The strategy is to kill one of them so that it sends a strong signal. They have to pick one! Now!! They look at each of the victims. Which one would be perfect? The camera pans on the victims and they are shit scared. The camera pans on the faces of the gang members and they look cold; they are contemplating….which one would be perfect? Their face looks like a predator carefully looking at a herd of deer to select its prey. Some members of the victims are crying, all of them are pale. And then they pick her.
She is just perfect. They pull her out and she screams. Her husband screams. He tries to hold her. He begs for their mercy. They start beating him up so that he leaves her. He does. The victim next to them is panicked, yet visibly relieved. It is not him they have picked! They drag her out; she screams; her husband begs for mercy; they simply kick him out. The camera is restless and so is the edit cut. They take her out to kill her. The female in the gang tells them to buy chaawal when they return as the number people have gone up!
Cut to next scene. Two of them are holding her and the relatively junior one is a bit farther. And then they start discussing. Their conversation becomes unclear now. They need to decide how they are going to execute her; they need to decide if the spot they have decided is the right one. She keeps screaming. The younger one now makes a request. He wants to cut her neck open. She keeps screaming. One of them loses his temper and yells at her. He tells her to keep quite. "Yeh bhi naa, dhimag khaa rahi hai", he complains. He simply needs to do a job and her screams are making him lose focus. He decides to give the younger one a chance. He asks him to go ahead. One person holds her arms and the other holds her leg. The younger one now takes a knife and raises his hands. The knife comes down.
Cut to next scene. Close up of the husband's face. The tears are dry. The face is expressionless, but his eyes are conveying the pain and the helplessness.
The film was Jungle. Written by Jaideep Sahni. Directed by Ram Gopal Varma.
I have watched it only once. It was the year 2000. Nine years after watching it, the scene remains etched in memory. The movie itself was just about ok. I did not think that it was great cinema. Ram Gopal Varma gave into commercial considerations with some silly songs and sillier placement of them. He had a mix of clichéd characters and interesting characters in the film. There were a lot of gimmicks used to scare and fool the audience. Jungle was a moderate success. It did not win any major awards. It got nominated in the technical department in Screen Awards, and in Filmfare, I think it got nominated only for sound. I remember some weird camera angles (which eventually became trademark RGV; he started using them even in love stories like Nishabd), some good sound effects, a neat BGM by Sandeep Chowta (Why the fuck is RGV using Amar Mohile nowadays? Why not Salim-Suleiman or Sandeep Chowta?) a neat performance by Fardeen Khan (for the first time), hamming by Urmila. Sunil Shetty was so-so and Sushant Singh had a good role and made full use of it. Considering it was Jaideep Sahni's work, the script was mediocre. RGV now has started giving so much of trash, that Jungle looks like a masterpiece in comparison. But back then, it was just another film. The movie had its moments but it was not great cinema. But it was a great scene. It was great because it was inclusive. It was great because, you felt the emotions of the husband and his wife, you felt the relief of the balance victims and you felt the gang’s cold approach. The writer and the director took you inside the heads of the characters. It was terrifying, it was repulsive, but it was fascinating.
Last week, I happened to read Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, in which he describes buffaloes getting killed as Balidhaans. The way he describes this, the scene from Jungle immediately came to my mind. And the scene started playing in my mind as if I had watched it only last week. That's the hallmark of a great scene. It remains etched in your memory for a long long time.
Originally posted in www.passionforcinema.com
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