Shoot at sight. Point blank. In different ways that's exactly what Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) and his characters do in Department.

While his cop heroes Sanjay Dutt, Rana Daggubati and their hazily sketched compatriots (one of whom looks like Deepak Tijori) go on a cleansing rampage against socio-paths, RGV goes on his own trip, shooting characters at angles you've never seen them being shot.

They don't always look fetching with their stained teeth and dirty nails showing up in embarrassing close-ups. So, who said life in cinema is about postcard pictures?

Welcome to RGV's world of muck and mayhem.

The one definite thing that must be said about RGV is that his exploration of the nexus between the law and the underworld is ceaselessly seeking new modes of storytelling.

Department is one breathless surge of aggression and violence. Shot with cameras that capture the actors at their quirkiest and most candid, the film is not for those who think cinema is all about style. RGV left his stylish days behind in Rangeela and Company.

Repeatedly and mercilessly RGV dismantles all conventions of pretty storytelling and aims for the jugular. The camera angles are often much too casual to be considered 'cinematic'. But breaking rules is a given in RGV's cinema. He breaks them in Department in a noisy rush of agitated images that go well with the edgy fidgety characters.

Not all the characters work. Vijay Raaz as a whiny dhoti-clad gangster and debutant Madhu Malini as a tartish sharp-shooter are a scream. The talented Abhimanyu Singh has a tough time trying to maintain an equilibrium between the two unintentionally comical evil doers. The dialogues these gangsters exchange try so hard to be real they end up being howlers. It's like eavesdropping on a conversation between two pathologists.
The camera, manned by no official Director Of Photography (and it shows), goes through the character's legs, into their nostrils, over their armpits…in this film about cops who do their own thing.

Department is a brutal film. There's no room here for emotions. Even when Sanjay Dutt playing a senior cop goes home his wife, played by Laxmi Manchu, speaking in a strangely loud tone, he talks to her in unsentimental tones. There's more feeling in the two cops, Sanjay and Rana's buddy-buddy talk, in the line of duty.

There's a long history in cinema of cops striking a rapport on the beat. Sanjay and Rana are no Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. But then this is no Lethal Weapon.

The action here is a strange mix of street aggression and stylized stunts. While scenes of Rana chasing goons through claustrophobic crowded areas of Mumbai are vintage Varma, the climactic fist-to-fist between Rana and Sanjay proves a battle of unequal titans. One of the two actors being just too agile for the other.

What grabs your attention in this oft-told tale of the cops resorting to extra-constitutional means to 'cleanse' the city is the frenetic pacing. The characters are constantly on the move.

Even Amitabh Bachchan, while taking sardonic jibes at a 'system' that is corroded, is seen restlessly circling Sanjay or Rana, depending on which of the two the wily wizened politicians is provoked into action.

Not surprisingly Amitabh's netagiri provides the liveliest interludes in the proceedings. He seems to be having the most fun even when saddled with dialogues that must have sounded far funnier on paper than they do in their delivery. Among the rest of the cast, Rana with his restrained ruggedness stands tall.

What Department delivers is yet another RGV product that takes Hindi cinema's crime genre away from conventional storytelling. There are no punctuations except exclamation marks, no speed-breakers except songs, which are terribly screechy and grating with Nathalia Kaur's item number hitting rock-bottom, and no way out for these restless law-enforcers than to take the law in their own hands.

The world of Department is anarchic, destructive and apocalyptic. The narrative
format imposed on the world of gangsterism is freewheeling almost chaotic. Violence and death are written into the DNA of the characters.

Department tells a virile story with no patience for sappy humbug. It's not meant for those who think lovers laughing their way into death, as they did in Ishaqzaade, are the last words in ruinous relationships.

In Department, the characters share a far more intimate bonding with their guns than with their friends.
 

This is a Yash Chopra production and the story has been co-written by Aditya Chopra, but no love story could be more unlike a Yash Raj Films romance than Ishaqzaade.

It revolves around two small-town lovebirds (or call them what you will), who are neither as meek as songbirds nor do they speak the lingo of soft romantic love in the splendour of solitude. Their passion grows in the shadows of life-threatening violence. So what's new?

Not much really, except for the grungy, downbeat treatment that writer-director Habib Faisal brings to the table for this oft-told story of impossible love played out in a nondescript north Indian town. But that might militate against the core YRF philosophy: Ishaqzaade isn't the sort of gossamer-coated crowd-pleaser that the banner specialises in.

The lovers in Ishaqzaade belong to two families that are divided by both politics and religion. The boy is a Hindu, the girl a Muslim. The patriarchs of the two clans, Surya Chauhan and Aftab Qureishi, are fierce political rivals engaged in a see-saw electoral battle in a town called Almore.

Hatred is the dominant emotion in this part of the world and street violence is always only a gunshot away. In this grimy milieu dominated by the two warring groups baying for each other's blood, love is low priority.

Cloaked in the violent love story that is Ishaqzaade is a message that could not have been better timed.

The film has opened in the multiplexes hours after a senior Uttar Pradesh police officer declared in front of TV cameras that he would shoot his daughter dead if she were to elope. That very mindset is deeply entrenched in the world that Habib Faisal depicts.

The boy, Parma (debutant Arjun Kapoor), and the girl, Zoya (one-film-old Parineeti Chopra), have hated each other ever since they can remember.

Things come to a head when Parma and his cousins, Dharma and Karma, storm a party at the Qureishi mansion and zip away with a dancing girl, Chand Bibi (Gauhar Khan).

To avenge the humiliation, Zoya confronts Parma outside her college and slaps him. The boy plots revenge. The act of vendetta – he literally sleeps with the enemy to teach her a lesson – has tragic consequences. Parma loses his widowed mother in the aftermath.

As circumstances go out of hand and the two patriarchs begin to worry about their political fortunes, Parma finds himself on the run with the girl, with both families in pursuit like a pack of hungry wolves. No escape, no retreat, no surrender: they are up against a dead-end where hope dies quickly.

Sadly, Ishaqzaade isn't quite as pulsating as the plot line might suggest. The script throws up some surprises all right, but the story of inter-religious love does not have legs robust enough to gallop all the way through to the end with sustained energy.

After a startling end to the first half, the film's pace drops several notches in the second half as the lovers seek refuge in Chand Bibi's brothel. “There is peace here,” Zoya retorts when Parma reminds her that they cannot live in a whorehouse forever. The boy replies: “Do you want the whole country to be turned into a brothel for peace to reign?” Well, well!

This cinematic plea against honour killing lacks crackle and fizz for want of true intensity.

However, Faisal Habib creates the small town environment with an eye for detail, with many of the interactions between the young foes-turned-lovers taking place in and around a train station, in abandoned coaches and decrepit yards.. It is a typical upcountry semi-urban space – dusty, crowded and cacophonous - with genuine and tangible dimensions.

The main characters, too, are by and large believable, especially because the roles are essayed by young actors who look real. The hero isn't a sculpted hunk; the heroine is, at best, a pretty girl next door. However, the supporting cast, with the exception of Gauhar Khan, make little impression.

That leaves too much of a load on the inexperienced leads. If only Arjun Kapoor's dialogue delivery had greater punch and Parineeti Chopra could pull off the emotional moments without going shrill, Ishaqzaade would have been a markedly better film. 

It was only a few weeks ago that producer Vikram Bhatt unleashed Hate Story, an erotic thriller about a woman scorned in the here and now. He’s back, this time as director, with another not-so-erotic thriller about a damsel in grave distress not just in this life but also in many others.

Grave is the operative word here for this tale spans across as many as five centuries and as many different stories involving the same star-crossed lady.

The protagonist dies many deaths, turns in her grave several times over, and then returns repeatedly for another shot at elusive ishq. It is love unrequited, violated, denied.

At the concept level, Dangerous Ishhq does have something going for it beyond the stereoscopic 3D that it has been filmed in. Hindi movie fans are accustomed to high-pitched reincarnation dramas in which characters are reborn in order to complete unfinished business a la Karan Arjun. But this one isn’t only about rebirth.

It is just as much about several deaths, loves, betrayals and slayings that go all the back to 17th century Rajasthan, to an era and place where love and longing meant much moaning and groaning under the weight of feudal excesses.

The heroine pines for her lover (played by different actors in different eras) across lifetimes only to have circumstances and inimical forces pull her apart from the object of her affection.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, Dangerous Ishhq ventures into the domain of past life regression in a rather overstuffed narrative about a supermodel who sees strange visions and must decipher them quickly in order to rescue her lover, the scion of a business family. The guy has been abducted by a foe who has been gunning for the woman for centuries.

Karisma Kapur, back on the screen after a nine-year hiatus, continues from where she left off, donning several looks, going the whole distance in justifying her return to the thick of the action, and delivering a performance that is competent, if not entirely convincing.

The screenplay is consistent in its convolutions and the further back it goes in time the less sense it seems to make.

Sanjana (Karisma) and her beau Rohan (Rajneesh Duggal) are the talk of the town. The high-flying supermodel nixes a prestigious Paris assignment because a whisper in her head tells her that something is about to go amiss. Her lover is kidnapped. Her life is thrown into turmoil. From there on, it is past forward all the way.

Part of the time travel, one must confess, is intriguing, if nothing else. But the plot is riddled with moments that stretch credulity to snapping point.

The female protagonist is subjected to hypnosis sessions in a bid to help her understand who or what is out to make her life miserable. The truth that emerges and the path that the film takes to get there is anything but hypnotic.

The fact that this is Karisma’s comeback vehicle is only of academic interest. So is the film’s toying with the theme of the past living on in the present. The two don’t quite mesh seamlessly enough on the screen to make an impact.

You could watch the film for one or the other reason. Karisma makes a fair fist of it. The plot is a problem. It is all over the place. 

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