Review: Department is another failed RGV experiment

Ram Gopal Varma's Department takes his increasingly schizoid cinematographic tendencies into a whole other league, and gives us, besides watery eyes and potential nausea, the filmmaker at his most insipid, writes Raja Sen.

If Ram Gopal Varma were to film me writing this review, I assume he'd start with a tight close-up. First of my eyes watering from his new film's assault, then a series of jump-cuts showing me massaging temples, yawning, cringing in my seat, then -- abruptly -- a slow-motion walk to my writing desk.

Next come the feet, close enough for the viewer to nearly feel my big toe, feet that tap furiously as I compose my opening paragraph, and -- after a series of intercuts between tapping feet and furrowing brow, set to a blaring background score -- there'd be a slow pan from toe to knee to torso to hands, on keyboard. Then shots of fingers hammering out words (these very words! How meta!) and then, because all I'm going to now do is write, alas, the camera will overcompensatingly vault around me in great big showy swooshes, up and down and upside down, simply because, well, it can.

However, as the above paragraph makes abundantly (and, hopefully, to aid my point, migraine-invitingly) clear, there's no point going loony with a camera -- or, indeed, several -- merely because the technology allows for it. Varma's latest, Department, takes the director's increasingly schizoid cinematographic tendencies into a whole other league, and gives us, besides watery eyes and potential nausea, the filmmaker at his most insipid. With barely a storyline, the new film is but a random assemblage of fight scenes, which would, in itself, work if crafted well. Alas, Varma's insistence to shoot every scene with a half-dozen cameras slows everything down and constantly distracts the viewer with repellent angles and needless tracking shots.

An experiment this may well be, but it is a pointless one. Uninspired scenes are slowed down and fed to us through staggered shots in wildly varying resolution -- one shot showing you every hair on a flabby chest in hideous detail and the next looking like it were shot with a cellphone -- and while it must be liberating for Varma to not worry about storyboards (or even stories), this cannot possibly be taken seriously.

A good-cop old-cop film, Department features Rana Dagubatti as a renegade police officer who enjoys shooting unarmed people. One day, a minister -- standing next to an ill-cast Sharad Pawar clone in incredibly ill-cut trousers --