The Lost Art of Talking About Revenge

Doing revenge is not everyone’s cup of tea. For instance, 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.

When an auto mechanic encounters the man who may have been his torturer in prison, he kidnaps him to exact vengeance. But since the sole clue to Eghbal’s identity is the squeak of his prosthetic leg, Vahid turns to other now-freed victims for confirmation. And the danger only escalates.

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.

The Ramayana, at least the one that day the millennial generation grew up hearing and watching on Ramanand Sagar’s TV serial, was much more than battle and bloodshed (even though it involved the mythical decapitation of ten-headed Ravana).

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 the enemy piñata. 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 versions of getting even—securing a better job after getting fired at one place or having 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 a base idea, a cheap flavour.

On screen 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 caustic flavour. In the final scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Henry Fonda looks with the pale-eyed horror of realisation at 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), Woojin dropping the pulverising reveal on his captor Oh Dae-su is skin-crawling stuff. At the end of Gangs of Wasseypur II (2012), Nawazuddin Siddiqui emptying his submachine gun into Ramadhir Singh goes from gut-wrenching to gratuitous but never empty.

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 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 lecture. 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 a fuel tanker and sets fire to it.