Too Many Guns On The Wall
First of all, this is NOT a review. These are just thoughts collected over a period of watching and re-watching Anurag Kashyap’s Wasseypur movies and pouring them out for the readers. Some might agree, some might agree to disagree. The article is mind bogglingly late but we are lazy pillocks not to watch and review them right after they released. Better late than never! Some thoughts from the movies:
There is a scene in the 2nd chapter of the Gangs of Wasseypur movies in which Sultan Qureshi and his minions attack Faisal Khan’s house in the middle of the night. The family is gathered around the television watching Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi on television, when the crass opening music of the soap is replaced by the sweet melody of bullets fired mindlessly. Faisal commands his family to stay put in an inner room and tries to escape amidst bullets, up the stairs, across a crevice to the next house, down the stairs and outside to the alley. The camera follows him in this 10 minute single take scene expertly conveying the adrenaline rush in such times. But as you think about it, you realise that there was simply no reason at all for Faisal to leave his family in such a calamitous situation. What exactly did he achieve by coming out of the house next door? Also, Anurag Kashyap should know that his true fans will catch every folly of his. Then why did he have to unnecessarily create that 10 minute single take scene when it was clearly visible there were convenient, evenly spaced dark spaces to allow for camera breaks and still maintain a sense of continuity, a gimmick implemented by Hitchcock in “Rope” which the filmmaker himself confessed was a mistake to start with?
That is what the problem is with the entire film in fact. The film, while brilliant in its execution, has an unnecessary ambition to be epic and this very ambition leads to its downfall.
Now I know hardly anything about Dhanbad. And Wasseypur, before watching the film, I thought was a fictional place like Gotham or Hogwarts. Hence I can’t really comment if it is ‘realistic’ or not. But when I usually go for a movie that declares itself to be realistic, I just want it to be subtle and characters to guide their actions truthfully. If I feel a character should have used a swear word, it shouldn’t be the censor certificate or the ambition of 8 Cr more that should be stopping him/her. Otherwise I don’t really care about the abuses or the violence. They for me just do what action set pieces do in a good action film: they should tell me about the character’s frame of mind at that moment and keep me interested and entertained. And GoW 1 succeeded in that aspect for me. Every time Manoj Bajpai’s brilliant Sardar Khan did anything redemptive, it always belonged to the Keh Ke Loonga genre. Hence I could enjoy the sight of him and Asghar chopping away. But in the 2nd film, the action from a Tarantino film was replaced by that of Ek Tha Tiger. Alright I apologize; I did exaggerate but you get the gist. I could never fathom how Sultan Qureshi and Shamshad Khan were so thick that an assassination attempt on the latter could make Sultan break the first rule of Mafia and kill his sister and a Khan Widow! That, I believe is the moment I was convinced the yardstick I carried to measure this film will be left unused at the long end. For me it lost the realistic tag it carried there itself. Also I did not believe Faisal for a moment when he broke down in front of his wife in the dark of the night. It looked like a scene which was just meant to outline the character’s guilt and innocence, and Faisal was such a kickass character without it.
There is a very important theory about theatre by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov which can be expanded to films. Known as the Chekhov Gun, it states “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” It illustrates the importance of foreshadowing in any story. But it also states that you should not introduce any element into the story if it is not important to the tale. And I found many a things to be of such a stature in this life-inspired epic. There are many a characters which are quite wasteful really in the scheme of things, specifically side characters like Shamshad and Iqlaq, the accountant. And I really wouldn’t have minded them so much, but Kashyap in a rare attempt at pizzazz, introduced them too with a montage like Guy Ritchie usually introduces his characters with, and this turned them into probable game-changers. Also I could not really understand why Iqlaq really needed to have a motivation or a backstory explaining his actions in the pre-climax. I personally feel money would have been a big enough motivation. This just jumbled up things unnecessarily and diverted my overused attention from this anyways complicated tale.
One thing I loved about the movie was how Bollywood was an important motivation for most of its heroes. I was literally out of breath while watching the scene in which Faisal tries to impress Mohsina with a combination of Amitabh Bachchan and Rajnikanth inspired shenanigans, I was laughing that hard. Movies and other art forms do play a role in moulding our decisions. Anybody saying otherwise is a fool. In that aspect, this is sort of the anti-Goodfellas. And it is inspired in so many ways by Godfather. But it sort of tries to live up to all the homages. Take that chase scene between Shamshad and Definite for example. It starts off brilliantly when Definite’s ‘katta’ refuses to fire. And it’s all good until Anurag Kashyap decided that his Black Friday chase scene is so awesome that this film couldn’t do without playing by that standard. So in a really weird and stupid scene, both of them are standing at the same petrol pump, waiting for their turn to have their fills in to their chariots of fire.
To conclude it in a nutshell, the Wasseypur movies are masterpieces in their own right. A step ahead for Bollywood, but they do come with their fair share of flaws. And what is a critic without some smug criticism? How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct?
2 Notes/ Hide
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