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'Chhaava' Movie Review: A Roaring Tribute to Bad Film-making
Starring Vicky Kaushal as a 17th-century Maratha king, 'Chhaava' has the personality of a deer in headlights
Director: Laxman Utekar
Writers: Laxman Utekar, Rishi Virmani, Kaustubh Savarkar, Unman Bankar, Omkar Mahajan
Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Akshaye Khanna, Vineet Kumar Singh, Rashmika Mandanna, Diana Penty, Divya Dutta, Ashutosh Rana, Santosh Juvekar
Language: Hindi
At its worst, the Tour de France turned moral decay into a non-factor. Doping among Lance Armstrong-era cyclists was so normalised that, perversely, the sport became a level-playing field. The logic being: if everybody cheats, is it even cheating anymore? It’s simply about who cheats — or performs — the best. The Bollywood period biopic is in a similar position today. It goes without saying that history and mythology are used as pawns to checkmate old-school notions of secularism. It goes without saying that the game being played is more modern.
‘Hidden’ themes like Islamophobia, bigotry, propaganda, erasure and jingoism are so normal that we barely notice them anymore. It’s the default pitch; that’s why “keeping the politics aside” is a common phrase. The irony is that, unlike the cyclists, such movies are so fundamentally broken that nobody wins. Cultural doping makes it a level-playing field of mediocrity and delusion. It’s like watching them race not to the finish line but straight off the top of a mountain. And not just any mountain, Mount Everest itself. Why stop there?
If it isn’t clear yet, Chhaava being one such biopic is more likely than starting the review of a 17th-century Hindi film with a Tour de France analogy. Let’s already assume that a film based on the life of Sambhaji Maharaj — the second king of the Maratha empire and the oldest son of its founder, Chhatrapati Shivaji — is a surrogate for another Hindus-are-pure-Muslims-are-evil tale. Let’s already assume that the shimmering valour of the Marathas and the deafening evil of the Mughals have religious connotations.
Let’s already assume that biopics and war movies are our new textbooks. Let’s just assume that the communal context is a given. Now that the stories we tell ourselves are out of the way, what’s left then? The actual storytelling, of course.
The problem with Chhaava is that, like its contemporaries, the film-making is driven not by curiosity but by crippling fear — fear of offending people, parties, places, communities, names, surnames, animals, insects, the air we breathe. And fear begets reverence.
The reverence here is paralysing. There is no room for creativity, imagination, interpretation, staging or real emotions. Even a fluid star like Vicky Kaushal is reduced to one (very loud) note. In the world of Chhaava, rage means wild screaming; bravery means wild screaming; killing means wild screaming; dying means wild screaming.
Every character sounds like they’re either reading off a teleprompter or narrating bullet-points and royal attributes to each other. Every Maratha hero becomes a human essay: love family, love country, love poetry. Every kohl-eyed Mughal becomes a human parody: betray family, no country, envy Marathas for having family and country.
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Akshaye Khanna, as Aurangzeb, is so committed to villainising the emperor that he ends up villainising his own performance. Diana Penty, as Aurangzeb’s daughter Zinat-un-Nissa Begum, spends the first half delivering inert reaction shots and the second half delivering inert orders of torture. Even a VFX lion with the misfortune of fighting Sambhaji overacts a little. For a film titled Chhaava (“lion’s cub”), the heroism of defeating a lion and shattering its jaw may not be the smartest metaphor.
The blood and gore in the battles are so extra that it often looks like a Holi celebration with swords. A noble king is tormented by his identity as an orphan; his devoted wife promptly wishes that he comes out of her womb in his next life so that he gets all the maternal love he deserves. Between this weird proclamation and Varun Dhawan’s Baby John telling his wife that she’s like his second mother, the rebirth of Hindi cinema’s oedipal complex is complete.
A.R. Rahman’s score is its own defector. The piano and electric guitar feature heavily in 17th-century settings, and a song called “Jaane Tu” — which shows Maharani Yesubai (Rashmika Mandanna) worshipping the return of her warrior king — sounds straight out of a 2010s romcom. In fact it’s so modern that you almost expect Aurangzeb’s Mughal aides to follow their chants of "jahanpanah" with "tussi great ho".
If the idea is to imitate the irreverence of a Tarantino soundtrack, the idea fails. If the idea is to convey that the music betrays the visuals like the Mughals betray everyone, the idea fails. If the idea is to formalise new-age rhetoric like "swaraj," "naya josh" and "mathrubhumi," the idea almost succeeds.
But it still fails.
A lot of dialogue seems to have been added in post-production — over unrelated images and dreams— to do what the filming couldn’t. Some shots are clearly missing, too, like when the screen abruptly cuts to black as Akbar kills an assailant. The slash of a sword has never sounded hollower.
Every sequence repeats the same act in four different ways so that nothing is lost in translation (or perception). For instance, when Sambhaji Maharaj and his loyal subjects plan an attack behind closed doors, each of them declares that they will win and the Mughals will lose in increasingly flowery language. One of them probably stops short of saying he will use the moon as a cannonball.
A montage of the Mughals being brutal unfolds in bold and all caps: a poor shepherd girl is seen burning to death, hundreds of bodies redden a river, dozens of corpses are seen hanging from trees, women are molested and raped in villages. A montage of the Marathas launching attacks on the unsuspecting Mughals goes on forever.
First they swing down from the trees like the Vanara Sena (Monkey Army); then disguised as giant locusts (plants, actually) in a sugarcane field; then disguised as women in a forest to lure horny enemies; then shooting up from the earth; and finally, shooting up from the water. No environment is spared. Each of these set pieces unfold like incomplete music videos shot in separate centuries.
The long climax amps up the four-different-ways formula. The only spoiler here is that it’s endless. Fashioned after The Passion of the Christ (2004), the torture sequence gets off on torturing the viewer. It’s not enough that fingernails are pulled out — no, the Mughals need to be impressed by his resilience. So salt is smeared on every wound. Eyes are gouged out with hot iron rods. But he can still deliver an incendiary one-liner. There goes his tongue.
At some point, with my own eyes shut, I started to affectionately remember Sanjay Leela Bhansali historicals. I’m not a fan, but at least the opulence of the love stories humanises the kings and queens of his universe. They are allowed to be vulnerable and fallible, if not beatable. I even missed the campiness of Taj: Divided by Blood (2023), a show designed around the war of succession in the Mughal dynasty.
Chhaava is neither romanticised nor pulpy. It’s just scared. So scared that only gods and demons can afford to exist. So scared that it’s blinded by its own reflection.
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It’s worth noting that a viewer in front of me was clicking pictures of the screen and live-Insta-storying Chhaava. She was not impressed. Neither was I, with her etiquette, but that’s a (non-Instagrammable) story for another day. It’s so normal these days that I barely get offended. “At least the climax is good” was her last story, except she was too busy posting it to watch the climax. I was too busy observing her to watch the climax too, but that’s a (Instagrammable) story for another day.
Perhaps what they say is true: moviegoers can only be as cultivated as the movies they see. After all, if everybody — including the audience — cheats, is it even cheating anymore? It’s simply about who pretends to perform the best.