GANGS OF WASSEYPUR: Return of the Kingpins

One of my first posts on this blog was a response to a first viewing of Gangs of Wasseypur, Part 1, and two and a half years later, the full two-part, 320-minute film has finally gotten a U.S. theatrical release. I took this rare opportunity to catch both parts back to back at Lincoln Center in NYC, where the film is playing for the rest of the week.

There's nobody working in Indian cinema--or maybe any cinema--who uses musical numbers better than director Anurag Kashyap does. First, he's not afraid to include music, and a lot of it. Second, he gets the best people in the business to write the new material (here, the great Sneha Khanwalkar is music director) and also weaves in a few classic Bollywood songs. And third, he uses the score brilliantly to comment on and contrast with what he's showing onscreen.

The outstandingly profane* number "Kehke Lunga," for example, underscores what Part 1's opposing strongmen, Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia, also a well-known director) and Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee), are doing to each other and to all the little people they mangle with so little thought:

The full version of the film is admittedly imperfect. Part 2 may be overpopulated; is it necessary to introduce two major new characters an hour from the end of a five-hour film? Also, Sardar Khan's third son, the one between Faizal and Perpendicular, vanishes without a trace--his presence in the story at all seems like a vestige of a storyline not quite completely left on the cutting-room floor. The narration by family retainer Nasir (Piyush Mishra**) sometimes exposits at excessive length to introduce complications that vanish in a few minutes and might have been omitted without much loss to the film. Blips like these are evidence that the plot's layers and layers and layers of complexity aren't completely under anyone's control.

But this feels like quibbling. My overwhelming feeling after watching the full five-hour, seventy-year, three-generation story is that it all went by awfully quickly, the way life does. Perhaps the unspooling narrative aims to demonstrate that nobody from Anurag Kashyap on down can keep track of all the petty slights and monstrous deeds that repeatedly bring repercussions in Wasseypur. At any rate, I sure can't, even after seeing both parts more than once. The one sure thing is that there's going to be a lot of killing, most of it for really bad reasons.

I love Manoj Bajpayee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in pretty much every film of theirs I've seen, and they are typically terrific as a father-son duo of fuckup kingpins. As mentioned in my 2012 post, in Part 1 Sardar Khan makes a series of disastrous personal choices that enrage two steely women, Nagma (Richa Chadda) and Durga (Reema Sen). Sardar fears their reactions, but probably not enough. Nawazuddin's Faizal Khan is the lead in Part 2, a stoner who cares only about his chillum and his girl, Mohsina (Huma Qureshi), whose love of 1970s action movies matches his own. When Faizal finally exacts vengeance for the murder of his sometimes-deadbeat dad, it's because his mother Nagma insists--and also because he's realized that in the movie of his life he's been the sidekick (or as he says, not Amitabh Bachchan but Shashi Kapoor).

The reduced screen time for Richa Chadda and Reema Sen in Part 2 is a bit of a disappointment, but perhaps Nagma and Durga's declining influence is a necessary result of Faizal's decision to be more like Amitabh (well, except much more enthusiastically bloodthirsty). Until the end of the film, Mohsina seems mostly OK with Faizal's turning himself into the star of the show. But then she's pregnant, and suddenly it must seem to her that being married to good-boy Shashi instead of to avenging Amitabh might not be such a terrible thing.

The rage of Nagma and Durga continues to infect their sons, and there is plenty of blowback from the feuds that they've helped perpetuate. The ongoing bloodshed touches all the women in the extended household, even those who aren't machinating behind the scenes. A high point of Part 2 is the song "Taar Bijli," performed by Nagma for the women celebrating Mohsina's wedding to Faizal. Nagma has been widowed by gang violence, as have other women in the room. Her voice cracks and tears run down her face. But she keeps singing. The younger women comfort Nagma while continuing to dance.

The film whirls on at a dizzying pace, tossing out romance and hilarity and fury and horror without leaving the audience time to breathe. The final scene at last allows a few characters to escape the maelstrom, but without illusions. With cast changes, deadlier guns, and updated Bollywood ringtones, the story seems likely to go on for generations to come.

*Google it if you want to know exactly how obscene the lyrics are--or just see it in the print playing in theaters now, which (I'm thrilled to report) includes song subtitles!

**Piyush Mishra also serves as lyricist for a number of songs, including the raunchy one mentioned in the previous footnote.

TALAASH: Down and Out in Mumbai

Talaash ("Search") is a detective story that ultimately seems more interested in human drama than in whatever solution there is to the film's central mystery. While there are some thrills in this thriller, it's the hard-luck subplots that give it staying power--and although many of these stories get more "closure" than a strict adherence to realism would allow, that, too, can be satisfying for those willing to suspend disbelief.

Director Reema Kagti, who co-wrote story and screenplay with Zoya Akhtar, is careful to cast light on the people toiling in the shadows of the starstruck city of Mumbai even as she follows a high-profile police investigation. The chorus of the jazzy song playing under the opening credits says that "the smile is a lie" as it shows prostitutes climbing into cars and addicts drinking clouds of smoke. This beginning has a whiff of the stunningly fine opening credit sequence of Zoya Akhtar's own Luck by Chance, which also featured unsung, unglamorous people who don't often appear in glossy Bollywood films (and which remains one of my all-time favorite scenes), but Zoya's images of studio-set laborers show real people doing real jobs; in contrast, the hookers and junkies in Talaash look more like junior artistes wearing prop-room rags and glitter. Still, the cynical lyrics (by legendary film writer Javed Akhtar, who also happens to be Zoya's father) and moody look create an effective setup for the first scene.

Studio construction workers in Zoya Akhtar's Luck by Chance

The switch from languid addicts to action is sudden: on a deserted stretch of Seaface Road, a speeding luxury car makes a sudden right turn and plunges over the embankment into the water below. The car's driver turns out to have been fictional Bollywood hero Armaan Kapoor, and his high-profile death spurs a police investigation headed by detective Suri Shekhawat (Aamir Khan, in a dramatic moustache). Suri talks smoothly to the rich and connected, but he is just as sincere with the terrified peons--the star's driver and spotboy, inexplicably asked by the hero not to accompany him in the car that night--who have the worn-down look of people accustomed to serving the powerful.

Rani and Aamir falling apart

We get repeated reminders that the story's interest is held less by the flashy crash and more by the human-scaled tragedies that happen all around it. One subplot concerns the unraveling marriage of Suri and his wife (Rani Mukherji), who are grieving the recent drowning death of their young son. She's seeing a therapist, but he's the one who can't sleep, dozing off only to enter repeated dream-world replays of the minutes just before the boy's death, and to see himself preventing the tragic outcome. Then he wakes up. 

In another subplot, in a part of Mumbai that might as well be on

Nawazuddin plotting a way out

another planet far, far away from middle-class sorrow, lame Tehmur (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the errand-boy of an abusive pimp, overhears things he's not supposed to know. Tehmur develops a brazen plan for working the angles and earning himself a chance for a happy-ever-after with the oldest of the prostitutes (Sheeba Chadha, also from Luck by Chance). Nawazuddin, who's been earning justified accolades in an amazing range of parts, plays the role as partly heroic and partly despicable, a character whose empathy for other miserable wretches goes only so far.

Connecting these miles-apart stories is the beautiful streetwalker Rosie (Kareena Kapoor), who spots the cop on his sleepless, aimless nightly rounds. She seems to be eyeing him as a potential customer, and for him she is, at first, merely a source of information about his case. But there's an underlying connection that isn't the one I expected. Rosie sees Suri as more kindred spirit and confidante than potential lover--and this is not the only parallel between their characters and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam's Chhoti Bahu and Bhoothnath.*

Eena Meena Kareena

When I watched Talaash a second time knowing the all the secrets that the film reveals as it unfolds, I did start to notice a few ragged edges. The characterizations rely more on star-power than on careful writing; Kareena Kapoor is a bit too upmarket to disappear into the role of streetwalker Rosie, Aamir Khan's character is more interesting as a bereaved dad than as a rather movie-typical upright cop, and Rani Mukerji's wise, suffering woman might be generic in other hands. But star-power can put audiences in a mood to forgive a lot of sketchiness, and it's so megawatt here that it's often enough.

The music (by Ram Sampath, who did such great work on Delhi Belly) didn't wow me, but a creepy repeated three-note motif--I swear it's the creaky-swing music from the scene in Sholay when the thakur returns home to find his family murdered--got under my skin like a fragment of a dream.

And I also couldn't shake a couple of small, telling moments from Talaash's matter-of-fact depictions of life among the sex workers and pimps. In one scene, we get a casual glimpse of a group of prostitutes asking Tehmur the servant for a drink of water--and in response, he passes the water bottle to them through the bars of the jail-like cell inside which they are imprisoned. Later a young woman whose boyfriend has been killed is dragged, wailing and protesting, back to work for the madam the boyfriend had paid for her freedom. Such moments aren't belabored, but they still manage to reveal something about what the bottom rung looks like and why it's so hard to imagine a way out.

Talaash has grim moments, but it isn't a grim movie. It's exciting and twisty and mysterious and really quite entertaining. But even if a few of the characters end up with something that looks suspiciously like a happy ending, there's no denying that this thriller has a sad, sad core. The star presence and some only-in-the-movies plot devices reassure us: relax, it's only a story! But I'm guessing that the most depressing parts are probably true.

*No, I can't tell you any more than this.

KAHAANI: The Wrath of Vidya

It’s been two months since I wrote a word here about an Indian movie, in spite of promising myself that I’d post at least weekly. Partly the silence was due to year-end busy stuff, partly it was due to my not seeing any Indian films for a while (!!), and partly, I suppose, it was due to disappointment at this kind of dreck. But even though my last two posts were responses to some truly soul-deadening cinema, since the end of 2012 I have watched (and re-watched) quite a few good Indian films. And after the performances I witnessed late last year, how wonderful it’s been to see so many actors actually doing, and apparently enjoying, their jobs—even Salman, who has had a tendency to phone it in since at least the beginning of this century.

So let me talk about a movie in which a passel of actors were clearly having a fine time, with the result that I did, too. First and foremost, let’s talk Vidya Balan. Many filmgoers seem to have a whole new respect for her interesting career—one that has actually gotten more interesting since she passed 30, which, for a woman in films of any continent, is a pretty cool achievement. How much fun she (and everyone else) seemed to be having in 2010’s Ishqiya:

And how I loved the first half of The Dirty Picture, though I was really disappointed with the sudden downfall-slash-comeuppance that awaited Vidya’s sexpot actress character at the end….

Well, now we have Sujoy Ghosh's Kahaani, which features Vidya’s best performance yet in a wild Kolkata thrill ride. (Look away, spoiler-haters!)

Mrs. Vidya and Rana

It’s Durga Puja time in Kolkata, and all the city is preparing for the big event. Vidya is Mrs. Vidya Bagchi, who has brought her giant pregnant belly all the way from London, where she’s a computer expert, to the mysterious lanes and zero-star hotels and giant data centers of Kolkata, where her husband was last seen. Or so she says. Nobody she meets can corroborate her story, quite. The police station is her first destination on arrival, but most of the cops assume that her husband just doesn’t want to be found. The one sweet cop, Satyoki, nicknamed Rana (the endearing Parambrata Chattopadhyay), feels sorry for her and starts volunteering to drive her around to look for Mr. Bagchi. Her big eyes and her way with children appeal to him. Soon she’s fixing his computer, and then, before he knows it, he’s breaking into storage rooms on her behalf.

Creepy, na?

Converging on Vidya’s trail is the bespectacled, balding insurance agent Bob Biswas (Saswata Chatterjee). “Kolkata is a dangerous city, very dangerous,” he tells Mrs. Vidya after he’s just prevented her from falling in front of an oncoming train. He is also the person who pushed her. Bob may have a sweet face and a soul-crushing day job, complete with a younger, type-A boss who delights in berating him, but he’s also an ace hitman who has been gunning down all the people who have given Mrs. Vidya information about her missing husband. Characters in movies don’t get much more entertainingly terrifying than this.

A. Khan. But which one??

And ooh, let’s not forget A. Khan, an intelligence agent from Delhi who shows up to nip the investigation in the bud. He doesn’t want Mrs. Vidya sniffing around Kolkata any more than Bob Biswas seems to. A. Khan is all sharp edges and shouts; the taller, softer Kolkata cops bend tentatively over him as he swaggers past them, like alpine meadow-flowers buffeted by an icy wind. He's focused on the big picture and cares less, much less, about keeping Mrs. Vidya unharmed. (This ethical conflict resonates a bit, as we've seen a horrible gas attack on Kolkata's Metro at the start of the film and know that preventing another mass killing must be a priority--but then Movie Ethics kick in to remind us that Khan is talking about letting Vidya Balan die, a thing that must not be allowed to occur.) A. Khan is brought to vibrant life by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, another actor who’s suddenly commanding everyone’s respect, and just as in Gangs of Wasseypur, it’s hard to take your eyes off him here. The Mrs. Vidya/Khan standoff provides a roiling undercurrent to the flow of the story.

And it is a story, as the film's title reminds us. That gnawed at me, and Khan’s suspicions about Mrs. Vidya wormed their way into my thoughts, too. Clearly she's inventing things. Clearly there are things she's not telling anyone. For a disturbing few minutes, I was wondering whether she would turn out to be another Aaron Stampler. But though Mrs. Vidya lies to almost everyone in the film, her motive for trickery turns out to be payback, not evildoing. First, her helpless pregnant-lady routine takes in all the men she meets, and then she rises up in the midst of the gloriously chaotic Durga Puja festival to reveal the avenging goddess she's been hiding all along. Woooooo!!

Sure, there are some imperfect moments—mostly involving the aforementioned office-plundering and some computer-hacking that seems either too easily accomplished or too pointless—but those went by so quickly that I was fine with shrugging "whatever" and falling back into the story. Yes, the film should have ended before the thuddingly heavy-handed voiceover that s-p-e-l-l-s o-u-t the Durga comparison that even I, a non-resident non-Indian, had figured out (and had felt quite smart about doing, thank you, which made the Amitabh* Let Me Splain moment even more irritating); I kind of wished I had shut it off five minutes earlier.**

But all in all, I was happy to be bowled over by the sheer force of actors having a grand time playing great characters—and by the film's other major character, the charismatically crumbling city of Kolkata. In the end, the Durga statues sink into the Hooghly, and Mrs. Vidya melts into a crowd of sindoor-smeared, identically clad women. But as those left behind realize, Mrs. Vidya's Kahaani isn't like all the rest.

*And you know I love you, Big B. 

**On the other hand, if I hadn't stayed for the end credits, I'd have missed this rather pretty song. Lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore. Voice by Amitabh. 

GANGS OF WASSEYPUR: Meet the New Boss

The New York Indian Film Festival provided a sneak peek at Part 1 of Anurag Kashyap’s forthcoming release Gangs of Wasseypur. Audiences at Cannes saw it as a two-part, five-hour film edited down from an eight-hour first cut.

Manoj Bhajpayee in action

Well, if The Godfather, Parts 1 and 2, took five hours to tell, why should this one take less? Gangs is a rich, sprawling, decades-long tale of a feud encompassing several generations of families—two descended from competing train-robbers and a third clan controlling the lucrative local coal-mining industry. As of this screening, Part 1 wasn’t completely coherent as a standalone story, but it’s a thrilling ride.

Gangs opens with a very one-sided shootout that ends when the gunmen conclude that Faisal Khan is dead. He isn’t, and Part 2 will surely connect this bang-up opening to the rest of the story. But the remainder of Part 1 explains only a part of how Faisal gets to this point. And then the film rewinds to the 1940s, when Faisal’s grandfather, Shahid Khan, begins robbing British trains under the nose of bandit king and fellow Wasseypur native Sultana.

Although the characters come and go from Wasseypur over a thirty-year period in Part 1, they all remain tied to the place, to each other, and to traditions that predate them, in spite of the gusto with which they try to adopt the role of independent operators. In each generation there's a lone underdog who thinks it’s unfair for others to have so much more than he has, yet never minds becoming the man with more than his share. The first-generation character is Shahid, who believes that shared local ties will protect him from Sultana’s wrath and who cheerfully swipes loot that Sultana sees as rightfully his—and sells the stolen goods so cheaply that other, poorer neighbors can’t compete in the market. After Shahid turns to an "honest" job at the coal mine at his wife’s behest, he ends up killing the mine owner’s enforcer and then stepping into his place as the man who makes sure that the villagers continue to do the mine company’s bidding.

Shahid’s violent death causes his swollen sense of entitlement to pass to his son, Sardar Khan (the great Manoj Bajpayee). Sardar spends the next two decades or so exacting little bits of vengeance against the wealthy mine owner (Tigmanshu Dhulia, better known as the director of Paan Singh Tomar and Sahib Biwi aur Gangster) and his puffed-up idiot of a son.

Sardar Khan is a larger-than-life character who seems to feel that whatever he wants at that moment is absolutely his due. He is fortunate to be surrounded with loyal friends, but he meets his match in his bride Nagma, played with ferocious relish by Richa Chadda. We get a glimpse of her steel and fury when she bursts into the local brothel, pregnant and wielding a large knife, when he doesn’t come home one night. When he goes to jail, she trains their oldest son to march in with a sneer and a tiffin packed with bomb-making supplies. But her loyalty, unlike that of the family retainers, stops short of allowing him to take a second wife (Reema Sen) who is a Bengali Hindu.

Nawaz: Irrfan + Aamir,
with Amitabh eyewear

Nagma and Sardar have three sons, and the middle is Faisal, who will have so many enemies when he grows up. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Faisal is a pot-smoking wastrel who spends his days hanging out—where else?—at the local cinema (we see him at Trishul, falling for the girl who loves Amitabh as much as Faisal does).

So many characters, so many crimes. Nobody is innocent except, perhaps, the impoverished local miners, farmers, and fishermen, who are inevitably the ones most ripped off by the swaggering gang lords.

And so many songs. Kashyap has shown that he’s open to eclectic wildness from his music director (Amit Trivedi’s Dev.D soundtrack paved bold new paths in Indian film, and this time Sneha Khanwalkar--whose work on Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! made a terrific impact--does heroic work with songs both old and new). There are fourteen songs in Part 1, with ten or so more promised in Part 2. There are old Bollywood songs performed at weddings (“Salaam-e-Ishq”), reggae-tinged folk songs performed by travelers on a train, and perfectly suited new numbers that show how the right music and the right film story can work together to form something greater than the sum of the parts.

I can guess how this story ends, but I can't wait to see it play out! Meanwhile, here’s the trailer: