First Post Reviews Anurag Kashyap's Facebook note

If you have grown up guzzling Bollywood films as if they are as important to your survival as cutting chai is, you're intimately familiar with the rituals involved in the death of the 'villain'. The hero charges at the villain, yelling. You may have been busy laughing/cringing and didn't notice, but he is also multi-tasking - yelling, rolling eyes, talking and killing. Oh, also let's not forget that loud, banging, shrieking background score declaring the winner.

Now cut to the conclusion of Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur 2. Faizal Khan (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) corners Ramadhir Singh (Timangshu Dhulia). There is no shrieking, no 'I'll have my badla' lines, no ominous background music. Singh knows what's coming, he motions Khan to hold fire for a bit, plonks himself down on a toilet seat. Khan starts sprinkling him with bullets, his face smug, alight with a slight hint of a smile - you know, the kind you'd get if you were to be photographed right after consuming a satisfying beef burger in Mumbai today. A delicious EDM track plays in the background.

As you watch gobsmacked - an action climax stripped off the sound and farcical fury of Bollywood - you probably pat Kashyap's back in your head. For having the kind of guts that very few filmmakers wanting to make it big in Bollywood have. It's probably the same guts that spurred Bombay Velvet - a thriller-meets-musical-meets Bollywood potboiler of a film. Now, while the idea sounds exciting in a line, the way it unfurled in Kashyap's film left a lot of its viewers disappointed, the writer included. Most of us took to social media to sigh aloud.

However, Kashyap responded to the criticism in style. He wrote a Facebook post, asking people who didn't like the film to revisit it again and declared that he stood by the film and would change nothing about it. He also exhorted his friends and colleagues and likened their clan to that of gladiators - who fought bravely in the face of adversity.

He says that he neither cares about applause, nor about brickbats. He makes a very telling distinction - possibly between the filmmaker and the audience, maybe the ones who didn't like Bombay Velvet especially. He mentions that it is the people who make films who have the guts to experiment, who face adversities, who follow their hearts. So effectively, they being the risk-takers and naturally by implication the superior beings, shouldn't be swayed by criticism. "its (sic) us who go out there and risk it, its us who choose not to take the easy route, its us who stand tall when they let the lions loose on us, we are and will be the gladiators, lets just keep playing the sport," he writes.

Some responses on the post itself chides Kashyap for defending a film which didn't cut ice with a majority of people who watched.

Kashyap's response might disappoint his audience - it seems as if the director is telling you that it's your fault that you didn't like the film, perhaps, even your lack of intellect is to be blamed.

He decides to qualify his narrative as 'shocking' - as something that's entirely too unfamiliar for an average Bollywood fan to handle. Which is untrue. Kashyap's most un-Bollywood films - like Gangs of Wasseypur and Ugly - had been unanimously praised on social media and for the right reasons. Bombay Velvet on the other hand, is strikingly familiar. It actually drags the old machinery that runs Bollywood potboilers out, dusts it and gives it a fresh coat of paint and asks us to believe that we have been treated to something entirely new. Bombay Velvet is a film that underestimates its audience's intelligence, not the other way round. That's why Kashyap's little note, almost threatens to cross the line between confidence and arrogance.

And the giant that Bombay Velvet is, it won't sink without a noise either, like many of its predecessors. From a Ram Gopal Verma taking pot shots at Kashyap to elaborate conspiracy theories that reviewers with personal vendetta against Kashyap has trashed a thoroughly likable movie and hence turned audiences away started doing the rounds of the internet. However, Bollywood is serious business in India and such reactions are expected.

What was perhaps, the most interesting bit of the drama that ensued with the film's release was its director's response. Filmmakers rarely acknowledge negative feedback about their films in India right after it has released. They don't do it in public at least. An admission that there have been people who didn't like a film is equated with the film being a failure, almost immediately. In fact, what most other filmmakers do is organise lavish 'success parties' - pictures of which are splashed all over the media - even before a film has completed a week's run at the box office.

This is where Kashyap has broken a stereotype and it's important. While he says that the feedback doesn't matter to him, he has explicitly acknowledged that a greater number of people disliked his film. "a lot of people do not connect with it and a small number of people did", he writes. While he doesn't say that maybe he and his team too need to introspect what went wrong with the film, he at least acknowledges that something did.

You may want to accuse Kashyap of arrogance, but it is also important to note here that Kashyap is also the leader of a huge number of people who have put long, long hours into making this film. As the one who leads them, this pep talk from him was perhaps expected and Kashyap is right is giving his team a virtual hug on Facebook as they face a lot of public criticism.

However, since it has been labelled as his 'response' to criticism towards Bombay Velvet, it runs the risk of being made out as a snub to people who didn't like the film. One in which the director leaves no space for a contrarian opinion about his work even from a well-wisher. That could easily be made out to be a sign of hubris. We can only hope it isn't.