Satya: How Ram Gopal Varma’s genre-defining classic stood the test of time

Even though both movies were released roughly 20 years apart, the spirit of the New Hollywood movement that fuelled Francis Ford Coppola to make The Godfather seemed to have also possessed the gaggle of scrappy young men who came together to create Satya. Among them were writer Anurag Kashyap, composer Vishal Bhardwaj, editor Apurva Asrani and actor Manoj Bajpayee. RGV has often insisted that there is no logical explanation for how Satya turned out the way that it did, but here, he is being modest. He chose well. The key ingredient to the film’s success was obvious. Each of these men was hungry to prove themselves, and desperate to be taken seriously by an industry far too obsessed with the superficial. Hunger, desperation, and an unbridled urge to create. It was a deadly combination.

Satya was a film made by equals. These guys didn’t have reputations to protect or egos to soothe. They didn’t have homes to mortgage or family jewels to pawn. They existed, like the characters in the film, on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy of power. Much like The Godfather, a movie about one man’s loss of innocence despite his family’s best efforts to help him hold on to it, in Satya, crime was almost incidental to a story, which instead dealt with themes of ambition and brotherhood, arrogance and bloodshed.

After arriving in Mumbai, the angsty Satya quickly finds himself behind bars after attacking a local mob boss. In jail, he meets, impresses, and befriends the notorious Bhiku Mhatre, played in a star-making turn by Manoj Bajpayee. Satya immediately becomes Bhiku’s ‘right hand’, as the movie proceeds to explore both the mundanity and the morbidity of a gangster’s day to day life. While there are plenty of shakedowns and shootouts — all handsomely filmed and edited, particularly the one intercut with a child’s shrieks — Satya’s best scenes are the ones in which these morally questionable characters are just… existing.

Film star Urmila Matondkar and JD Chakravarty in film SATYA. Express archive photo

The movie dared to suggest that the sort of people who’d normally be reduced to camp caricatures in Hindi cinema might actually lead rich lives of their own. When Bhiku storms into a construction magnate’s offices with his ‘chamchas’ in tow, he is talking to his young daughter on the phone, assuring her that he’ll be home on time in the evening. He listens patiently to her recitation when she pays him a visit along with her brother and mother in jail. But the film’s best scene is the one in which Bhiku and his wife, played by Shefali Shah, go on a double date with Satya and his girlfriend Vidya, played by a luminous Urmila Matondkar.

Bhiku brags about taking his wife to see a film about a giant ‘chipkali’ which turns out to be Jurassic Park, while she tries to impress Vidya by pretending to have watched The Bold and the Beautiful. When Bhiku playfully calls her out, she sulks. Vidya, who seems to be very amused by the genuine affection that they clearly have for each other, can’t help but giggle. “You love each other so much,” she says in English, as her hand grazes Satya’s shoulder. Despite Chakravarthy’s famously wooden performance, the spark is unmistakable. When Satya wants to buy a gift for Vidya some time later, he turns to Bhiku for advice. This is a sweet moment in itself, but the movie takes it a step further by including a scene in which they actually go jewellery shopping together. Nobody had seen anything like this before.

A lesser film would’ve established Bhiku and Satya’s bond by having one of them wax poetic about it at some point, or worse, force them to break into song. But in Satya, RGV conveyed this through an effortlessly effective scene in which Bhiku scolds Satya for having gone to Khandala with Vidya without telling anybody. He could’ve been killed; people were after them, and Satya should know better. Bajpayee’s performance perfectly captures the sense of relief and anger that Bhiku is going through. It’s very similar to an early scene in which Bhiku’s wife yells at him for being missing all day, galivanting across town while she was worried sick at home. These are the moments that make Satya. And this is what contemporary filmmakers working in the crime genre — easily the most popular kind of cinema being made these days — need to understand. Dense plots and grating exposition are meaningless. It’s the characters that matter.