards, be replete with a dance sequence and probably some exquisite flirtations by the male and female leads. Instead, it’s Neil Nitin Mukesh — whose debut it was — testing his music system, dancing alone. No club scene, no lip-to-lip action. He was like me dancing in my room alone, swinging to the sounds of my boombox. When was the last time Bollywood let a fresh face have some fun like that?
The fun doesn’t stop there at all. A few minutes prior, we see Dharmendra, the head of a 5-member gang (of which Mukesh’s character Vikram is a part) playing a tape where his dead wife supposedly sings an old Gulzar-penned tune called Mora Gora Ang Lei Le[7]. The context of the track is the woman (sung by Lata Mangeshkar) is trying to meet her beloved secretly. She asks the night to color her as dark as the lord Krishna, so that she can hide in its blackness.
The movie this was originally a part of — Bandini, while brutal, had a feel-good ending to it. Which makes its use hilarious in Johnny Gaddaar, a movie that, like Reservoir Dogs, ends with no holds barred. Vikram wants to elope with Mini, the unhappy wife of his gang-mate Shardul. It’s this illicit romance that kickstarts the ruckus that ensues because Vikram / Johnny G wanted a way out by stealing some heavy money that the gang was planning to move for a deal. Everything you need for pitch black comedy. Moreover, Dharmendra senses that the two are in love, but does not spill the beans to Shardul. He confronts Vikram, who he clearly shares a close master-protege relationship with.
And THEN there’s the chloroform sequence[7 p2]. Sriram Raghavan’s longtime collaborator is Daniel B George, who’s written the score for most of his films. Vikram is hatching his mega-plan, and he subjects himself to just the right amount of chloroform to see what is enough to not kill someone. You’re just watching the sequence trying to figure out what he’s doing, going “HE’S GOING TO DIE”. He puts his napkin to the nose, and that’s where a sick grunge beat kicks in.
Naturally, Johnny Gaddaar takes a page from the crime jazz of older Hollywood murder mysteries. You know, noir movies in dingy streets where the local precinct has to investigate a disgustingly violent feat, one where the victim was likely a woman. Probably involves a smokey jazz club with tons of gambling. L.A Confidential, Sweet Smell of Success, Chinatown, books by James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler, and video game L.A Noire are good reference points for this vibe. Much of Vikram’s planning sequence is scored to George fusing crime jazz and classic 70s Bollywood sounds.
In that vein, the piece of score from the movie titled Confidence plays when Prakash is gambling big and ends up losing 10 lakh. And of course, historically in media, any such gamble either leads to something devious or something insane, or both. Between its harmonium, trumpets, the saxophone, and the piano, the song closes with 4 bars of wavy 808s that conventionally differ from any of the aforementioned instruments. This is no isolated incident — Johnny Gaddaar has plenty of electronic influence. Move Your Body has a guitar riff with a sub-bass and 808s, and the same song has an overt DJ remix present in the album. Johnny Breakbeat Mera Naam sounds like a lighter version of something The Prodigy would make, with vocoder-aided vocals. The beat in the chloroform scene as well.
To me, the electronic elements on the movie are most reminiscent of the soundtracks of two movies from the year 1999. One was about Edward Norton being mentally ill, and the other was about Keanu Reeves figuring out that he’s not mentally ill. Hear Stealing Fat[8] from the Fight Club soundtrack, composed by The Dust Brothers. They’ve notably worked with someone who was an early pioneer of using electronic elements in non-electronic music — Beck. Then there’s Prime Audio Soup[9] by Meat Beat Manifesto. Recall some bullet dodging and eclectic MMA as you listen to this? This was on The Matrix, which also has Mindfields by The Prodigy[10].
Most importantly, Sriram Raghavan is a huge fan of the John Carpenter flick Assault on Precinct 13. It is well known for having one of the most superb electronic scores[11] any film has ever used. Synth bass, modular synth, drones, hi-hats, snares, heavy use of flangers and phaser effects. Carpenter himself reportedly did the score in 3 days.
Andhadhun is about a “blind” pianist, so music needs to be in its DNA anyway. Naina Da Kya Kasoor is its most famous song, a delightful track by Amit Trivedi. It’s quite joyful sounding, and it underscores a scene where the pianist Akash (Ayushman Khurana) is romancing Sophie (Radhika Apte). But its first few lyrics pre-hook are essentially a foretelling of what he is about to witness:
Arey abhi abhi pyara sa chehra dikha hai
Jaane kya kahun uspe kya likha hai
Gehra samandar dil dooba jismein
Ghayal hua main uss pal se isme[translation here]
Interestingly, the soundtrack also features Delhi’s own Raftaar for the title track. It follows the template that a song in a Sriram Raghavan film follows: either provide a character study or do some foreshadowing. Aap Se Milkar is the one song that doesn’t feature in the film. It’s peppy and jolly and romantic, so it’s supposed to provide context to Akash’s romance with Sophie, and how it turned his life all over. However, it could be well construed to mean his meeting (or lack thereof) with Simi. It goes without saying that vision metaphors galore throughout the album.
Naina Da Kya Kasoor is also a creative reinvention of RD Burman’s composition O Mere Sona Re[12] from Teesri Manzil, something I did not know / realize until I researched this. Raghavan also based the film on the idea that many old Bollywood films made heavy use of piano in their music albums. His streak of integrating some amount of his love for old Hindi cinema remains unbroken. And he does it in such a fun way that you can’t help but be impressed.
In the scene where he goes to Simi’s (Tabu) house and eventually sees the dead body of her actor husband, Akash plays a piano cover of another old song that’s titled Teri Galliyon Mai Na Rakhenge Kadam Aaj Ke Baad[13], from the movie Hawas (1974). The song originally seems to be about heartbreak and becoming forlorn. The male lead tells the female lead that he’ll never cross paths with her again, that she should consider any memory of them meeting a dream and assume he doesn’t exist. That’s coincidentally also really good advice for when you pretend to be blind but happen to witness the dead body of your client, courtesy his wife. And the client — a yesteryear Bollywood actor — is played by Anil Dhawan, an actual yesteryear actor, who also happens to be the lead of Hawas.
And it doesn’t stop there. The next scene shows the flashback of how the client, Pramod dies. He returns early from a trip, wanting to surprise Simi. This is underscored by a beautiful cover of Yeh Jo Mohabbat Hai[14] from the movie Kati Patang. In the original, Rajesh Khanna is drinking like a sponge while proclaiming how he has no intention of falling in love with anyone no matter what. And Pramod finds that Simi is cheating on him. You know the rest.
Most notable are the original piano compositions of the film, played by Mumbai-based pianist Jarvis Menezes. The first theme[15] plays when Simi is cleaning up the mess of the murder, just after Yeh Jo Mohabbat Hai. And it’s too happy-go-lucky-sounding for what it’s truly giving voice to. Almost as if it’s a scene from the Looney Tunes, where a ton of bricks has fallen on the Tazmanian Devil — an incident that would kill anyone in the real world. Or the scene where Simi goes to the restaurant where Akash plays. I couldn’t find whether this composition was a cover or not, but I could see myself hearing this on an episode of Tom & Jerry. A coda worthy of a predator chasing her prey.
You know what really blows my mind? It’s that the endings of both Andhadhun and Merry Christmas, while considerably different, share one commonality: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons! Andhadhun uses “Summer”. Sadly, the sonnet for “Summer” doesn’t say too much about the climax, but could Raghavan going for a crazy 4-movie run based on Four Seasons? Who’s not signing up for it?
(Apparently, a Redditor[16] also found striking similarities between the opening score of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the score where Akash removes his lenses to see Sophie leaving. They’re not direct copies of each other, at least on listening closely. But crazy resemblance nonetheless.)
It is well-known that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony plays when Simi drops one of her annoying neighbors to her death because she saw her muse enter her house. The composition is supposed to be a tonal representation of Fate knocking on one’s door. And Fate is that annoying cheese-eating rat that every caper like Andhadhun or Johnny Gaddaar has to deal with eventually. Oh, and consequently even Ek Hasina Thi, if you know how the movie ends :)
By the time the Fifth was written, Beethoven was deaf. Maybe what they say about having heightened awareness the moment you don’t have ears or eyes might be true. Within Raghavan’s filmography, Andhadhun is only one instance of that. The other is from what is considered his weakest movie (that I actually quite enjoyed). An exquisite one-take shootout from Agent Vinod, scored to a piano version of the hit track Raabta. The blind pianist in that movie served partly as an inspiration for Andhadhun.
Action Item Number 1
Agent Vinod is the most controversial movie Raghavan has ever made. There was notable studio executive intervention in the filmmaking process because they thought that the kind of movie he originally envisioned wouldn’t be a hit in the theatres. The result is a weird, incoherent mish-mash that is fun in many places.
But the set pieces, man. I’m a huge fan of the club action sequence that takes place in the first 30 minutes, scored by the Pritam banger I’ll Do The Talking Tonight. For once, Pritam’s template of copying well-known elements of well-known songs worked in his favor. The track mostly takes from Boney M’s Rasputin, but some of the male vocals feel like Pritam generated an Indian clone of Enrique Iglesias and had him do a variation of “Tonight I’m Lovin’ (slash-Fuckin’) You” in F-minor. Of course, this is notwithstanding the titles of both songs. And throw in some Jennifer Lopez’ On The Floor for good measure. In fact, the metronomes of all 3 songs are similar, and the instrumentals are too close for comfort.
The club action sequence is a stealer in every movie it exists in, provided it’s done right. I still remember the first time I saw John Wick, and decided I wanted more of Keanu Reeves playing IRL Call of Duty in nightclubs. But that’s not as subtle as another personal favorite of mine from Collateral[17]. Tom Cruise’s villainous nihilist, Max enters the club, not caring about the techno playing behind him, snapping legs and busting groins. He’s trying to be quiet, and you see people dancing around him, with only few people hearing the commotion he’s causing, until there’s a gunshot (which he doesn’t fire). Gotta love an assassin who doesn’t want his job to come in the way of the dancing crowd.
The song that plays in the Collateral scene is a track called Ready Steady Go by Paul Oakenfold. It’s a banger that, interestingly, also provides context to a police chase from the first part of a trilogy Sriram Raghavan has quoted as an inspiration for Agent Vinod. About a man often named second to Jesus Christ[18].
(Also, the Paul Oakenfold song sounds so in tune with the Himesh cover of Ek Hasina Thi. You can literally sing along the lyrics to Ready Steady Go. Holy shit.)
In a lot of ways, the Agent Vinod club sequence takes from Collateral and, in true espionage fashion, Casino Royale with a classy poker scene. Everything — from the initial meeting that Vinod has with an arms dealer, to the final confrontation — is scored to the Pritam song. People are dancing, paying little attention to the ruckus Vinod is causing. There’s some creative torture, too. Imagine making someone’s ears bleed by binding them to headphones and playing screeching high frequencies.
I have not even begun talking about the famous one-take shootout. Often hailed by many as the only redeeming factor of the movie, it was also new for Bollywood to be seeing that. As with many things about Sriram Raghavan, the inspiration for it was Vijay Anand. His 1973 movie Blackmail has a scene where the song Mile Do Badan[19] plays while Dharmendra and Rakhee are romancing each other while trying to fight bad guys. While not a one-take, the setting is the same for Raabta. Another non-Indian inspiration for Raghavan was king of Hong Kong action (and the director of the worst Mission Impossible flick) John Woo. His hit, Hard Boiled, has an iconic one-take hospital shootout[20].
And now that we speak of hospital shootouts, here’s a killer domino effect[21]. Agent Vinod was the 2nd movie under the banner of Saif’s now shut production house, Illuminati Films. The studio made 6 films as a whole. One of them is a zombie movie with Saif playing a Russian assassin that turned out to be a cult classic. The two men that directed it have since created one of the most important revolutions in Indian OTT — making the action set piece mainstream. Business failures have great spillover effects. Like this hospital shootout (and other Raj & DK shenanigans):
Despite being marketed as a blockbuster movie unlike his 2 prior ventures, Raghavan wanted to make particular musical decisions. Arguably the biggest song from the album, the Mika Singh banger Pungi does not feature in the movie until the end credits. It does not play any role in providing context, and it just underscores Saif Ali Khan doing the funniest dance moves to seemingly random enemy spycams. However, Pyaar Ki Pungi broke one convention of item numbers, especially according to the very writer of the song, Amitabh Bhattacharya[22]:
“It's difficult to explain the phrase. Usually any song that stands out in a movie or a song where a female protagonist performs in a different manner is called an item number. I feel a song that attracts viewers' attention towards a movie and rises on the popularity chart is called an item number.”
The first song released from the Agent Vinod album for promotion was Dil Mera Muft Ka. The music video was Kareena Kapoor and Maryam Zakaria in mujra mode — a hit in its own right, and a true outlier in terms of being a conventional item number in Raghavan’s filmography. And Pungi blew it away in the charts, notching yet another hit in Mika Singh’s long and illustrious career.
But more than its hit songs, it’s the proliferate use of guitar riffs in the movie that’s confounding. I’m not aware of too many espionage movies that resort to electric to provide background music. And when the guitar is needed in a spy movie, it’s usually bass — think the Mission Impossible theme (the Lalo Schifrin version, not Henry Mancini) or the James Bond themes. The former uses the bass, while the latter has the famous series of notes that is now synonymous with the Scottish spy[22 p1]. But Agent Vinod opens with a doozy rock cover of Govind Bolo Gopal Bolo.
And what would Agent Vinod be without some throwback, with O Meri Jaan from the 1970 murder mystery The Train underscoring an airport break-in by the villains? And its innumerable yesteryear easter eggs: a Charlie Chaplin clip[23], an homage to lead of the original 1970 Agent Vinod (Mahendra Sandhu), Saif’s druggily quoting Antony Gonsalves, and the use of Ennio Morricone — complete with a close-up shot characteristic of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western[24]! Agent Vinod may have zilch to do with The Good The Bad and the Ugly, but I suppose Raghavan could not resist using the iconic motif of the movie just once.
Raghavan claimed that Agent Vinod was an attempt to make a realistic spy movie, in the vein of Jason Bourne. The Bourne Ultimatum also happens to be my favorite espionage movie of all time, and Raghavan was so inspired by Bourne’s back-and-forth in Tangiers[25][26] that he decided to have much of his own film take place in Morocco. Much of the camera movement in the fight scenes seems inspired by Bourne’s shakycam. It’s a shame that Agent Vinod was instead perceived (for good reason) more in line with a poor Austin Powers.
It’s hilarious that on reviewing this piece before publication, I realized that I dedicated an entire space of this newsletter to what is obviously Sriram Raghavan’s weakest outing.
It’s likely because the great scenes of the movie exist in disharmony with its tonal inconsistency, that it became hard for me to make sense of it as a whole. And regardless of the end product, much like the masterpieces Sriram Raghavan has made, it’s a love letter not just to old Bollywood, but to all the media that has inspired him.
As with the rest of the 5 movies he has done, there are beautiful common threads that weave them. Be it the brutal nature of Indian police and prisons, or the lust (or love) for the making of money, or how common (often underprivileged) people are pushed to the brink, or the absolutely blinding desire for revenge.
OR, on the more fun side of things — the Russian Roulette nature of the plots (and all the gambling references), the craft of the murders and crimes, the red herrings (rabbits in the case of Andhadhun and rats in Ek Hasina Thi), the very strong female leads, the backstabbing and the spicy affairs, and lastly — the storytelling hidden in his films’ songs, and the excellent cross-genre experimentation in film score.
With Sriram Raghavan, you can expect certain plot devices and pop culture references in every venture. He works with a recurring cast of people and crew that bolster those expectations. But it’s the man who aces a few things 10000 times who’s better, not the one who’s tried 10000 things once each. And Raghavan understands mystery and suspense better than most others in the industry. Why use too many device when few device do trick?
Sriram Raghavan, Daniel George, and all the famous composers they have worked with know this only too well. They understand that life may not have a film score, but life events have meaning. It’s why Sergio Leone went as far as to play music on set[27]. Because he wants the actor to get into a vibe. I don’t know if Raghavan does the same, but he understands the effect it produces better than anyone in Bollywood.
The result is almost always an unmistakable sensory vibe that delivers on what you’re about to experience. And for that odd attempt that puts the “almost” in “almost always”, you will, at the very least, find it amusing.
Until next time :)
Special thanks to: Sunaina Bose, Molina Singh, Ritwik Tripathy for the proofreading and the wonderful notes they’ve provided me from their knowledge of film!
While writing this piece, I tweeted incessantly about my findings. You search “Pranav Manie” and “Sriram Raghavan” on Twitter and you’ll find me be annoying about this entire thing. Luckily, one tweet became a mini-hit, and was noticed by Varun Grover and Hemanth Rao, who have both worked with Raghavan (on Merry Christmas and Andhadhun respectively). So I knew that I was PROBABLY doing something right. Thanks to them :)