Sriram Raghavan and the Original Art of Cinephilia

It’s been more than five years since a Sriram Raghavan movie hit the screens. But his presence has lingered over Hindi cinema, like a friendly neighbourhood ghost. Everywhere you look, there are bricks from his graffiti-strewn building. If something catches your eye for its retro ingenuity and inbuilt cinephilia, chances are it’s a Raghavan spirit animal. He’s around even when he isn’t: A Raj & DK show, a Vasan Bala film, a Vikramaditya Motwane production. Given that the director himself turned homage-making into a cunning genre, it’s fitting that some of the most promising voices today are new-age descendents of his legacy. That’s not to say he is the master, and others are his apprentices. His style leaves space for artists to reconnect with history and fashion a future at once. It’s such a deep-rooted influence that it’s impossible to imitate but easy to personalise. It’s probably why many of Raghavan’s own films rarely feel like adaptations; the source material is often hidden within form, manner and subtext. 

One of my enduring memories of Sriram Raghavan has nothing to do with his films. Or maybe it does. After the release of Andhadhun in 2018, “Sriram Spotting” became a trend at that year’s Mumbai film festival. He was regularly seen standing in queue, like anyone else, for multiple titles a day. No special passes, no drama, no fanfare (except the bemused glances of young festival delegates).  There was something wholesome about the sight of a moviegoer in geeky film t-shirts — days after directing the box-office hit of the season — enjoying some downtime in his natural habitat. The image goes hand in glove with the kind of movies he makes. 

On the eve of Merry Christmas, Sriram Raghavan’s sixth feature film, here’s a recap of his 20-year filmography, disguised as a bottom-to-top ranking:

5. Agent Vinod (2012)

The one that got away. Agent Vinod is the original Bombay Velvet (2015), if only in terms of how a maverick director gets temporarily co-opted by the very system he once subverted. Raghavan’s globe-trotting spy actioner is the Bollywood equivalent of a soulless Marvel movie commissioned to a breakout indie film-maker. It was produced and headlined by Saif Ali Khan who, for a hot minute, seemed to be playing the big-budget superstar game. Johnny Gaddaar rightfully attracted a lot of attention, but a bigger film is wrongly considered the next step. The troubled production legacy of Agent Vinod aside, Raghavan’s voice is visibly derailed by the burdens of star power, scale and narrative greed. 

Yet, despite the incoherent form, it’s not a bad movie. There are many glimpses of the clever entertainer it could’ve been: That one-take Raabta sequence, the catchy opening titles and soundtrack, an appropriately cool Saif, the spy-satire premise, the massive cast, the Seventies nods. Also, who can forget Indian film Twitter teasing The Dark Knight Rises (2012) for ‘stealing’ the bomb-in-helicopter climax of Agent Vinod? Messy-great minds think alike. Thankfully, this was the director’s only blip. It’s appropriate that his revenge-bod comeback would be called ‘Badlapur’. 

4. Ek Hasina Thi (2004)

A young woman is charmed and duped by her new boyfriend. After reaching rock-bottom in prison, she sets out to take warm-blooded revenge. On paper, Ek Hasina Thi sounds like an amalgamation of every jilted-lover tale ever told. There’s a bit of Double Jeopardy (1989), a lot of Sidney Sheldon, some Anjaam (1994) and a dash of the 1987 film Khoon Bhari Maang (without the crocodile).

But Sriram Raghavan’s feature film debut unfolds like an origin story of the Sriram Raghavan we know today. There are seeds of his future cinema-scape. The rat as a thematic metaphor. A mystery suitcase. A nosy neighbour. A suburban flat. Characters pretending to be innocent. Performances within performances. A jail drama. A male-dominated environment getting undone by a woman they don’t see coming. At its technical core, however, Ek Hasina Thi was very much a Ram Gopal Varma production. The Bhoot-styled tone and opening credits. The subversion of Urmila Matondkar’s psychopathic acts from Kaun (1999) and Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya (2001). The weaponisation of Saif Ali Khan’s debonair ways in his golden phase (setting the stage for Omkara). The abrupt cuts, strange camera angles, pulpy transitions and echoey background score. Raghavan was yet to fully realise his own vision – a vision shaped by the most fabled film-making school in Hindi cinema.

3. Badlapur (2015)

Badlapur is a better Raman Raghav 2.0 than Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). Which is fair, given that Sriram Raghavan was the first to make a docudrama about the Sixties' serial killer post his FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) days. The cat-and-mouse game between a drug-addicted cop, and a cold-blooded criminal, is reimagined as a snakes-and-ladders chase between a revenge-addicted civilian (named Raghav of course), and a deceptively ordinary criminal (wryly named Liaq, as in “capable”). The blurred lines between victim and villain of circumstances reveal Badlapur as a brutal postmortem of Indian ego and masculinity.

Raghav builds up a dark movie narrative in his mind to lend credibility and purpose to his elaborate killing spree. He represents the neat futility of fiction, insisting that the deaths of his wife and child were never random; that they were always worth avenging. But Liaq stays heartbreakingly real, like an accidental anti-hero on his own path to moral salvation. His prison sequences are morbidly funny; his desperate freedom is unsettling for how naive it actually is. By repurposing Varun Dhawan’s rawness (Badlapur was his fourth film), the director justifies Raghav’s idealistic descent into evil. It's like watching a boy throw a violent tantrum in a man's world. It pits an unwitting antagonist against himself, reduces him to a beast that has discovered a lust for blood, and elevates Badlapur into a stylish supervillain origin story that winks at its own tagline: “Don't miss the beginning”. The beginning of the end.

2. Andhadhun (2018)

Sriram Raghavan’s biggest hit triggered the kind of online and offline discourse that most directors only dream of. It became a cultural moment, a perfect distillation of his Pune-centric noir into a film that mobilised its craft into a language of entertainment.

As a thriller alone, Andhadhun is immense. The staging of suspense can be taught in school: There’s that scene, and that one, and that one. The twists and turns — an organ-trafficking racket in the second half is a Johnny-Gaddaar-ish swing for the fences — are anything but conventional. The story is a conveyor belt of one-liners: A veteran character-actor famous for dying in his movies is killed by his cheating wife; a pianist pretending to be blind witnesses a murder; an old woman is hurled off a balcony for being nosy; a child is slapped for being a telltale; a rabbit causes a fatal car accident. The harmony between sight and vision — a man acting blind and a pianist blinded by ambition — is integrated into the film-making.

Ayushmann Khurrana redefines his relationship with the camera, and Tabu is Tabu. But the bleak beauty of Andhadhun — the kind of thriller that Sujoy Ghosh always seems to be aiming for — lies in its dual identity as a toxic-artist story. The protagonist, Akash (Khurrana), is constantly punished for faking a narrative around his art: He acts blind so that, at some level, his talent acquires a higher frame of context. He is not improving his skills so much as improving them in the eyes of those who romanticise his underdog journey. (Akash is, in a way, milking the elitism of an ableist world). For him, it’s no different from acting poor and downtrodden; he knows that society will then see and reward him differently. It’s a small crime that keeps bumping into bigger ones. It’s a lie that keeps cheating the inequity of truth.

1. Johnny Gaddaar (2007)

Much like Khosla Ka Ghosla, Maqbool and Black Friday, Johnny Gaddaar became a blueprint for generations of future storytellers. Ironically, it marked Raghavan breaking out from Ram Gopal Varma’s shadow, while also emulating Varma’s ability to inspire an alt-Bollywood wave of talent. The result was a brand of pulp fiction that remains perhaps the purest marriage of cinephilia and originality in modern Hindi film. Neil Nitin Mukesh’s wicked acting debut, an unorthodox supporting cast and the cheeky staging aside, Johnny Gaddaar is one giant easter egg omelet. From Vijay Anand and James Hadley Chase to Parwaana, Scarface, Sin City and Stanley Kubrick, the anti-heist drama is defined by its clear-eyed affection for the moving picture. Each ‘murder’ is steeped in vintage tropes: A moving train, a gunshot to the sound of old music, a car pushed off a cliff, a bullet in the rain.

It’s not homage for the sake of homage, but a narrative built on the moral ambiguity of romantic heroism. The protagonist is not driven by Italian-Job-styled greed so much as love and individualism. In his head, he is rescuing his girlfriend from an abusive husband and stealing from robbers – which makes him an oddly honest villain. It’s no coincidence that he succumbs to karma, a narrative equivalent of divine intervention. That one feels sorry for the man’s lack of guile is a testament to Raghavan’s uncanny excavation of the link between pop culture and reality. The tragedy of life is unfolding both despite and because of the movies.

Special Mention:

The Eight Column Affair (1987)

A young Sriram Raghavan’s student diploma film manages to be a Godardian swipe at the surrealism of storytelling, as well as an anthropological portrait of India in the 1980s. The 29-minute black-and-white short (edited by fellow FTII alumnus Rajkumar Hirani) uses an innovative premise to convey the cultural relationship between a foreground and a backdrop.

A marathon runner (Shivkumar Subrahmanyam) on the front page of a newspaper falls for a tennis starlet (Rachel Reubin) on the back page. He must reach her — sprinting through various headlines and columns (a war, a bank robbery, a movie scene, the matrimonial section, product ads) — before the next day’s edition goes to print at midnight. He is a more literal Forrest Gump, inadvertently shaping the snapshot of a country in pursuit of a personal goal. The Eight Column Affair is a work of creative purism, with a nesting-doll-like ambition that’s reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s first short, Doodlebug (1997). Naturally, a film strip, a Bollywood star (Nana Patekar), a news editor and a printing press feature in the marathoner’s race against time. What’s impressive is that, apart from a single visual transition that shows the man popping through an actual headline, there is no repetition of the gimmick. All that’s left is reality becoming an obstacle course in a flight of fancy. After all, history is only at odds with the ink that records it.