Ghajini: It's brutal but almost lyrically so

Movie: Ghajini
Director: A.R. Murugadoss
Starring: Aamir Khan, Asin, Jiah Khan
Rating:

The movie opens with Aamir Khan shoving a tap into a particularly evil looking man's gut. There's more to come. Necks are twisted, bones crushed, iron rods connect with heads. Imagine a South Indian movie made in Hong Kong by John Woo's disciples and you get close to the kind of mind-bending brutality unleashed in Ghajini.

Blood, thick, viscuous and almost purple in colour, gushes from wounds. Eyes are bloodshot. Fists are bunched and ready to fly. This is a movie harrowing in its intensity. Yes it is adapted from Christopher Nolan's Memento and from A.R. Murugadoss's own Tamil version, but it is also made Aamir Khan's own, with a performance that is unflinching in its ability to absorb pain. There is the trauma of losing his memory, of seeing his girlfriend dying in front of him, of his own body being turned into a killing machine. Never before has a male body been used with such force in a Bollywood movie.

This is not the glossy display of six pack abs and tightly packed butt that we've got used to. This is the body being used in vengeance, with every scrap of memory stored on it for recall (even the foot is not spared-the message there says insistently 'take the camera').

The story, as probably every Googleable person knows by now, is about a tycoon who goes on a mission to locate Ghajini, the man who killed his girlfriend and caused him to lose his long term memory. It's told in a series of non-linear flashbacks, the clues left in two diaries Aamir's character used to maintain, and in a series of other visual props, Polaroid pictures, messages written on his impressive chest, and words inscribed on every scrap of surface he can find. And in Asin, the South Indian actor who plays his girlfriend, Aamir is given a woman who seems worth killing for, even dying for. Channeling the other great export from the South, Sridevi (on a very strict diet), Asin plays a struggling model with a heart of gold. She's the kind who doesn't mind lying to get ahead in her work, but she also helps blind people cross the road and saves little girls from being sold for sex. She teaches our young tycoon, Aamir with hair, how to drink tea from a saucer and eat watermelons on the roadside. It is enough for us to believe his hair-less avatar, screaming in almost feral anger, will go to the ends of the earth to avenge her death.

It's a technically accomplished film. Ravi K Chandran's camera makes the old and winding alleys of Hyderabad come alive with menace. Resul Pookutty's sound effects, echoing every click and crunch, are note perfect. Stun Shiva and Peter Heins have invented a new language of visceral violence-Hong Kong action cooked on a slow burn with South Indian masala by a cook listening to some heavy metal. The atmosphere of the film is moody in most parts, sunny in others, but the overhang of tragedy just will not let go. But if your heart weighs heavy when Aamir holds hands with Asin's apparition at the end of the film, complete with sunny maple leaves falling in slow motion, just attribute it to the performances. With every taut nerve in his face, every pinched muscle in his body, Aamir conveys the pain of a man who is battling a loss without measure. In Pradeep Rawat's Ghajini, though, there is a sense of disappointment. Is this a South Indian villain speaking in a Haryanvi accent? Or a Haryanvi villain looking very South Indian?

Watch it, but keep a grip on your nerves. And the children safely tucked up in bed. At home.

This is brutality, choreographed by a poet, and therefore that much more compelling.

Courtesy: digitaltoday.in