Satya Analysis

Satya

Directed and Produced by: Ram Gopal Varma

Dialogues by: Anurag Kashyap

Starring: J. D. Chakravarthy, Manoj Bajpayee, Urmila Matondkar

Satya is often credited to be the film which started the Bombay noir genre in Indian cinema. There are a number of reasons for this, one reason which RGV says is the usage of slang and cuss words. He says that no one used the word 'Chutiya' in mainstream cinema before this. Apart from the subject matter, the way it is shot and conceived is to be looked at. A lot of the scenes are shot on real locations, we see Bombay with rains and the city is a character in the film like Woody Allen's films. The cinematographer Mazhar Kamran, shares an anecdote that in the edit table when someone saw shots of Urmila Matondkar (properly lit), they said that the cinematographer can shoot well and they were confused about why he didn't shoot the whole film like that, to which RGV laughed. The point was that, they used cinematography to push storytelling, the scenes with Urmila were pleasant scenes and hence they were shot well lit, whereas the gangster parts were supposed to be dark and gritty and hence the natural lighting and the shadows.

The film has a dense one-liner, things happen so fast in the film. The edit is refreshing, as soon as we hear the line, 'kuch kaam milega', we cut to Satya serving in a hotel and that cut is crisp and tight even today. We see a lot of such cuts, where the dialogue is cut midway and it is cut to what they were referring to and in spite of it being a little jarring it never feels disturbing. There is very less dialogue for Satya, they have a lot of dialogue for Manoj Bajpayee but for J. D. Chakravarthy, who is not a native Hindi speaker, they only had actions largely. Satya relies on visual film making, the conflicts and the fights are all visual and the dialogue is used to carry the scenes only in fillers. The story events are built in a way that we get a feeling that we have witnessed an entire journey of Satya and now I can see how heavily Businessman is inspired from Satya.