The Lost Art of Talking About Revenge

In It Was Just An Accident, his Cannes-darling latest, Jafar Panahi makes the idea of payback a haunting, lightless hall, rummaging through it for meaning and necessity. In the latest film of the celebrated Iranian auteur of our times, an auto mechanic believes the man he just saw asking for help after his car broke down on a deserted road—might have been the one who tortured him in prison. The following day, he tracks him down and abducts him to punish him for his actions.

However, before he is about to bury him alive in the desert, Vahid needs to confirm the identity of his torturer—the preliminary giveaway having been the creak of his prosthetic leg. He must turn to others like him, a circle of free citizens going about their lives, who were tortured and humiliated in prison in the same way by the wretch Eghbal. All this while, the suspected culprit is kept overpowered as accusers pile up, each recounting their own ordeal at the hands of this agent of the regime.

Meanwhile, keeping Eghbal in the back of Vahid’s van becomes more serious by the minute. Their personal relationships grow more fractured and finally, the moment of reckoning arrives. Thereon, where Vahid’s need for revenge leads is the kind of thing that makes a film like this truly interesting.

A still from It Was Just an AccidentMUBI

In Indian cinema of late, revenge is clearly the flavour of the season. After the two Dhurandhar films, Indian audiences are gearing up for another double-instalment extravaganza in Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana. If Aditya Dhar’s film involves one wronged son going into hiding to bring the violators of his country to justice, Tiwari has taken on a story that’s essentially about the nobility of punishment—for abducting the pious wife of an exiled prince—one who is an incarnation of God no less.

Critics, however, have held Dhurandhar as having a much more perfidious effect on culture. Its straight-faced conjoinment of real, historical events and made-up, filmic, underground reportage synthesises a faux revenge. It does so by creating a cornered, wronged self for its ideal viewer and then rolling up all its present-day discontent into a feral hero that it will unleash on an enemy piñata that we don’t grow tired of thrashing. The exploits of this avenger, however, are so over-the-top and basic intrigue, that anyone who wants to see its mediocrity can easily see it.

The propulsion of revenge comes from the idea of justice. While the latter is supposed to be served by a mutual arbiter, such as God, or providence, revenge is made delicious by the fact that you take it in your own hands. Justice is supposed to be sought, revenge is to be taken. Modern-life versions of getting even—securing a better job after getting fired at one place or having holy, punitive ‘karma’ strike on the person who made your love life hell or just levelling up in life—take out your active role in the act of retribution itself. It’s supposed to be a base idea, a cheap flavour that needs to be enjoyed personally.

Onscreen and in stories, the appeal of revenge is in the simmering wait of the moment that the character who was wronged undergoes. There’s a narrative flying-under-the-radar and thrilling tug-of-war that gives revenge its exhilarating flavour. You know it in the final scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), when Henry Fonda looks with pale-eyed horror at realising that Harmonica (Charles Bronson), towering over him as Ennio Morricone’s Man with a Harmonia plays in the background. In the South Korean classic Oldboy (2003), it happens with Woojin dropping the pulverising reveal on his captor Oh Dae-su. And who can forget how, at the end of Gangs of Wasseypur II (2012), Nawazuddin Siddiqui empties his submachine gun into Ramadhir Singh, a scene that goes from gut-wrenching to gratuitous but never vacuous.

The final scene of Aditya Dhar’s concluding film in the duology, however, goes from insipid to stupid in a blaze of grenade and RPG explosions. The protagonist, Ranveer Singh’s Hamza, having in the course of a so far topsy turvy game, managed to suddenly outwit SP Aslam (Sanjay Dutt), is up against Major Iqbal now. Iqbal has discovered the truth about Hamza’s identity and is confronting him in the silly way Bollywood films insist on the psychopathic villain humiliate the hero in a long monologue. You don’t realise when a series of blasts and some comical crossfire later, they end up at a dock, going at each other with chains, saws, chainsaws, the works. Hamza manages to (shocker!) get the better of his opponent, having chopped his legs off, drowns him in a fuel tanker and sets fire to it.

In It Was Just An Accident, Vahid and Shiva are left at the end to try one final time to coax Eghbal to own up. He's tied to the trunk of a tree and the two begin questioning the man, who realises that his kidnappers are incapable of murder. He grows bolder in his bluff and admits to his wrongdoing in a fire-and-brimstone scene done with the most quotidian matter-of-factness (Panahi, who shot this film entirely clandestinely, is able to absorb the hushed nature of the filming into the plot's proceedings). Ultimately, you're left with weighing the satisfaction that revenge could bring the wronged here, when there's no real shame or guilt experienced by the perpetrator. Ultimately, Vahid and Shiva spare Eghbal and drive off into the dusty darkness on the highway. What happens in the film’s final scene is another matter.

Gabbar chops off Thakur's arms in Sholay (1976)Sippy Films

As far as stories go, revenge tastes best when it serves as a righteous correction, and not really a punitive response. It gains its fuel from suffering that has metastasised into anger—much like that of The Bride in Kill Bill. In the film, her former employer Bill orders a massacre at the chapel she is supposed to get married at. Her fiancé, guests and unborn child are killed, and she is left comatose. So, after she wakes up years later, the only thing on her mind is retribution. In Bollywood’s very own Sholay (1976), freshly retired police commissioner Thakur Baldev Singh witnesses the immediate aftermath of a similar tragedy—in a chilling scene the bones of which were borrowed liberally by writers Salim-Javed borrowed from Westerns—that his family undergoes. The dacoit Gabbar, his arch-nemesis, brings him to his lair and chops both his arms. The scars accumulate and give Thakur enough trauma to seek revenge. He hires Jai and Veeru, two guns-for-hire who, for all their onscreen comedic coupling, pack enough bravado and mercenariness to eventually bring down the monster responsible for destroying their employer's whole world.

In Dhurandhar: The Revenge, however, the ‘eendhan’, the Hindi term the film uses to refer to this ‘fuel’ for revenge, isn’t earned from a genuine emotional core. The film’s merits, speaking strictly keeping in mind mainstream masala plotting standards, are restricted to its gangster subplots and the personal journey of the protagonist. In the film’s closing moments, when the protagonist returns home after many years, if you find yourself welling up, it’s likely because you’re watching someone scarred with bereavement trauma and severed familial ties almost come face-to-face with the family he was forced to massacre a house full of people for. But as a revenge plot, it falls flat because it gives viewers a fantastical payback for a series of historical tragedies. A ‘revenge’ like that is not only wrong on multiple moral grounds—it is undercooked and delivers a rather flimsy and predictable payoff for a seven-hour investment. 

Unlike Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino’s revisionist epic that sees Hitler being assassinated in a cinema theatre blaze during the Axis Powers’ occupation of France, Dhurandhar’s conflation of family with nation feels imposed—a psychological extrapolation founded in inauthenticity. In the former, the two subplots—that of the Basterds and that of the eventual avenger—intersect at the reappearance of the clearly identified common enemy: the Jew-hunting, milk-drinking, double-talking Nazi Colonel Hans Landa. Until that point, Shosanna, whose family he executed years ago and from whose grip she fled, hasn’t really been looking for revenge.

But when the opportunity presents itself, she and Marcel, her cinema projectionist partner, decide to go out with a bang—if it means a history-altering end to the Führer. It’s a truly heroic moment for the character to be given an opportunity like that and not blink. In that moment, Shosanna’s appetite and incentive for revenge is doubled: a man she personally loathes, the ideology that made that man and the progenitor of that ideology, all seem one. Marcel sets fire to a pile of nitrate film behind the screen, incinerating the theatre while the audience (including Hitler and Goebbels) is locked in. It’s as cold as it gets, and if you know the oldest thing they say about revenge, it fits.