I started seeing the tweets in March, and it took a few to make an impression; at first, I was merely confused. What on earth was RRR? Why were so many of the film people I follow talking about it? Why hadn’t I heard anything about it? As a Professional Film Journalist ™ I’m inundated with multiple emails for the most obscure titles imaginable – how was this movie, apparently one of the biggest-budgeted and highest-grossing Indian movies in history, somehow flying under my radar?
RRR finally made its way into my inbox on May 16, with the announcement of a “One Night Only” return to U.S. cinemas, dubbed “encoRRRe” – and as soon as it announced, every film critic and movie geek I knew had bought a ticket. I nabbed one at my closest available venue, the Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers, and prepared to take in something that seems increasingly impossible: an honest-to-goodness cult movie.
That’s become one of the most abused and misunderstood phrases in the cinematic lexicon, a description so loose and ill-defined that it’s all but burst. (Let us recall The Ringer’s recent “50 Best Cult Movies” list, which included no John Waters or Alejandro Jorodorwsky, but entries for Empire Records and Rushmore. Better yet, let us not recall that list.) And perhaps you cannot call a film that is, by all definitions, a blockbuster in one country a cult movie in another. But the way RRR made itself known to its American ticket buyers – as a word-of-mouth hit, declaimed loudly by a few, picked up by a few more, and spread to those whose tastes run to the fringes as an immediate must-see – recalls the golden days of El Topo, Eraserhead, or Rocky Horror. And that’s worth talking about.
The voice at the beginning of the picture purred “Braaaaace yourself,” and it was a warranted warning – there’s no movie you can see right now that works harder to entertain you. I’ll not get into the specific plot synopsis, because there’s so much happening in RRR that a description could run as long as this piece, and then some. Suffice it to say that the story is set in the 1920s, in the run-up to the Indian revolution against the English, and it concerns Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Raju (Ram Charan), whose intense friendship – they meet while saving a child trapped on a burning lake, like ya do – is tested by their secret intentions and political allegiances.
What that simplified (and I mean simplified) thumbnail description does not convey is the sheer volume of movie we’ve got here. And I don’t just mean running time, though the 187-minute duration is certainly daunting. It’s that RRR is a genre-juggling, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affair, by turns an action spectacular, a caper, a buddy movie, a romantic comedy, a period drama, a war movie, and a musical extravaganza.
It does all of those things exceptionally well – the action sequences are astonishing, the villains are comically reprehensible, and the songs are catchy (particularly when the lyrics comment very directly on the events onscreen: “Won’t this friendship come to a point of betrayal,” “This is an unforeseen turn of fate,” that sorta thing). And it’s impossible to overstate the value of its leads, of their burning charisma and fierce athleticism, each man playing like they’re successfully stealing the picture. S.S. Rajamouli’s direction is breathtaking in its scope, yes, but also striking in its verve and self-confidence; it’s a film with the stylistic and narrative flourishes of a director drunk on devices, high on the sheer act of making a movie.
It’s refreshing to watch a movie with a pop sensibility and sense of style – the camera moves gracefully, the compositions are both inventive and spontaneous, and there’s actually some color saturation, for God’s sake. And make no mistake, much of its appeal is that it’s just batshit insane, taking the ornate action set pieces and bromance dynamics of something like the Fast franchise and amping them up to operatic volumes. Yet what’s most striking about RRR is its unapologetic sincerity – a quality that’s become, well, somewhat foreign in American cinema. The soapy playing, melodramatic music, the familiar types, and the visual cues (slow-motion, extreme close-ups, haunted flashbacks, other arch effects) skirt right up to the edge of corniness, and sometimes topple over. But because it’s all so sincere, because it’s done without a wink (or, perhaps, with the right wink), emotional beats that might otherwise play as goofy come off as heartfelt.
I have a theory as to why a film like RRR, and a filmmaker like Rajamouli, hits like this at at our particular moment. Watching his work, I was reminded of Sergio Leone and John Woo, foreign filmmakers who juiced up the conventions of American genre cinema with their own style, energy, and cultural DNA. Their films felt like subversive, smuggled contraband in eras (the mid-‘60s and late-‘80s) in which our homegrown entertainment felt increasingly risk-adverse.
Rajamouli, like those directors, shows a willingness to risk silliness, anachronism, and overkill; his movie, like theirs, is cool because it’s so willing to do things that are inherently uncool. And that’s refreshing, because we’re in one of the safest periods of movie history – an era in which all that warrants a budget (and attention) is that which is based on something else. Few movies, particularly big movies, are willing to risk it all anymore; they’d rather tell stories we’ve already been told, and fill their frames with “Easter eggs” and callbacks and “surprise” cameos that we’ve already heard about. In that environment, of course we respond to a movie where literally anything can happen.
RRR has its problems, to be sure – the silliness of the full-on comedy material doesn’t really translate, and there’s a whole nationalist propaganda element to deal with (at one point, Bheem literally wraps himself in the flag to save himself). But the pleasures of this thing are undeniable. When Bheem leaps from a truck to save his sister, flanked on all sides by roaring wild animals, the cheers that erupt from the audience are what moviegoing is about; when Raju arrives in a literal flaming chariot, and they embark on a water hose and fireworks fight, one wonders what else we want out of cinema. And the cheers that continue through that fight also remind us, after two-plus years of watching most things at home, that the great movies are so often also communal viewing experiences; you can, at this moment, watch RRR on Netflix, just like you could (from 1990 on, at least) watch Rocky Horror on VHS. But why would you?
In light of the success of the encoRRRe, distributor Variance Films is beginning one-a-day screenings of RRR in New York and Los Angeles, which will certainly increase access (and revenue), though I can’t help but wonder if they’re courting a comparison to the ill-fated conventional release of El Topo, which lost much of its magic when it became just another movie you could see anytime. And RRR isn’t just any old movie – it’s an event. 
“RRR” is now playing once a night at IFC Center in New York and the Glendale Laemmle in Los Angeles.
