Animal: The new 'angry young man' is just a super-rich, entitled child

I can scarcely remember a movie as bad as Animal. It is a paean to deranged masculinity masquerading as filial love. Misogyny pours forth from its every orifice. It is an orgy of violence with maimed bodies, gore, and mindless shooting.

There is an absurdity to the whole plot, whereby a sociopath moves around killing and maiming people. Gunfights suddenly turn into axe slugfests and fighters become dhadis (bards) only to accommodate the song Arjan Vailly. Women are dominated by so-called 'alpha' males, and are shown in stereotypical roles lacking any agency.

If gore, misogyny and absurdity were not enough, the film has long passages of cringe-worthy, dull family scenes with pathetic acting and dialogues that could make one die of boredom. Inexplicably long at over three hours, the director seems to have forgotten to hire an editor, so that the final product looks like a curious amalgam of video game action and saas-bahu sagas.

Despite its banality, the political subtext of the movie is undeniable. In a tribute to the ideology of the current regime, there are liberal references to swastika, gau mutra, havans and atmanirbhar Bharat. Capitalists here are proud of their Hindu heritage, and preside over rigidly patriarchal families.

The allegory of a family comprising three brothers — one of whom moves to the city to build an industrial empire as a sanskari, practising Hindu, and who then exhorts the one left in the village stuck in the 'backward' agrarian past as a Sikh, to become his sidekick, assimilate in his culture and fight the bad, polygamist, deranged and converted 'Muslim' third brother who wants to capture 'Swastika Steel' — is too blatant to be missed.

Also, this new 'angry young man' of India is not the version we all grew up with. While the angst and ire of the characters usually played by Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s were that of an ordinary man fighting for justice against an uncaring society and state, the rage that Ranbir Kapoor’s character feels is more like a bid for hegemony by a super-rich and entitled kid, who will take no prisoners, and to whose actions the state will be a mute and subservient witness.

Welcome to the brand-new Bharat!

The writer is assistant professor of History at SGGS College, Chandigarh