Sukumar’s Pushpa: The Rise (2021)
‘Rage and vengeance’ movies with violence and sensationalism decided by algorithms are a trend both in Bollywood and Tollywood, one we have become rather too accustomed to: monstrous violence slipping from the symbolic to the literal; the violence and sensationalism getting more and more formulaic and banal, further enhancing the movie’s box-office earnings. But, as blockbusters go, Pushpa: The Rise directed by Sukumar, released on 17 December 2021 in Telugu, (also dubbed in Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, and Hindi) is different. On the face of it, it is an action-drama of the rage and revenge kind in which the cast out “bastard” son seizes power, but fundamentally it is a love story.
Pushpa: The Rise tells a story of love in conflict, of the kind that Telugu cinema does with originality, and operatic intensity.
Pushpa: The Rise fuses two different strands together- a story of reckoning and a love-story. The revenge thriller is contained in a forbidden love-story that is shown to us rather than just told as a background-story of Pushpa. Allu Arjun, Tollywood’s handsome and talented superstar, known for his magnetism and dancing talent, is in disguise in this film, wearing a limp and a hunched shoulder, both as fighter and lover. Allu Arjun’s look in Pushpa is not just about darker-flesh make-up or about an authentic “rustic” and “rugged” look, as the reviews have called it. It is rather the portrait of an injury. In Pushpa, we are given a hero with a self-inflicted wound, a pain that both tortures and animates him.
Through the hero’s deformity, the movie succeeds in reveals vulnerability or woundedness, an intoxication with woundedness.
The violence in Pushpa is more about the inescapability of violence when all that matters is money and power and the criminality needed to maximize both. Allu Arjun does not play the prototype of the angry, aggressive-depressive young man devoted to revenge. The film is structured in a way that the audience does not have to plod through the hero’s angry period, sad period, reckoning period, and happy period.
The movie asks, what counts as love in these times?
Maybe, the language of cinema is profoundly regional, despite the craze for dubbing movies. Telugu cinema is a cinema of hyperbole, of deep emotionality rather than easy sentimentality. When Telugu-speaking film-viewers watch the movie, the cinematic metaphor of exaggeration (no matter how outlandish) is agreed upon, but it is lost in translation.
A whole dimension of the film goes missing in translation, as it did with Kabir Singh. First, there was no real acknowledgement in the reviews that the Hindi version, Kabir Singh, was based on the Telugu film, Arjun Reddy, and directed by the same director, Sandeep Reddy Vanga.
Kabir Singh became something else altogether in the urban world, dominated by the ideological currency of “toxic-masculinity,” “hyper-masculinity,” “abjection,” “misogyny” etc. The engagement with the film’s sexual politics was based on disingenuous arguments that rested on a simplistic opposition between the aggressive Kabir Singh and the “demure” Preethi Sikha, despite the evidence of a love too deep to be denied. “Demure girl” within the regional Telugu context does not mean lacking in boldness (and I can speak to this as someone who has lived in cities in Andhra Pradesh for years). For film viewers watching the film in Telugu, demure would have no recognizable correlation with, as the reviews put it, “mouse-like” passivity, non-choosing, or lacking agency or absence of equality within the intimacy.
Sukumar’s Pushpa, while an action-drama, is also a film about love.
Pushpa is successful not just because of its over-financing, or its five hit songs, or its special and unexplored location-shooting (the movie is shot in the remotest parts of the Kalahasti forest of Seshachalam hills in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, known for red sandalwood) but because it does not insult the intelligence of the mass audience.
Allu Arjun’s limp and shoulder hunch have become a new dance move among young men and women. Pushpa, for all its melodrama, gestures to something that cannot be said, the unspoken angst of the soul.
Allu Arjun as Pushpa is always human, not a type, and that is why the audience could feel a sense of connection. Allu Arjun is magnificent in the way in which he moves between his different roles: that of the coolie (who owns nothing in the world, but has the guts to walk away from a job rather than be a servile servant), or the tormented “illegitimate” son protecting his disgraced mother from insults from his half-brother, or that of a lover who has to woo the woman who, at first curtly dismisses him, or that of a loyal friend, or that of an avenger who starts slow but decides finally to put an end to the villainy of the sandalwood smugglers.
Pushpa: The Rise is a story about societal violence against love. The first love-story we see is that of Pushpa’s mother for Molleti Venkatraman, a married Brahmin man, a love which runs into difficulties right away, and into even greater difficulties when Venkataraman dies. His eldest son throws out “his father’s concubine” and her 5-year-old son-Pushpa and threatens dire consequences if Pushpa ever tries to use the family name. The denial of and the violence against love turns into a wound that Pushpa wears on his body as an Oedipal limp. But Pushpa’s half-brother is not the only antagonist in the film.
So, Pushpa is not just a film about the powerlessness, anger and, suffering of a “bastard” hero. Pushpa (fire, not to be confused with flower) is the illegitimate son of a Brahmin who has been robbed of his name and legitimacy by his half-brother who pours contempt on him, and more generally by the dynamics of power and money in a small-town. Pushpa moves up from being a tree-logger and a coolie (who transports sandalwood for smugglers) to becoming the head of the smuggling syndicate. But even as a ‘coolie’, Pushpa refuses servility but also violence; he is always to prepared to negotiate with good-will, nor does he have a caustic attitude towards women, nor is he desperate or vengeful.
This self-made hero carrying a wound inflicted by those who hold destructive power spoke to millions of fans across India. This is because, Pushpa: The Rise (2021) dares to tell an archetypal story without simplifying or distorting the complexity. Archetypal stories raise real questions: “What happens to society when forces of corruption, greed, cruelty, and violence become unnaturally ruthless? Can power be seized by a cast-out “bastard”? Can those who hold power be made to suffer correction? What is the cost of revenge? And, what happens to love? Mainly, what counts as love?
The song-sequences also comment on the larger story, and Pushpa’s wound is present rather than escaped away in the songs. Pushpa’s dragging walk accounts for the extraordinary appeal of the Srivalli song sung by Sid Sriram “Choope Bangaram Aayane Srivalli.” The lyrics express all the joyful themes of love, but the hero is seen limping sideways clumsily, and the reality of the context keeps breaking into the song. The effect is eerie. It is as if Shakespeare’s cripple Richard III has walked into a romantic song-sequence. Pushpa’s limping, dragging walk is now trending as new dance-move!
Rashmika Mandanna plays Srivalli with a self-assured, small-town folksiness, and has a role beyond being Pushpa’s love interest as a woman who is strong, and a survivor. At one point in the film, she is put in an impossible position where her only options are either to allow her father to be killed because he was forced to become a police-informer or “consent” to be raped by Jalli Reddy. Srivalli is neither helpless nor does she go in for the tearful self-sacrifice. She considers her options carefully, and we see her thinking, while she is dressing up. Next, we see her on her moped, but she arrives at Pushpa’s place who is feeling the aftershock of yet another humiliation by his half-brother. Srivalli convinces Pushpa that she loves him, makes her love for him manifest, and asks if it is possible that he can reciprocate her love before she must go to Jalli Reddy. As we can expect, the village-rapist is soon ambushed by Pushpa and Srivalli, and has every bone in his body broken, and Jalli Reddy becomes another antagonist that Pushpa will need to deal with. The violence of rape and sexism is a reality powerfully evoked in this movie, but not through showing victimization in the most exaggerated and exploitative way.
Love -story is the glory of Indian cinema. We may not be good at laughing at ourselves but telling a true-hearted love-story without intruding too heavily on its mystery, Indian block-buster movies do spectacularly well. Western movies are good at telling the story of falling out of love, or of the difficulties of loving, and about loss of love, without sentimentalizing it. But we have cornered the market on the operatic falling-in-love story, on presenting both rapturous joy and pained love, and showing love as a force that has the power to bring the dead alive!
Love in block-buster movie-when done well- whether it is Kudrat or Chemmeen or Manasa Antha Nuvve or Jab Tak Hain Jaan or Majili is like a revelation — the scene of a miracle. Typically, when Indian cinema does a love-story, the passion of love is happily imagined- there is no guilt, no ambivalence, no shame, no regret, no layer of irony. But in this film, the love-story too is made uncomfortable in keeping with our times — Pushpa must pay for Srivalli’s smile, for the first kiss, which he does not get. Something is being communicated about a sense of unsureness, foreboding, distrust, and depression that characterizes our age.
In the second half of the movie, Pushpa has hardened into Pushparaj. Pushpa’s suffering in the second half of the film is metamorphosed into an intoxication of woundedness. When his half-brother’s insult scuttles his marriage to Srivalli, Pushpa’s suffering and defiance harden and he turns violently energetic, now the hero of a different movie.
After the intermission, the film changes its personality into a vengeance film, complete with superfluous violence and horror and axe-murderers, and the horror of this matches the catastrophe about to befall our leading hero in the final scene of the film. When Pushpa shows up, hours late, at his own wedding, we see that he is stumbling, like a drunk. His right hand is bloody and bandaged. When his bride asks him, if his fight is finished, Pushpa responds: “No, it has just begun!” That is why “ThaggedeLe”-I will not back down- is the motto of this film.
The battlefield is being prepared for the sequel titled Pushpa: The Ruler. It is too early to say if, in movie in its sequel form — Pushpa: The Rule- will become a formulaic “rage and vengeance” blockbuster.
