Mar 19, 2009 08:29 PM
2610 Views
(Updated Mar 19, 2009 08:32 PM)
A film by Anurag Kashyap!! This phrase is enough to arouse any true-blue movie aficionado!! Add to this phrase a few more strings - Rousing success of Dev D and a long wait of 8 years to bring Gulaal on to the screens! Also, when AK calls Gulaal his most personal and angriest film, the expectations then just soar skywards!!
Being an admirer of AK, it has become a sort of a ritual for me to see all his films the first day, first show. Gulaal was no exception...
10'o clock, I stepped into the theater waiting with just bated breath for something to hit me and hit me HARD!! 2 and a half hours later, I was a soul, completely charred, smashed, ridiculed and tortured by the brutal intensity and unabashed anger of the movie.
To say, Gulaal is a love story, or a story of betrayal, ambition, deceit or anything like that is trivialising the attempt that has gone behind the screen to present the times that we live in to us... Let's make it clear at the outset that Gulaal is not yet another story-bound film! Just like all other movies that Kashyap has made, Gulaal too takes the garb of a story to take the audience on a trip to (sub-conscious!) dark alleys, the world that we inhabit. And the world is so screwed up, and so materialistically immaterial and purposeless, that by the end you begin to ponder over the futility over the existence of anything...
Anurag Kashyap doesn't sugarcoat the truth in his films! His films have been a slap on the face of impotent human conscience, and Gulaal is no exception...
On the surface, Gulaal might look like a socio-political commentary and an anti-democracy tale; but it is far from that! Gulaal is actually a visual representation of the classic song 'Yeh Duniya Agar Bhi Mil Bhi Jaaye Toh Kya Hai". After the movie, you really begin to question what's the point of anything in life!!
It is depressing, and it is dark! It is also unapologetic!
Gulaal is everything - a commentary on the state of affairs that permeates the Indian society in the name of Democracy! It is also a tale of ambition (Demand for an Independent Rajputana), It is a tale of an underdog and oppresion on the weaker sects of the society (college-ragging), to the tale of seeking social acceptance (Karan and Kiran's angle!), to creation of social outcasts at the hands of supposedly-moral society (Anuja's character), corrupt souls and pseudo-masculinity (Dukey Bana) and of course manipulations (everyone).
But on a sublime level, it is also a tale of the innane impotency existing within every human being as an alter-ego and our efforts and willingness to quash it and being masculine and our willingness to accept it and be percieved a coward...
It is a tale about confused and bastardized ideologies, to coming to terms with the harsh reality called LIFE!! It is an extremely topical and a timely film that examines India as a collective society that is at the crossroads of everything and how we have nothing of our own from culture to ideologies, to clothes, to drinks and everything...
Each character in Gulaal is carved out brilliantly by AK and the team of writers in an extremely allegorical way to drive home multiple realities of Indian psyche and collective society. The performances - are of the highest order... Something that has become a norm now with AK's films... Kay Kay is just unbelievable as Dukey Bana. Raj Singh is immensely effectively as the meek and gullible Dileep. Ayesha and Jesse Randhawa are spectacular in their characters. Aditya Srivastava is cunning and calculative while being cold-blooded at the same time.
However, the characters of Piyush Mishra, Deepak Dobriyal and Abhimanyu Singh are true examples of craftsmanship!The visual designing of the film is raw, untamed, and extremely chilling. The usage of Red filter and dry landscapes just accentuates the feeling of a blood-dripping, anarchic Rajpur... Club the raw exterior palette of the movie with the neonlit interiors of the abode of Ransa and Dileep; it signifies the detached and an hallucinated-existentialist nature of the characters..'
The sound design like all the previous works of Anurag Kashyap is marvellous... The usage of silences during the murder scenes, or just the room tones is brilliantly done to heighten the tension, the restlessness and the impact of the scene. The music and the poetry in the film takes the shape of the most important character in the movie. Its tremendously visceral and so disturbing, that it gives goose-bumps!! The movie is loaded with acidic dialogues, dipped in dry sarcasm and cynical liners. Kudos to AK - he just cements the fact that he is the best dialogue writer we have in HiFI today.
All in all - Gulaal is stuff that even classics aspire to be! Watch it; not to be missed.
