Swatantra Veer Savarkar Review: Randeep Hooda the Director outshines the Actor in Strangely Fascinating Yarn

Randeep Hooda in and as Swatantra Veer Savarkar.

Somewhere during the first half of Swatantra Veer Savarkar, the ideologue meets the future father of the nation in the kitchen of a London house. Savarkar is marinating his favourite prawns when Gandhi arrives, hands-folded, seeking to introduce a certain vegetarian softness to his methods. It’s an intriguing, tense scene, a meeting point of not just two popular ideologues, but diverse ways of thinking that continue to divide the country 75 years after independence. To the film’s credit the scene is tailored well, as an intimate stand-off between two men who though they are working towards the same goal, don’t agree on the path that leads there. The devices - meat as a sign of wilful violence – are interestingly positioned, the camera teetering on intrusion as a casual chat transcends into a rift between ideologies. Much likes the rest of the film it’s fascinating, if not utterly convincing.

Randeep Hooda plays Savarkar in a film that he has also directed and partly produced. Hooda’s methods and dedication to his work have been well-documented and here he gives his all in a performance that’s equal parts eccentric and equal parts focussed. A stiff curled lip, a drained face and a near emaciated body are all ingredients in a role that certainly can’t be faulted for commitment. We begin the story in Savarkar’s youth, a young Marathi boy on his way to London to study law. Radicalised from a young age, though, he intends to use the Empire’s law against the Crown’s brutal dominion over his motherland. From London, Savarkar inspires many young rebels, fighters and martyrs. His vision of militarism, of armed conflict as the only way past the sheen of British bureaucracy is in direct contrast to Gandhi’s (Rajesh Khera) approach of non-violence. The latter is often portrayed as a co-opted beneficiary, so the former can mounted as the visionary the country didn’t know it had.

What works for this film, which can and possibly will be debated for historical inaccuracies, is the performance, the hypnotic cinematography and the kind of craft that turns platitudinous surveys of history into intriguing poetic interludes. We get extreme close-ups, sequences transpiring in utter darkness, ear-shots of dialogue and Savarkar’s inner monologue making up for the void of scenery. The film traces his life in London, with the infamous chapter in Andaman’s Cellular Jail arriving in the second half. By that time, this three-hour marathon has earned Savarkar the tag of a steely, underappreciated and possibly discredited visionary. His mercy petitions are serviced as last resorts, in an argument that continues to divide people till date. The politics of that slippery wicket which could swing either way notwithstanding, this is still a fascinating piece of cinema that urges to look if not agree.

Directed by Hooda himself, the directorial decisions almost rival the clenched-fist nature of actor’s craft here. The decoloured palette, the near invisible dead spaces, the claustrophobic setting of most of the period paraphernalia are guerrilla filmmaking of the highest order. The intimacy of the camera, the close-ups offer stirring reminders of the ordeal that independence was. Unfortunately, though, the film’s gaze is both boosted and somewhat circumcised by its Savarkar-over-all ambitions. Bhagat Singh, Khudiram Bose et al are painted as martyrs spurred by the ideologue’s unbendable conscience and his willingness to let blood in exchange for blood. What that narrative airbrushing does is erect Savarkar as a messiah before he can be parsed through the inhumanity of a brutalising experience. Unwittingly, the film, so effectively troubling and visceral through the most provocative leg of its runtime, undermines its own emotional source. You can sense the physical trauma but you can also smell the hot air of tailoring that has preceded it.

Hooda must be credited with putting in another performance that is as surreal to witness as it is beguiling to dissect. More than his extreme physical presence in the frames of this dimly lit but closely observed film, is his directorial overview of a man’s life being less about the geography of events and more about the geometry of his belief system. It’s why Hooda’s physical transformation, his awkward delivery, his painfully lean body are all characters in a film that is hard to look away from. The politics aside, it’s at least not dull, or instantly forgettable like most films cut from similar fabric. For all his absurd, opaque and overzealous views about acting, it’s actor’s direction that emerges as the latest red herring in a career that feels so accomplished yet under-celebrated. If nothing else, Swatantra Veer Savarkar offers evidence that Hooda can act and he can damn well direct.