100 % REVIEW PROOF. Review on Gangs of Wasseypur Part 2

STATUTORY WARNING: This reviewer will not delve too much into the story of the movie on review, reckons a one line description will do just fine. For filmophiles who have suffered for years at the hands of sadistic reviewers including yours truly, all SPOILERS are at the end i.e. are only for those already done watching.

STORY:

Two Muslim families fight a bloody feud in the hinterlands of the country over a span of three generations.

REVIEW: GANGS OF WASSEYPUR- FULL MOVIE

The longest 40 days of sometimes expectant but mostly excruciating wait are finally over. From the day Gangs of Wasseypur part 1 hit screens,a barrage of reviews good, bad and mean appeared everywhere. In this interim and amusingly so, even sides were clearly taken, with total disregard for the fact that it was an incomplete ballad.( for the uninformed nincompoops, a ballad is a narrative set to the tune of music ) Now having seen the conclusion (?) to this behemoth of a movie gives one a more rounded view of GANGS OF WASSEYPUR. Or does it really ? In hindsight one feels that releasing the movie in two parts was a masterstroke for one fears the full version would have become a unmitigated disaster, even maybe sounding a deathknell to the brightest mind in Hindi cinema of today.

Spinning yarns about gangsters, for eons has been de rigueur in Hindi cinema regardless of commercial ambitions. One of the early hits in this genre was Gyan Mukherjee's Ashok Kumar starrer KISMET (1943) and since, the role has brought out the best in actors over the years be it Amitabh Bachchan, (AGNEEPATH) Nana Patekar, (PARINDA) Manoj Bajpai, (SATYA) Irfan Khan,(HAASIL) and Sanjay Dutt. ( VAASTAV) But of late, with even the most staunch fanboys of this genre, Ramgopal Verma & his factory of proteges struggling to conjure magic on screen, it seemed like Hindi cinema had lost the plot and literally so. Gangs of Wasseypur seems to have come at the wrong time, yet by a strange quirk of fate this works in its favour.

First things first. This movie is 100% review proof. Simply put, nothing can prepare you for what unfolds once the lights go off. This is a cult movie in the truest sense of the word. It is almost as if Anurag Kashyap and his team of writers (Zeishan Quadri, Akhilesh Jaiswal, Sachin Ladia) have meticulously chalked down all the unwritten rules of commercial cinema and decided to co** a snook at each one of them. With almost child like glee. Here the lines between good vs bad, hero vs villain are not blurred, they do not exist. Which as a revenge saga is a surefire recipe for disaster for there is no underdog to root for, no gangster with a heart of gold to applaud. (no tadakta bhadakta moll-types even) Yet, around release time word gets spread that this is Anurag Kashyap's most commercially accessible film. Now one gets the deeper connotations behind the song " Keh Ke Loonga "

Zeishan Quadri is the one who started it all. Wearing several hats and mostly pulling it off triumphantly, he is quite the natural actor and God knows our industry needs writers. With only the director's vision as a rallying point and not having a reference point to work with, the technical crew of Sneha Khanwalkar - Music, Varun Grover - Lyrics, Rajeev Ravi  - Cinematography, G.V. Prakash - Background score  and Shweta Venkat - Editor must have had their work cut out. The flipside is that (which one suspects they know in their hearts ) the above mentioned will perhaps never better this feat. Much has been said about the liberal use of profanity in the film. Truth be told most, if not all reviews of Gangs of Wasseypur find it hard to not reference at least one line from the movie. Special shout-out goes to Mukesh Chhabra   ( Casting ) and Wasiq Khan ( Production Design ) for transporting us to the zany world of Wasseypur.

When it comes to Anurag Kashyap the word most commonly bandied around by almost every pseudo critic is I-N-D-U-L-G-E-N-C-E. Really now. Splurging indecent sums of moolah on item songs with actors as glorified sex objects is NOT indulgence, pandering to a star's whims & fancies is NOT AT ALL indulgence, but every time Anurag Kashyap swims against the tide and creates an original piece of work, it MUST be indulgence. For this reviewer over the years BLACK FRIDAY ( his best till now ) GULAAL ( flawed work of genius )  DEV D ( the most original retelling of a legendary character) have shown that this director wants to indulge his audience more than anything else. And in what surely must be a measure of the man's enviable talent, there is but little in the entire 318 mins which leaves the viewer with a sense of deja vu.

The unsung hero of the movie to whom it belongs unequivocally is Tigmanshu Dhulia. Underplaying to a nicety and stealing the film from right under the nose of both his bete noirs in the movie, with the most memorable lines since Gabbar Singh, as Ramadhir Singh, this is the DEBUT of the year. Both Manoj Bajpai ( Bhiku Mhatre still is and sadly will be his best ) and Nawazuddin Siddique have never had so much to sink their teeth into yet at times they seem overwhelmed by the their idiosyncratic roles. In stark contrast the womaniyas played by Huma Qureshi and Richa Chadda ( The wait for the Smita Patil of our times ends ) seem to revel in author backed roles of the kind that are rarely written in our male chauvinistic tinseltown. The superb ensemble in the movie reiterates the fact that these are indeed exciting times at the movies.

SPOILERS

THE CHARACTER: Much like Rananjay Singh aka Ransa in Gulaal, the character of Perpendicular provides the highest highs of the movie, stokes our imagination us briefly before abruptly getting bumped off in a similarly dramatic fashion, right at interval too.

THE LINE: Difficult to pick but the line " Jaise loha lohe ko kaat ta hai waise hi  ... " stands out both for its inimitable humour and sheer irony. The irony here is that the character ( Ramadhir Singh ) who mouths this lines finally dies only because of his own son.

THE SCENE: This is easy. The scene in which the character of Sultan Qureshi shoots his own sister point blank still gives me the willies. It marks the beginning of the bloody end. A close second is the stabbing of Sultan's pehelwan by Sardar Khan.

THE SONG: Yaad teri Aayegi that is sung at the funeral of Sardar Khan. The character of Danish Khan has just exploded and even as the anger builds up in the viewer we abruptly cut to this song and the audience breaks into guffaws. Truly, a K.L.P.D.( for want of a better idiom ) moment for the viewer.