SANDEEP REDDY VANGA SHOWS YOU WHAT TRUE VIOLENCE MEANS

(but not intentionally)

By Ahona

I mean, the intentional violence is there. The guns. The bigger guns. The biggest guns. Blood. Constant, relentless blood. But all of this was promised, right? This is a director who has consistently presented a certain version of masculinity, who swore to show more violence in his upcoming film, who sees women as tangential to the hero's journey. I do not expect his worldview to align with my politics, which is possibly why the physical violence did not really affect me as much (if anything, I was a little disappointed that there's not much addition to the corridor fight sequence inspired from Oldboy.)Animal begins with a wounded child who never gets to grow up, at least not emotionally. Neither his father nor the film allows him to become the person he could have become. His father leaves a void in his life and he tries to fill it up with blood, flesh and cigarette smoke. He wounds himself constantly so that he can call his father back into his life, and justify his need for fatherly love. But this is a wounded child who had learned how to be a man through the absence of his father. And the problem with absent fathers is that their damned absence never leaves you, even when they have.And in the flashes where the film admits to that, you see its true potential. In the loaded exchanges between father and son (especially the one that the trailer began with), you see both the actors thrive in the passion of the moment. "I did not know how to raise a son," Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor) breathes out in a regretful acceptance of his mistakes. But you know it is already too late. His son has become a Russian doll of trauma. You know those dolls which enclose a smaller, identical doll within themselves? That's what Rannvijay Singh Balbir (Ranbir Kapoor) is rage wombed in rage, with only a punishing hollowness in between.That, precisely that, is the true violence of the film. There's a deeply wounded person, a boy who was unloved grows into a man who is unlovable - and no one, within the film or in the audience is allowed to feel sorry for him. His violence does not let you do that. He commands, chokes, slashes and shoots men. He neglects, controls, violates and excludes women. And after all that is done, because the film is so heavily reliant on a strict gender binary, there is no one left to tend to him. All his life is measured in absences. You would expect a character like this to be embedded in a deeper story about selfhood.But he barely has the time to pause and understand himself. The film does not give him that time. I walked into the theatre prepared to see a film about a man who is cruel to the world. I saw a story where the film is more cruel to the man than he himself could be. I wonder if Vijay doesn't stop with the onslaught of violence because if he did, he would see his own tragedy. In cinema, a general rule of thumb is that characters are not allowed to know their own genres. This is why the family in a horror film buys the cursed house where many people have died. They do not know they are in a horror film. They do not know the ghosts are real. Vijay does not know he is a tragic hero either. His fate is worse than Devdas's. At least, someone felt sorry for Devdas. And I repeat, I am not asking you to feel sorry for the character's tragedy. I am saying that the fact that you cannot feel sorry for him is what makes him a worse kind of tragedy. Does that make this a good film or a bad film? That would depend on the kind of metric you are judging it by. Based on the arc of the story, I personally thought it has a rather haphazard narrative. Based on the way that it places music, some sequences really hit it right for me, others were rather unimpressive. Based on the way that the film tortures the character, it should be difficult to imagine him as a great example of masculinity for society. In fact, I thought the film loses its seriousness when it tries to focus on his masculinity. I haven't seen a film as obsessed with the male body as much as this one.

The objectification of the male body in this film is through the roof. Villains take off their shirts with an aggressive seductiveness. There is so much talk about the anti-hero's reproductive organs that it seems like the film is trying to reassure itself about his masculinity. And as was expected, men are intensely caught between their disregard for women's opinions and their hunger for the female body. That part about men's abject disregard for women's opinion gets cruelly funny when you think that the film is literally hinged on that fact. Animal, as a story, would not have happened if Vijay's father just listened to Vijay's mother. Like you see in the trailer, the poor woman keeps pointing out just the right thing - "you have to give your child more time" she says to him. He doesn't listen. She is reduced to a silenced spectator of his ignorance and her son's disproportionate violence. Vijay's wife, decidedly more violent and less forgiving than his mother, never really gets to be a person beyond his relationship to her. Perhaps this film falters the most in its idea of personhood. It thinks that the violence lies in bloodshed, in torture, in suffering. It does not pause to reflect on the great gentleness with which Vijay cradles his son. It does not dwell on the fact that he only experiences genuine joy when his son rushes towards him. The violence lies in the story of a man who could have been a better father to his son, but rarely gets the chance. The violence lies in a man who is so haunted by an absent father that he does not notice when he becomes an absent father himself. I wish this film had the emotional capacity to explore this true violence more. After all, the violence of a bullet can be tended to. It is the violence of a father that Vijay never recovers from.