Raja Sen feels Ram Gopal Varma disappoints with Not A Love Story. Post YOUR Reviews here!It can be argued that some directors shoot with a roving camera, representative of the male gaze. That theirs are the cameras that intrusively tackle the forbidden, lingering lecherously on legs and posteriors and cleavage where other conventional, 'shyer' cameras would look up at the girl's eyes. Ram Gopal Varma has long been a proponent of the voyeuristic lens, the one that sneakily, surreptitiously, shamelessly thrusts a sexual angle right in our faces, occasionally effective enough to nudge the viewer into guilt. This, in theory, may well be intentional, the filmmaker offering up a trick-mirror to the audience to shame them into submission.
Of late with this particular director, however, we've mostly just been rolling our eyes. And in his latest film, as a girl mopping the floor clean of blood has the camera trying to peek down her blouse, or later when it swivels inexplicably up her dress to briefly show us the colour of her undergarments -- this while she's torn and emotionally traumatised and trying to cope -- it's hard not to label the exercise as pornography. This is Varma at his most sexploitative, milking a already-sensationalized real-life murder and labeling it a crime of carnal passion.
Varma tries excruciatingly hard to keep this film constantly scalding. The never-stationary camera flits from face to face, angle to angle like a particularly jumpy fly on the wall, and while there are indeed moments this works -- near the end of a film where a lawyer outlines a plan and the camera swims around like the heroine's head would, or when the murderer takes the murderess by the chin to avoid showing her the bloody carnage on the suburban floor below -- but more often then not, it's plain unnecessary. Meanwhile, Sandeep Chowta's idiosyncratic background score screeches at us, presumably to discourage nodding off.
Why, you may ask, would sleep be a risk in the first place? It is a film about a true murder case, and has two very good actors in the lead. Aren't the facts themselves exciting? Not quite. Tragically enough, while there might be enough meat in this version of the story for a great India's Most Wanted recreational exposé, it doesn't have feature-length potential, not the way RGV shows it.
This isn't Blood Simple, where we dwell on the act of murder itself, and the violence inherent in all of us, or the messiness of the crime. This isn't a film where the director draws up different versions of the crime and steps back and lets us pick a side. This isn't a film that justifies, condemns or leaves room for debate, for ambiguity. Not A Love Story is a sadly simplistic project, one showing a version of the crime -- Varma's film would have us believe the court recently got it right --
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