Cast: Manoj Bajpai, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Richa Chadda, TigmanshuDhulia, Zeishan Quadri, Pankaj Tripathi, Huma Qureshi, Piyush Mishra, ReemmaSen, Yashpal Sharma, Aditya Kumar Director: Anurag KashyapRuntime: 320 min. Verdict: For the most part a squandered opportunity. But thereare moments that give me hope. Genre: Drama, Crime, Comedy
(Note: I lump togetherpart 1 and part 2, partly because that is how they ought to be judged andpartly because makes my job easier. I watched the first part this Saturday night(18th August) and watched the second part the next morning (19thAugust), in what is my attempt at approximating the experience of those folksdown at Cannes. I like to think I succeeded. But for clarity, I shall be specifyingthe part the moment is from, addressing the first part as opening half and thesecond part as the second half.)
Consider oneof part II’s opening moments, where Fazlu comes running up the stairs to theterrace to wake up a doped Faizal Khan (Mr. Siddiqui) , informing him of hisfather Sardar Khan’s (Mr. Bajpai) killing. It is one single shot with no cut.Fazlu climbs, shouts, and Faizal wakes up to the utter dizziness of it all. Itell you, Mr. Siddiqui is some actor. So, Faizal wakes, rushes to climb down theterrace, the sequence still offering no cut, and then climbs back up again,runs to the near wall where his slippers lay, wears them and climbs back down. Therewas this roar of laughter all around me. An audience member in the row in frontof me immediately remarked to his friend how remarkable the direction is here. Betweenthis and Mr. Banerjee’s usage of shuklambaradharam in Shanghai, one getsthe feeling this is what it has come down to, with this breed of new youngIndian filmmakers – trading meaningless details that are targeted for nothingbut laughter. Abstract details that are designed to elicit that preciseresponse of appreciation for cleverness within the audience member. Everythingwithin the shot is traded for a bit of “awesomeness”, which lends itself toeasy appreciation. These are details that don’t work inwards, i.e. adding thematicdepth to the composition and narrative, and instead merely exist to jumpoutwards, towards us. Which contrasts starkly to an image almost shot someseven years ago, in Black Friday,where Badshah Khan looks at a young couple holding hands on the opposite sideof a ferry. It was a detail that was drenched with history, revealing moreabout the character and his culture and his mental state and his prejudices thanany other moment in the film. It was a detail that helped me understand whatall the fuss was all about. I look at it now, a little frustratingly, andcannot help but feel that somewhere down the line we got a little carried away. Unless weconsider the moment where the women of this world, in that rare moment inmovies, especially those concerning gangsters, or even men for that matter,join together in a song to celebrate Faizal’s wedding with Mohsina (Ms.Qureshi). I admit, I don’t get the meaning of the song, but the moment alone,sculpted in real time like so much of Mr. Kashyap and left untouched by hisalmost schizophrenic tendency to crack a joke to undermine the dramaticpotential, is a thing of beauty. Nagma (Ms. Chadda) remembers her husband andbreaks a tear, and without a flashback of him, it is a moment and a memory thatis hers alone. I was overwhelmed, and that shot shall stay with me for sometime, but bearing the weight of another one, a few sequences earlier, duringSardar Khan’s funeral, where Mr. Kashyap thinks it is mighty clever to indulgeus in another of his touches of awesomeness – having the singer (Mr. YashpalSharma) sing that track from Ek jaan hainhum (1982), its presence only to provide a big joke. I do get that the film’scentral theme is the role of popular cinema in our lives, as subtly presentedduring the opening half via Faizal’s introduction, and explicitly declared towardsthe latter part of the second half by Ramadhir Singh (Mr. Dhulia). And I evenrespect Mr. Kashyap’s right to stay away from melodrama by draping it in humor,because hey, irreverence is an attitude too. An attitude I don’t abide by, butan attitude nonetheless. An attitude that is unfortunately taking a lot ofspine and conviction away from modern filmmaking. But just as much I respect anartist’s right to present a moment, I believe an artist ought to respect themoment for my sake and not jump out of the frame and pee all over it just for afew silly laughs. Had the song been played in the background, preferably aroundthe frame than within it, it would’ve created a strange tension and would’veprobably carried the weight of the film’s aforementioned central theme. Instead,Mr. Kashyap cuts to the singer and his shenanigans, even presenting to us aclose-up of his fingers while he’s adjusting his rhythm. The death is theset-up, the song is the punchline. It is such a self-congratulatory tone Mr.Kashyap’s film assumes here, thoroughly highlighting and underlining the sillinessof the track being sung, that it completely overwrites the moment’s andprobably the movie’s essential dynamic – the frailty of life here in this land,the business that is derived out of it (what the narrator refers to as haraami), and the fools who take it allpersonally (what he refers to as chutiya).In a film as this, where the absurdity of arbitrary and abrupt termination of alife-trajectory – with all its dreams and future and relations and past – is palpable,where faith and God and thus hope have precious little to offer, where cinemais probably the only spirituality and hope everyone seeks, it becomes mightymighty frustrating when a filmmaker fritters all those layers for the pleasuresof a silly joke. Or, for thesimple sensual pleasures of the rhythms of a well-captured moment that offersnothing but bathes in its own virtuosity. Sardar Singh squats besides Durga(Ms. Sen) while she’s washing the clothes. Mr. Kashyap gradually sculpts therhythm in real time – her washing and blushing and washing and Sardar riffingon the act. Look at it as a standalone moment, it could be mistaken for one ofthose enchanting little short films, like those Pixar shorts, only that what’scute there is the purest form of lust here. But scene after scene after sceneMr. Kashyap’s employs this strategy of his, which is guided by an approach to lay-outthe details of the process, so that he gets an opportunity to mock thatprocess. It is not enough that Perpendicular (Mr. Kumar) finds the owner of thejewellery store he robbed only a few moments back at his house helping the womenfolkselect stuff. It is a unique statement about this world, this town ofWasseypur, but Mr. Kashyap needs to find a joke in there somewhere. Never mindif it is a stupid key, but the punchline needs to exist to overwrite any tonal/thematicresidue. Gangs ofWasseypur could be described as a narrative out ofseveral slices of life, which is ambitious if you look at it that way, but whenmost of those slices taste funny it renders the overall experience a tadtrivial. The only desirable reaction at the end of any given moment is a laugh.Perpendicular and Definite have a bike-jump scene that reveals precious littleabout either of them but does serve the butt of an off-the-frame cuss-word, andthus a joke. The longer a process runs, one feels, the higher the chances Mr.Kashyap finding the absurdity of the situation. It doesn’t matter who’s gunneddown, and in an extended coordinated set-up masterfully handled that leaves thewhole thing both silly and clever and funny, he finds time to insert detailsabout what’s bought and what’s being worn and what’s the decoy. It is notenough that a sequence is funny by itself, it is necessary that Mr. Kashyapdeclares to us that he knows how clever and hilarious it is, and the punchlineat the end of it, like taking the dead hand off the horn, is his high-five tous. I mean, the vacuum cleaner running in the foreground is audio-visually onthe nose. Occasionally, Mr. Kashyap finds the poetry and the restraint tolet a moment and be, and let the tone and the emotions of the narrative takecenter-stage, like on Faizal’s wedding night, when he comes down the stairs todrink water, with Farhan (Mr. Mishra) looking at him. Much like Nagma’s moment,this little thing acknowledges the memories of a narrative, a facet too oftenignored when we place too much emphasis on cinema being an out-and-out visualmedium and attach awesomeness to virtuosity. The framework the script lends todiscipline the overall narrative, lending it not merely memory but an internal logic,is for the most part lost here. Sardar Khan spends time with Durga while hecompletely ignores Nagma, so much so that there’s a moment he remarks how oldhis son has grown. The geographical logic that is set here is contradicted byan earlier moment where a young Faizal runs to Durga’s house and throws brickat the door. Or when Ramadhir Singh promises Sultan automatic guns, in a land fraughtwith meaningless death, it doesn’t make much sense when it takes so much timefor the latter to find an opportunity to gun him down. Cause is secondary here,and everything happens when it needs to happen. Faizal Khan, who’s until thenmerely guided by the fantasies of cinema, suddenly develops greed once thenarrator breaks it us that development in his very gentle manner. The same narratorconfides in us, in both the parts, when the support/fear of the masses isswaying Sardar Khan’s family’s way, and yet the crowd never plays any real partin the scheme of things. The individual families are just about as naked asevery other person here, and the waiting game here doesn’t really feelconsistent with the terrain. I’m sure Mr. Kashyap has the answers but amongstall the meaningless details and all the resulting jokes, the narration is lost.Most times it feels like a set of short films strung together end-to-end tomerely give the feel of an overarching narrative arc, like the abstraction ofthe opening, which doesn’t offer anything more than being a trailer for therest of the film, with its random deaths and cinema-intrusion and cuss-words servinga punchline. And when the film is about a place and its people, and when thetitle of the film is about all the gangs, I find it endearing when a narrativerises above good and bad. Unlike here, where the bad guys remain bad guys withlittle to no detail of their private lives and their emotions other than tocause a few more jokes. Mr. Kashyap’s structure for BlackFriday, with its feel for both the microscopic and macroscopic, still remainsone of my favorite examples on how to construct an epic narrative. There was afilm that had both integrity and memory. I wouldn’t necessarily mind thedilution of the overall narrative, which I admit is a considerably tougherthing to pull off, but what frustrates me is the trivialization of the details.The adult Faizal Khan is first seen in a theatre watching Trishul, and the manner in which the notion of popular cinema(Amitabh Bachchan then) seeps into those ensuing moment via Mr. Siddiqui, andeven a random dude sitting opposite to him in a train, creates a sublime momentof criticism of an entire culture that breeds and celebrates and imitates adolescence.Yet, Mr. Kashyap brings that observation down via a dialog between Ramadhir andhis men, which becomes yet again a joke about actor name-dropping more thananything else. Couple all of that with all those meta-tracks about guns andequating them with masculinity, or those mocking the dialect with English wordsstretched to confirm to the songwriter’s beliefs about the people and it isreason enough to make me one feel a tad offended. But here is the frustrating bit,Mr. Kashyap, by using those tracks, especially the latter, repeatedly, almostlegitimizes it into a private memory. In the film’s most remarkably constructedsequence, completely arresting us within it, Mr. Kashyap lets go off all thoseannoying tendencies to simply capture every breath and every moment as Faizalclimbs stairs and jumps walls and crouches while Sultan’s gangs unloadseemingly an unlimited supply of AK-47s somewhere below. It is that rare shotthat betrays both virtuosity and attains greatness, almost 6-D in the way itnumbs our senses and suffocates us, and when Faizal takes a jump and hurts hisankle and winces in deep pain Mr. Kashyap audaciously plays that private memory.There’re often in our day-to-day lives moments as these, often after a dullday, when we feel an almost magical surge of optimism. That shot from Mr.Kashyap sculpts that surge. And thusthe question. In this post-ideological climate, do reactionaries like me whoswear by the classical seriousness, have any reason to cheer? I don’t know. There’reso many different angles and so many perspectives from where Mr. Kashyap looksat Wasseypur, mocking Faizal’s cinema-induced reverie (please don’t tell methat his weed-addiction is another in-your-face stand-in, it’ll break my heart)one moment, and dancing in its frenzy the next. All of that sort of condensesinto Mr. Kashyap’s aesthetic – intercutting and slow-motion – when Faizalconsumes his revenge, assuming multiples layers, at once celebrating emotionand condemning violence. For the first time in the film, the pawns in thenarrative assume an identity of their own, stakes of their own, their existencenot merely to serve the principal characters but to provide the essentialcounterpoint to Wasseypur’s tragic absurdity. It is a rare gesture of grace andrespect that transcends the families and unites the community in its own mess. MaybeMr. Kashyap somewhere believes Wasseypur deserves to be the butt of a joke. I don’tknow. But when I remind of that final shot, a slow pan into a new world, ofmigrants and Mumbai, a motion leading to cause new memory in a completelyremoved geography, it humbles me. And bears testament to how easy it is tocause awesomeness borne out of virtuosity, which doesn’t need any memory, and howdifficult it is to build greatness.
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