“Are you a good man or a bad man?” the little boy asks his imprisoned grandfather, an underworld Indian don. The old man, who has spent a lifetime helping others and righting social wrongs, and also killing, answers, “I don’t know.”
Nor do I, in a film that has given me a wrenching moral workout, and one of the most brilliant gangster films I have seen, Mani Ratnam’s 1987 Nayagan, which recently made Time‘s list of the 100 greatest films of all time.
It is often compared to The Godfather, I suppose because it’s a gangster chronicle covering many years and because its leading figure, based on an actual person, dearly loves his family—his wife, his son, his daughter, his closest associates. But Nayagan is a good film. Its frames aren’t studied, like those of Coppola’s film; violence in Ratnam’s film is horrific, not titillating, coldly manipulative of our enjoyment of mayhem, as is the case with Coppola’s. Whereas The Godfather is a commercial advertisement for the Mob, Nayagan is a humane piece of work.
It is also lushly gorgeous, lyrically lovely in many passages, and spiritedly punctuated by songs and street dances. It’s a people’s film, at times an outright musical, that writer-director Ratnam brings in inexorably to a solemn finish.
It is absorbing for all of its 2½ hours and sometimes riveting, but be forewarned: there is a Dickensian contrivance/surprise revelation that will please some and mess with others.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
Dennis Grunes 