Rang de Basanti review 'More Than a Movie'

Rating: 10/10 (5 April 2016)

A curious aspect of Bollywood cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century was its obsession with the past. Shrewd at tweaking the clichés of social chaos, Rang De Basanti is ultimately an academic exercise, full of stand-ins and signifies a kind of Velvet Goldmine for the destructive impact of the Indian Political corruption and chaos, minus the sense of decadent fun. There is an undeniable appeal to a movie that's made to be picked apart and analyzed as much as this one is, where the props seem to be cross-referencing each other, every incident and character has a mirror image, and even the protagonist is played by two people. One just wishes it weren't doing all the work for the viewer.
But RDB does more than just correct the historical narrative. The argument that the nation's history cannot be thought apart from aurality entails a re-conceptualization of history itself. Rather than treating the past as a set of facts to be "discovered" and plotted onto a linear timeline, RDB urges us to think of it as a body of disparate, ephemeral fragments that can be narrativized in different ways. History is a narrative composed of (some of) those fragments, interpreted and remixed such that it speaks to the exigencies of the present. The re-configuring of traditional boundaries of time- space in the RDB soundtrack liberates us not only from the oppression of the (colonial and contemporary) state but also, and more importantly, from its narrative about history. Cinematic sound and music in RDB are the primary means of moving from colonialism's gift of "World-history" back to an older, more enchanted relationship between past and present