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Release date:
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April 22, 2016
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Director:
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Syed Ahmad Afzal
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Cast:
Language:
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Randeep Hooda,
Akshay Oberoi, Pia Bajpai, Meenakshi Dixit, Rajniesh Duggall
Hindi
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Let’s get this out of the way
first. Randeep Hooda is hot. It is worth the price of a ticket just to see him
wandering around in sleeveless vests throughout this film. He also takes off
his shirt at one point, letting the camera linger on a really really admirable yet
not obviously gym-sculpted, over-muscled back. That is a second ticket taken
care of.
A it happens, this man – who we
first saw in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding
in 2001 – is one of contemporary Indian cinema’s most talented, most under-rated
actors. It is a mystery why he is not a bigger star.
Hooda’s talent and looks are very
much in evidence in director Syed Ahmad Afzal’s Laal Rang. Question is: does the film add up to more than what he
has to offer?
Laal Rang
revolves
around an extremely important subject: corruption in blood banks. It is set in
Karnal, Haryana, where Shankar Malik (Hooda) runs a
successful blood donation racket. To make his illegal activities easier
by becoming a government insider, he enrols in a Medical
Lab Technology course at a government hospital. There he meets the young and
impressionable Rajesh Dhiman (Akshay Oberoi) who is so awe-struck by his charisma,
his swagger, his inventive ways of making money under the table and his Yamaha
RX100 (which, the film tells us, makes men irresistible to women) that he soon
becomes his protégé.
Also in the picture
is their straight-laced classmate Poonam Sharma (Pia Bajpai) and a late entrant
into the story, Superintendent of Police Gajraj Singh (Rajniesh Duggall), the
local Haryanvi boy who made it big.
The film’s supporting
actors are a uniformly competent lot, though a special mention must be made of
Rajendra Sethi – another excellent yet underrated actor – playing one of
Shankar’s cohorts. Bajpai is good for the most part even though she is not
entirely convincing with her fake bad English.
In what is one of
the film’s nicest touches, the characters in Laal Rang are not built up as menacing repulsive villains, yet they
are clearly an amoral bunch who, for instance, celebrate a dengue epidemic
because of the gains it brings blood racketeers like them. What the film
teaches us about their underhand dealings is terrifying. It is the kind of
story that will make you hesitate to ever visit a blood bank again, though of
course we do not have a choice in this matter, a realisation that would chill
any normal human being to the bone.
The film’s undoing is
what seems to be confusion over the tone it wants to achieve. And so, although
large parts of the narrative have a very apt, realistic feel to them, Laal Rang never becomes as gritty as it needed
to be because of its tendency to intermittently wander off into long, loud
songs supplemented by stylised, slow motion shots. The insistent background
score is used to underline every single emotion, twist and turn as if for fear
that the audience may miss the point.
As standalone scenes and music
videos outside a feature film, some of these are pretty impressive. In one
passage in the film, for instance, Shankar
takes Rajesh for a ride on his mobike and as the music plays and the wind blows
through his hair, he seems to ask his young pillion rider to take the
handlebars while he himself lets go and reaches into his pocket for a
cigarette. Ooh. Neat.
While this scene works because it
comes before we discover the horrid reality of the blood underworld that is Laal Rang’s focus, once we settle into
that theme, the repeated musical asides become an irritant.
A great subject alone doth not a
great film make. Relevant topics translate into good films when they are
peopled with human beings that we become completely involved with. That does
not happen here. There is a distant feel to Laal
Rang, the air of a newspaper reporter recounting a corruption scandal as a
detached observer would and should, rather than an insider’s account, which is
what this is supposed to be.
There is a memorable moment early
in Laal Rang when Shankar hails a
cycle rickshaw, and an aerial shot shows us every single rickshawpuller on that
street immediately freezing at his summons. They do it out of choice and not
for fear of him, as we soon find out. One of the poor men tells Rajesh that
they consider Shankar god (the choice of divine name for the character even
comes up for a mention at one point). Later we realise that all the men in that
scene were probably professional donors (PDs) whose impoverished existence was
greatly improved by the extra money Shankar’s business brings in.
The film needed more of that kind
of material minus the overdone music. Laal
Rang tells us a lot about the fraudulent operations of the country’s blood
banks. Wish it had got us to feel invested in the lives of the men and women
who run the fraud, especially the likes of Shankar and Rajesh who have a
straight path staring them in the face yet choose a crooked way.
This film has many interesting
individual elements but fails to lift off in its entirety. So yes, Randeep
Hooda is hot, but Laal Rang is not.
Rating (out of five): **1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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150 minutes
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This review has also been published on
Firstpost:
He isn't a big star because of his obnoxious nature.
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