Gangs of Wasseypur Movie Reviews -- POST HERE - Page 2

The screen, at the beginning of Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur, is filled with the titles sequence from Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, and then the camera begins to pull back. The gaudy, brightly lit world of the popular soap is slowly swallowed up by the dimness of an undistinguished room. The screen of the television set keeps getting smaller, the real world larger. And then, the spatter of gunfire. And a shout, instructing these TV viewers to down their shutters. This, we realise, is no home, but a business establishment of some sort – a small shop in a row of small shops. More gunfire pierces the darkness. People are felled by bullets. A haveli is surrounded and bursts of fire from automatics illuminate the night. Who are these people with these guns? Who are those cowering in the haveli, around the man whose phone explodes with the ring tone of Nayak nahin… khalnayak hoon main? The only certainties are that we are in a violent neighbourhood, that this stretch is set post 1993, the year of Subhash Ghai's antihero blockbuster, and that the director is not going to slow down for exposition and explanation.

In a pre-titles credit, Kashyap expresses his gratitude to the "Madurai triumvirate" of Bala, Ameer Sultan and M Sasikumar, for inspiring him to get back to his roots, but he just as well could have thanked Cervantes and Dickens. Gangs of Wasseypur is a sprawling, picaresque saga set in and around the mining community in Dhanbad (formerly of Bihar; now belonging to Jharkhand), and its raffish protagonist is a man named Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpai). But where films revolving around a hero (or an antihero, a khalnayak) usually become fixated with their every movement to the extent that this hero (or antihero) shows up in every scene, Kashyap tells the story of Sardar Khan through the people around him, the people who came before him, and those who come after him. In other words, we begin in the years just preceding Independence, where we learn who Sardar Khan's father was, how he lived, how he died, and how the young Sardar Khan, subsequently, swore to avenge his death. We meet this story's villain, Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia), and we steel ourselves for his showdowns with Sardar Khan, and for him to meet a most well-deserved end. This is how films have trained us.

But novels, on the other hand, aren't as bound to plot and protagonist. They can, on a whim, linger on descriptions of scenery, or on the misfortunes of a secondary character – they aren't time-bound. There's no pressure that they wind up in two-and-a-half hours, and that's the philosophy that informs Gangs of Wasseypur. On a formal level, this is easily Kashyap's most fascinating outing (and a gratifying return to form after the underwhelming That Girl In Yellow Boots). The film unfolds as a series of voiceovers, a flurry of dates and names, a cavalcade of memorable scenes – Sardar Khan canvassing for votes as a sidekick channels Mithun Chakraborty from Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki; Yashpal Sharma breaking into a falsetto rendition of Salaam-e-ishq meri jaan (one of the many throwbacks to the Amitabh Bachchan era); a smitten Sardar Khan wooing Durga (Reema Sen) as she washes clothes by a hand pump; Sardar Khan's elder son being hit by a bullet and later tended to in a hospital in the midst of a power cut; the younger son putting the moves on a girl he likes, as a goat, behind him, nibbles on leaves from a tree, oblivious to the unfolding of all this human drama.

Gangs of Wasseypur is a diffuse epic, content to coast around the revenge plot instead of making it the thrust of its narrative – and what the film loses in terms of dramatic power, it gains in texture. (Besides, do we really want Anurag Kashyap to take on a conventional revenge story?) Several scenes touch upon the hero-villain dynamic that drove a lot of the cinema of the eras this film is set in (acknowledged through delightful nods to tropes like the "prison song," providing the background for an escape), such as the one where Ranadhir Singh attempts to poison the minds of Sardar Khan's sons, pointing out that their father now lives with Durga, or the other one where the younger son is informed that he cannot go to school anymore because his father has stopped sending money home. Seething at the unfairness, he hurls a brick at Durga's door, and you think (again, because of how films have trained us) that he will grow up to be like Bachchan in Shakti or Trishul (which is excerpted here), who regarded his father as the villain – but Kashyap is not interested in going there.

He isn't even interested in showcasing Sardar Khan as a towering figure, someone capable of anchoring all this churn of activity. The man comes off, frankly, as a bit of a clown, a fool who cannot get his fill of women. He's also unheroically selfish, chasing Durga as his first wife Naghma is harassed by cops. Bajpai is wonderful and the rest of the cast is equally fine, but it's Richa Chaddha, as Naghma, who walks away with the movie. She has what book critics like to term an author-backed part, and she teeters exquisitely between comedy and drama. She straddles both in a superb scene where she's about to deliver her first child, just after she has caught her husband in the house of a prostitute. The pain of delivery alternates with her rage at this man who has now crawled back home – we don't know whether to laugh or cry. Later, she decides it's better he strays – at least he'll leave her alone. But she makes sure to feed him well, so he has his strength. "Baahar jaake beizzati mat karaana," she instructs him, like a strict mother instructing a son to perform well in his exams.

For a film that spans decades, there are no flashy signposts. But for the pattern of a sweater on a scrawny kid, a film song, a movie poster, or Naghma's graduation from broom to vacuum cleaner, we could be in the same time period. The people stay the same, as does the place, which may be the sole bit of social commentary from Kashyap here – but Gangs of Wasseypur is far too entertaining to be ghettoized as a movie about an issue. It goes after anything and everything in its quest to sweep us through its story, even tongue-in-cheek film references – there's an homage to Sonny's horrifically bloody assassination at the toll booth in The Godfather (right down to the giant billboard on the way), and this film's title probably harks back to Martin Scorsese's New York epic. The only major mistake is the end, which looks towards a sequel. I'll be the first to admit that I may not have the stamina for a five-and-a-half hour film (which is what Wiki tells me), but not knowing it all ends is almost as frustrating. But perhaps this is only in keeping with the film's novelistic ambitions. Just as we'd tire of a doorstop of a book and set it aside for later, Kashyap has made us dog-ear his film.

Review: Gangs Of Aise-Waisepur

Smriti Irani's ridiculously bovine grin welcomes us to the Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhu Bahu Thi house, introducing us to the saccharine-soaked members of the smiley family, before the camera pulls out and the television is silenced by gunfire. And more gunfire. As Pankaj Tripathi's Sultan leads a group of marauders through twisty side-streets, Anurag Kashyap's film has, within seconds, evolved from soap opera to First Person Shooter. We're jolted into its noisy, brutish world. Then, yet another metamorphosis: into a history lesson. And this ' in keeping with the lamentable way most schoolteachers use the subject to provoke yawns and force dates down student throats ' is instantly boring.

And the yawns are the primary issue with Anurag Kashyap's Gangs Of Wasseypur, an impressively ambitious ' and excellently shot ' collection of memorable characters and entertaining scenes, set to a killer soundtrack. The film never recovers from the unforgivably tedious first half-hour, and despite many laudable moments and nifty touches, never quite engages. This is partly because of every Indian filmmaker's befuddling desire to borrow plot-points from The Godfather whenever dealing with crime families, but mostly because Kashyap is defiant in his self-indulgence, piling on more and more when less could have done the job more efficiently. He wouldn't have made a good hitman, clearly; Kashyap is a kingpin.

It must here be remembered that mob bosses, at least the ones Hindi cinema have accustomed us to over the years, have hardly been an efficient lot. They growl orders, surround themselves by those applauding their every maniacal move, and, intoxicated by their own bluster, proceed to boast about their convoluted plot to the protagonist, resulting in their climactic downfall. It is this look-what-I-did windbaggery that constantly weighs down Wasseypur, a highly competent and occasionally enjoyable product, and keeps it from soaring like it should have.

The magnificent Piyush Mishra narrates this sprawling tale, lifting his first two lines almost verbatim from the start of Omkara. We're told about Wasseypur, legendary dacoits, impersonators and trade unions. It is clear from the very onset that coal ' which, we're taught, is light till it soaks up water ' isn't the darkest thing about a colliery, and that we're in for a real blood-feud. And, in keeping with most phrases in this film, we mean literally. Tigmanshu Dhulia's portly and effortlessly sinister Ramadhir Singh kills a fearsome foe and anoints his bereaved son with a drop of his dead father's blood. The son, vowing to keep his head shaved till he finishes Singh off, grows up to be Sardar Khan, played by Manoj Bajpai.

As you can imagine, there's a fair bit of Prakash Mehra and vintage Yash Chopra running through this film's veins, and while Kashyap doffs his hat to each of the directors in style, his film tries too hard to be more: more than just an actioner, more than just a drama, more even than a bloodied saga. This overreaching desire to be an Epic makes it a film that, despite some genuinely stunning individual pieces, fails to come together as a whole. There is much to treasure, but there is more to decry.

Entire sequences that could be compressed into clever throwaway lines are staged in grand, time-consuming detail; while genuinely sharp lines are often repeated, as if too good to use just once. The characters are a wild, fantastical bunch of oddballs and trigger-happy loons, but attempting to do each fascinating freak justice with meaty chunks of screen-time may not even be film's job. Wasseypur may have worked better as a long and intriguing television series, one deserving a spin-off movie only after six seasons. Here it feels too linear, and even too predictable: scenes themselves often surprise, even delight, but the narrative is cumbersome and unexciting. And, as said before, Godfatherly.

And yet it hurts to lambast Wasseypur, because it contains a lot to love. The randy and over-virile Sardar Khan, justifying polygamy as an altruistic gesture to support two families, a man his fiery wife declares should have been born a horse instead. A gangster calling 'shotgun' as he runs to an escape vehicle, and another, unable to pronounce his wife's name, reassuring the newlywed by saying that calling an orange an apple won't change the fruit it is. Love over laundry, and love through Aviator sunglasses. A Mithun-impersonator is made to mock a foe, while a moustached performer lacking the ability to say 'r' sings a Lata Mangeshkar song in falsetto. Two lines, in particular, will stay with me a fair while: "Tum sahi ho; woh marad hai," ("You are right; he is male") said in resigned agreement to a wronged wife, and, ultimately, a spectacular Trishul analogy: about how while Waheeda Rehman is alive, Sanjeev Kumar is invincible.

The cast is mostly spot-on. Richa Chaddha and Jameel Khan are the pick of a very talented bunch, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui (who, Part One's plot promises, will dominate the sequel) burns through the frames he's in. There are admirably few familiar faces in key roles, and while characters age very sporadically ' Tripathi's Sultan, for example, barely ages a day in over four decades ' their growth is very well defined. And the film's best performer is composer Sneha Khanwalkar, whose Keh Ke Loonga is, I repeat, the song of the year. The film picks up a lot of steam in the final act, and the trailer for Part Two (which comes after the end-credits) with a man called Perpendicular treating a razor blade as if it were a stick of Wrigley's, is crackling.

Yet it is the excess that suffocates all the magic, originality dying out for lack of room to breathe. Kashyap gets flavour, setting and character right, but the lack of economy cripples the film. There is a lot of gunfire, but like the fine actors populating its sets, Wasseypur fires too many blanks.

Rating: 2.5 stars