Being left breathless after seeing Ram Gopal Verma's astonishing Giallo- style Thriller Kaun?,I decided to take a quick look at the directors IMDb and Wiki page.Comparing both of the pages,one of the first things that I noticed right away was that a Gangster film of his called "Satya" seemed to be held up as one of Verma's most praised movie on both sites.Reading some more intriguing info on various boards,led to me getting set to come face to face with one of Bollywood's most famous gangsters.
The plot:
Finding himself in Mumbai without a penny in his pocket,Satya quickly gets in trouble with some of Mumbai's iron-fist underground rulers.Getting confrontational with one person too many,Satya ends up being sent to jail.Desperate to make his time in the slammer pass by in anyway possible,Satya starts to become friends with a group of gangsters who have been arrested for assassinating a film director.Wanting Saya to prove his loyalty,the gangsters arrange for him to get an early release,so that he can kill the man who put them all behind bars.
Committing the murder,Satya is officially made a member of the gang,and given a small flat,Where he runs into a girl called Vidya (played by a charming Urmila Matondkar),who quickly starts to pull on his heart strings.
Quickly rising through the ranks of the under world,Satya becomes an in separable solider for his increasingly ruthless gang,as other rivals start to wage attacks on "their land",and the police begin to contemplate making the dreaded decision of "crossing the line" head on.
View on the film.
Using the brilliant on location filming to give Satya a rawness that would be almost impossible to reproduce in a studio,Verma takes his gangsters as far from any glamour as he possibly can,with the film being covered in the grit that all the characters are desperately trying to pull themselves out from.
For the scenes showing the power and violence of the gangsters,Verma uses elegantly handled,long tracking shots to show the friendship developing between Satya and the others in run down prisons and nightclubs.Impressivly moving away from elegance,Verma makes the violence something which is brilliantly brutal,fast and extremely aggressive.
As an interesting comparison to how the violence is shown,Verma makes most of the gruesome deaths that happen in buildings occur on around the corners of the screen, so that the viewer is left with a strong imprint for which to form their own ideas on how ruthless the killings actually were.
Going in the opposite direction,Verma makes the stunning outdoor killing scenes almost feel as if they are coming from a war zone!,thanks to having the camera scatter- shooting round and always feeling like it is at the front of the turf war battle lines.
Whilst Verma's terrific directing and the tremendous performances from the whole cast (with J.D. Chakravathy giving an excellent performance as the title character,who always seems to have something mysterious lurking behind his eyes) giving this great movie a strong feeling of urgency.
The screenplay by Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh Shukla disappointingly dilutes some of the films rawness,by focusing less on some of the most interesting aspects of the story, (such as the police force having to decay from within in order to tackle the gangs)to instead focus on the growling love that Satya has for Vidya,which whist well performed by both actors,just feels out of place in an otherwise terrifically raw and tough Gangster movie.
The plot:
Finding himself in Mumbai without a penny in his pocket,Satya quickly gets in trouble with some of Mumbai's iron-fist underground rulers.Getting confrontational with one person too many,Satya ends up being sent to jail.Desperate to make his time in the slammer pass by in anyway possible,Satya starts to become friends with a group of gangsters who have been arrested for assassinating a film director.Wanting Saya to prove his loyalty,the gangsters arrange for him to get an early release,so that he can kill the man who put them all behind bars.
Committing the murder,Satya is officially made a member of the gang,and given a small flat,Where he runs into a girl called Vidya (played by a charming Urmila Matondkar),who quickly starts to pull on his heart strings.
Quickly rising through the ranks of the under world,Satya becomes an in separable solider for his increasingly ruthless gang,as other rivals start to wage attacks on "their land",and the police begin to contemplate making the dreaded decision of "crossing the line" head on.
View on the film.
Using the brilliant on location filming to give Satya a rawness that would be almost impossible to reproduce in a studio,Verma takes his gangsters as far from any glamour as he possibly can,with the film being covered in the grit that all the characters are desperately trying to pull themselves out from.
For the scenes showing the power and violence of the gangsters,Verma uses elegantly handled,long tracking shots to show the friendship developing between Satya and the others in run down prisons and nightclubs.Impressivly moving away from elegance,Verma makes the violence something which is brilliantly brutal,fast and extremely aggressive.
As an interesting comparison to how the violence is shown,Verma makes most of the gruesome deaths that happen in buildings occur on around the corners of the screen, so that the viewer is left with a strong imprint for which to form their own ideas on how ruthless the killings actually were.
Going in the opposite direction,Verma makes the stunning outdoor killing scenes almost feel as if they are coming from a war zone!,thanks to having the camera scatter- shooting round and always feeling like it is at the front of the turf war battle lines.
Whilst Verma's terrific directing and the tremendous performances from the whole cast (with J.D. Chakravathy giving an excellent performance as the title character,who always seems to have something mysterious lurking behind his eyes) giving this great movie a strong feeling of urgency.
The screenplay by Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh Shukla disappointingly dilutes some of the films rawness,by focusing less on some of the most interesting aspects of the story, (such as the police force having to decay from within in order to tackle the gangs)to instead focus on the growling love that Satya has for Vidya,which whist well performed by both actors,just feels out of place in an otherwise terrifically raw and tough Gangster movie.