Raavan: initial analysis after first viewing

Finally, seventeen years after he made Thiruda Thiruda, Mani Ratnam makes a bad film. Raavan, like TT, isn't bad in terms of technique, theme and intention; but it's absolutely bad in terms of clarity in expression and entertainment. Also, the film gets real bad in terms of meeting expectations (w.r.t. a genre named 'Mani Ratnam').

The two main aspects of the film are: Raavan falling in love with Sita and Rama banishing Sita for 'greater good' (climax). Former happens too early in the movie, when Aishwarya's character opposes Abhishek's attempt to kill her, by jumping off the cliff. The Behne De sequence is exquisitely shot, esp. the part where Aishwarya is represented like a tender leaf falling off a tree branch (or is the representation that of a tiny dew drop sliding down off a leaf?). And Abhishek's character has no character curve in the whole film thence. And that's the foremost reason for the film to look and sound boring: lack of change in the protagonist's character.

The latter aspect goes for a severe beating as the 'greater good' wasn't established; I think the writers wanted Rama's decision to be unreasonably cruel, but it fails to work. Instead it seems that they stuck to the inevitable fact of Raavan dying in the end. Bad dialogue (Vijay Krishna Acharya) and incompetent acting (Abhishek and Aishwarya) confuses the audience during the climax.

In the film school, the important aspect we were taught was: don't edit your film in the scripting stage. This film, I suspect, fails to obey that basic film school rule while writing. And to cover that up, the editing stages have damaged the elaborately and beautifully shot sequences in the film. The editing has gone for an over-kill. The slickness worked for Yuva, as the execution there was different. But in Raavan, the cuts seemed to break the beautiful flow of the greatly cinematographed sequences (Santosh Sivan).

It's a huge disappointment that such great effort shown in cinematography and action sequences (the pre-climax action scene is one of the best in Indian cinema) have been put down by the writing and direction departments, esp when these are headed by a master story-teller like Mani Ratnam.