As fond as I am of many Hindi movies, I’ll also willingly admit that some of them have faults.   Fight sequences may be cartoonish, plot points  might be incredibly frail, some song picturizations  could be deemed too sweet and self-indulgent and way too long, but nonetheless, even if the movies  suffer from these or other problems, they  are  (sometimes) guilty pleasures and  favorites.  

At the same time, after seeing a mainstream Hindi movie, at some point  the question will cross my mind: “Could this be well received outside of India?”    99% of the time, my answer is “Not for most audiences, other than  foreigners who  enjoy these type of films already.”   And that’s fine.   I’m not particularly concerned about  whether Bollywood can take over the remaining population  of the world that’s not captivated by it already, it’s just a passing thought.    

To me, Ram Gopal Verma’s Company  is perfect and  this 2002 film could also be screened, say, in Chicago, at a  typical suburban multiplex, and  audiences would be rapt enough to sit through the English subtitles and stay to the end to see what happens.   For a story about two underworld dons and their environment, it could have suffered from exaggerated, drag-on fight scenes with garishly red liquid gushing forth from everyone’s wounds, but RGV went instead for a spare approach, conveying the violence between men in the shortest of shots and quick cuts from one to the next.   Thank you, Mr. Verma.   As a woman who’s not terribly into action movies, one of the worst things I find myself sitting through in mainstream Indian movies is these prolonged dishum scenes and the inevitable accompanying shot  of an exploding car shooting straight up into the air, and the not-at-all-well-hidden gas jet that has just propelled it upwards.   Thank you for sparing us all of that.

Company is the story of the relationship between Malik (Ajay Devgan), a high-level underworld don who takes over  the Aslambhai gang, and Chandu (Vivek Oberoi, in his first film), the small-time thief he hires and  takes under his wing, and  what happens as Chandu grows in ability and power.

One of the strengths of this  movie is Verma’s  realistic portrayal of the small details of the characters lives.   In the beginning of the movie we see Chandu living with his mother  (Seema Biswas) in a cramped, dark, small  home down  narrow lanes, surrounded by other poor people.   He ferries her on the crossbar of his bicycle to  buy food, and he rides home late one night with his gang on an almost deserted Bombay train.   Ajay Devgan as Malik is a man of few words and tightly controlled movement who wears chains and smokes all the time.   Later, when the group relocates to Hong Kong, they take up residence in high-rise, tastefully decorated  terrace apartments.

The story takes place in Bombay, then Hong Kong, the Nairobi and Mombasa, and back to Bombay for the conclusion.   The early Bombay period marks the introduction of Chandru to Malik’s world and the growth of both their careers.   As they are close to being arrested by Police Inspector Sreenivasan (Mohanlal), they flee with their respective women and gangs to Hong Kong, where they grow even more powerful, but where conflicts arise, with tragic consequences, and Chandru flees to Nairobi.

The Bombay segment is the longest and the most atmospheric.   The aging don Aslambhai lives in a sprawling, shadow-filled  apartment at the top of an abandoned waterfront building, a politician departs in the ubiquitous white Ambassador from his Peddar Road residence, the gang parties as Isha Koppikar writhes to the chart-busting Khallas in a crowded disco, and Chandu saves Malik’s life at a shootout during a Bollywood movie mahurat (as RGV points to the links between the underworld and film world).   One of the simplest and most perfect  shots of the city comes when  the gang is living in Hong Kong and a  narrator remarks that the telephone  is the biggest weapon of the underworld.   The  news of some recent incident is shown traveling all over Bombay by  a dizzying series of quick shots of phones ringing,  until the last  shot of the sequence has a telephone alone on a table next to a window  on a high floor of an apartment building  and the background we see through the window is the Bombay skyline.

While never an Ajay Devgan fan before (he never seems right in hero roles), he does the whole strong, silent type well here, and I appreciated that the part was not scripted to portray him as a totally evil man.   It’s plain to see that he really does love Saroja,  the woman he lives with, and the most telling detail is that even when he learns that one of her actions has inadvertently contributed to the death of one of his men, he doesn’t pull out his gun and kill her, something that lesser movies on this subject would have had him do.

Vivek Oberoi makes an strong first impression as the newcomer on the scene who has a real fire in his belly to succeed.    He is natural in the role, and genuine.    The only thing I found a bit off was in the “making of” feature on the DVD, when he talked about his character, he pointed out that he had to spend hours in makeup as they covered him from head to toe in something to make him “about eight shades darker”, which I would think could been interpreted by some viewers as the young Oberoi suggesting that the darker you are, the more likely you are to have criminal tendencies.

The best casting of the film is Manisha Koirala as Saroja.   Never married in real life, yet with a colorful romantic history behind her (Nana Patekar is one former love interest), she comfortably inhabits the skin of a character I’d bet some other actresses would have balked at taking.   Saroja has a sleepy-eyed, laid back, been-there-done-that air about her and she has no qualms about “just” living with Malik.   She smokes, drinks and wears rather hip pant suits with a string of small silver cuffs up the curve of her ear.   It helps that she also has a cool shag haircut that would make  Jane Fonda jealous.   I liked that the couple are shown snuggled up together, half asleep and not talking about anything in particular while it rains outside, and not as most movies would do, making her the slutty bimbo moll who is just part of the background to be tossed around by the gangster.    

The supporting cast – Mohanlal, Rajpal Yadav, Vijay Raaz, Antara Mali  and Akash Khurana – are all solid  in their roles, to the point that they don’t seem to be acting.   Unlike in Sarkar, the music in Company actually helps the story along.   A lone flute plays menacingly when bad things are happening and  orchestral music rises to heighten the tension.   Verma’s only concession to the push to have some picturized musical scenes in the movie are the opening credits, with his muse Urmila doing a slinky dance in a proto-Bond sequence, and then  Khallas, which meshes perfectly with the picture, since the gang have gone for a night out to a club.

See it or skip it?

Don’t miss it.   This movie is tight, well written and has a flawless cast.