Rakht Charitra, Part II, 2010

Want to get your blood-pressure up even more? Watch the second part of this two-part movie, and you can be assured of that. This movie begins with the longest summary of the first part, but when it gets going, it really gets going. Long story short: the good guy becomes the bad guy; the bad guy’s son appears to become the good guy; and these roles continue to alternate throughout this long saga of the two families’ political vendettas.

What is right and what is not is all very relative when revenge is the only motivation to act and to react. Thanks to the shocking and very graphic violence from the first movie, over the course of the next two hours, blood pressure notwithstanding, one does tend to become somewhat desenitized to the gruesome manner in which people are slaughtered left, right and center.

The cycle of revenge is a vicious one, but it doesn’t have to be an eternal one. This is the implication that one may draw if one wishes from the very last scene– which is the young mother tending to her baby boy who will grow up to be fatherless. Unless, of course, the spirit of the Mahabharat is so pervasive as to drive him to seek vengeance yet again. The Mahabharat is invoked on the billboards of this movie with the legend “Revenge is the purest emotion”, and I wonder how great an influence this is on the minds of the viewers, especially in India, who might very well view this statement to be a justification for perpetrating this gross falsehood. A falsehood, because in my humble opinion, there are emotions even more purer and undiluted than this emotion called revenge which is nothing more than a base, visceral instinct. One emotion that I’ll just throw out there is something called love from which stems a concept called forgiveness. Try it on for size sometime, is what I’d like to tell those two warring families!

And yet, from the artistic point of view, this is certainly a movie for the files. With a brilliant screenplay and cinematography, as well as exemplary performances by virtually every actor, it is not so much the story but the imagery of these two movies that will stay with you for a long time.