Jean Luc Godard once famously said, €All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.' First time film-maker Pawan Kripalani has indeed read that quote, maybe even pasted a strip of the quote on his bedroom wall plastered with posters of cult films he has been gloating over ever since his alumni days, if he ever went to film school, or uses his computer to download any possible film you have not heard of whose genius he's been trying to soak.
Should he then chain a girl in handcuffs to a bed post, string the room with night vision cameras, brief his male lead to walk around her, scared, sometimes possessed of an evil spirit she has to escape? Here's your Godard formula to Ragini MMS. What more do you need to make a film? It's a bloody easy slip on the edit board.
Uday (Raj Kumar Yadav) and Ragini (Kainaz Motivala) head out to the hills to spend a weekend at an isolated house doing pretty much what most hormonally challenged young people would do. The house is fitted to record their activity for an underground porn film that Uday is making on the sly, therefore the foreplay which is endless and needlessly interrupted by friends stopping over for a glug of beer and then the customary lights out and creaking doors till the couple realizes someone is watching over them.
Clocking less than a hundred minutes, the film's smarter qualities include snappy edit work and respect for viewer's time in voyeuristically taking a tour of the house - once this is established, and there is a certain thrill to be had from exploring a spooky house being tapped into with spy cameras, the horror of such a situation takes over.
Clich©s galore, audience is rapt, often circumvented by the novelty of being chased by several camera angles. It's the novelty of a hand-held camera, such a treatment is a new trend in Bollywood cinema, and suits best this genre of erotic horror. It places you right in the centre of action by way of shooting from the point of view of the character as camera, thus becoming, audience as camera - an involvement with the medium that is no longer detached to watch men and women gaudily dressed and shaking the tush to metered tip-tap.
This style should then lend itself to more meaty material on film.
Tragically that is not so with Ragini MMS. The film has a wafer-thin plot line to begin with; couple this with eerie music and a vernac spirit (dressed in a lovely kastha saree, anklets, nose pin - tantamount to a lavani perfomance, remember Manjulika of Bhool Bhulaiya) who sneaks in and out, popping up in the most unexpected of places (buttressing the horror structure) the film eventually breaks free from its staginess like the girl who manages to unshackle herself, towards a clumsy climax - a wholly unconvincing abrupt end to a film you think has more to offer than just its dogme induced coolth.
In that case, should the director be credited? Go make your own MMS, the more spurious your content, that much more you'd like us not to know who made it. Its enough that everyone saw it. The curiosity surrounding Ragini MMS is likely to earn it that notoriety.
Should he then chain a girl in handcuffs to a bed post, string the room with night vision cameras, brief his male lead to walk around her, scared, sometimes possessed of an evil spirit she has to escape? Here's your Godard formula to Ragini MMS. What more do you need to make a film? It's a bloody easy slip on the edit board.
Uday (Raj Kumar Yadav) and Ragini (Kainaz Motivala) head out to the hills to spend a weekend at an isolated house doing pretty much what most hormonally challenged young people would do. The house is fitted to record their activity for an underground porn film that Uday is making on the sly, therefore the foreplay which is endless and needlessly interrupted by friends stopping over for a glug of beer and then the customary lights out and creaking doors till the couple realizes someone is watching over them.
Clocking less than a hundred minutes, the film's smarter qualities include snappy edit work and respect for viewer's time in voyeuristically taking a tour of the house - once this is established, and there is a certain thrill to be had from exploring a spooky house being tapped into with spy cameras, the horror of such a situation takes over.
Clich©s galore, audience is rapt, often circumvented by the novelty of being chased by several camera angles. It's the novelty of a hand-held camera, such a treatment is a new trend in Bollywood cinema, and suits best this genre of erotic horror. It places you right in the centre of action by way of shooting from the point of view of the character as camera, thus becoming, audience as camera - an involvement with the medium that is no longer detached to watch men and women gaudily dressed and shaking the tush to metered tip-tap.
This style should then lend itself to more meaty material on film.
Tragically that is not so with Ragini MMS. The film has a wafer-thin plot line to begin with; couple this with eerie music and a vernac spirit (dressed in a lovely kastha saree, anklets, nose pin - tantamount to a lavani perfomance, remember Manjulika of Bhool Bhulaiya) who sneaks in and out, popping up in the most unexpected of places (buttressing the horror structure) the film eventually breaks free from its staginess like the girl who manages to unshackle herself, towards a clumsy climax - a wholly unconvincing abrupt end to a film you think has more to offer than just its dogme induced coolth.
In that case, should the director be credited? Go make your own MMS, the more spurious your content, that much more you'd like us not to know who made it. Its enough that everyone saw it. The curiosity surrounding Ragini MMS is likely to earn it that notoriety.