Review: Rang Rasiya is an important film

Rang Rasiyais not a consistent film, but one that tells a story of a pioneering artist and visionary, a story decidedly worth telling, says Raja Sen.

Censorship is an utterly pointless and regressive activity, and we Indians have always been good at it.

Good at said pointlessness, that is, not at actually establishing some sort of sensible organisation that knows the meaning of the word 'context'.

Ketan Mehta's film Rang Rasiya, a biopic of the artist Raja Ravi Varma, deals with artistic censorship, a subject that remains immensely relevant in a country where filmmakers are asked to cut out dialogues and trim scenes by 20 percent just cause the censor board said so.

The movie opens with a courtroom scene, one that reminded me of Howl, the James Franco-starrer about Allen Ginsberg's obscenity trial.A compelling film, it concentrated on the fascinating case -- recreating preposterous but real-life court transcripts -- and, on the side, explored the beat poet's life, love and history.

The story, however, was always the trial and I wish Mehta too had kept the courtroom front and centre in his film instead of trying to give us a concise life-and-times or a treatise on censorship instead of both.

That is the fundamental issue with Rang Rasiya: it starts off as a condensed biopic, theatrically moving from one milestone in the artists life to another, with scarcely any time to breathe.

It is a fascinating life, sure, but this narrative progression -- with long stretches devoted to mediocre songs and dramatic moments constantly underscored by overdone background music -- plays out like a school play, with bad costumes, clunky lines and no detailing.

Randeep Hooda, who plays Raja Ravi Varma, is solid but the film around him is eye-rollingly overdone. Like the books we see as background in a study, leatherbound hardbacks with nothing written on them to distinguish one from the other, the film appears spineless.

Thankfully, the second half of the film, where the courtroom battle comes more sharply into focus and the narrative of his life actually gets going, is genuinely interesting. Portions where the artist took an interest in the cinema, for example, bustle with energy. Even the background score gets jauntier.

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Review: Rang Rasiya is an important film