Movie review- Gangs of Wasseypur

Cutting short my Sunday afternoon siesta, when I dragged myself to the multiplex to watch ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, I had not expected the hall to be full. It was not only full, it comprised almost exclusively of men, most of them in large groups. I could sense my wife getting uncomfortable as the movie progressed, because it was replete with all conceivable content that it takes to qualify a movie for an ‘A’ certificate- Violence, sex, and gaalis. And these days watching a movie in expensive multiplexes does not guarantee decent audience, and the theatre continuously rang with vulgar laughter, cat-calls and whistles.  Thankfully we had left our daughter at home owing to the ‘A’ certificate.

I had high hopes of Anurag Kashyap, and this was the first of his directorial ventures that I saw. I have been meaning to see Dev D for long, but haven’t been able to do so.

Even if the best of the cooks sets out to bake a cake with all the right ingredients, the cake can still get spoilt by over-baking. This is exactly what happened with Gangs of Wasseypur (GOW). Anurag had the perfect story-line, a set of brilliant actors, and he himself is a good director, but he simply overdid everything, including the length of the film. While watching a film if I find myself waiting for the interval in the first half, or waiting for the movie to end in the second half, I declare the movie as boring. And this happened with GOW in both halves. So, I was rather surprised to find the movie boring when everything about it was good- The rawness of rural Bihar; the ruthlessness of the gangs; the violence; the sleaze and the works. Then what went wrong?  It was simply a case of too much of everything. The story spanned over three generations, and I don’t think there was a particular need to do so, since the truth about the scenario in mafia-ridden rural Bihar could have been driven home in a single-generation story as well, with interspersed short flashes into the past. There was nothing drastically new happening in any of the generations, and on the contrary, there was added unnecessary confusion with a plethora of characters getting added with each generation. The violence was simply too much, nauseating, in fact. Murders were committed through the movie practically every ten minutes, and the lead actor (Manoj Bajayee) was shown murdering at least a dozen people with his own hands, ruthlessly cutting down people at times, choking bathroom drains with their blood and body-parts. There was no need for such garish display of violence, and certainly not in this quantity. The sleaze was in form of an explicit adulterous sex scene involving Manoj Bajpayee and Reema Sen, who plays his mistress, and also in the form of overt dialogues about sex between Bajpayee and his wife. As expected, GOW was full of cuss-words, the worst sounding ones heard regularly in the bad-lands of north India. In order to show the crude reality of the gang-ridden towns of Bihar, Anurag left no holds barred, and I dare say he even exaggerated a bit.

The actual story can be summarized in just a few lines: Though the tale spans through three generations, it is all about rivalry between two major groups of Wasseypur. The fight is for power, control over the local coal mafia, and all other illegal activities like kidnapping, murder, protection for money etc etc. Manoj Bajpayee is the middle generation of the Khan family, which is in constant fight with the local political family of the Singhs- mainly Ramdhari Singh, who uses another local Muslim group of Qureshis (butchers) against the Khans. One major flaw in the film is that though the rivalry between the families starts in 1941, in the generation of Bajpayee’s dad Shahid Khan and Ramdhari singh, Ramdhari Singh does not age much even when Shahid Khan’s grandsons become goons themselves in 2004. Meanwhile, Ramdhari Singh’s family is shown to be still stuck in the second generation. Another shortcoming is that police and administration is practically non-existent in the whole movie. Except for a few scenes where the lower-rung policemen are shown behaving timidly before the gangsters, it appears that law is practically non-existent in rural Bihar. It is agreed that there is utter lawlessness in the Wasseypurs of India, but it is not that the law-keepers don't exist. In fact, they have their own sinister role to play in the police-politician-gangster nexus. Therefore, while no one expected the good cops to be around, the rogue policemen are badly missed in this story. 

There is no flaw in the performances, and all actors have done their parts extremely well. The direction is bang on and the cinematography is beautiful. Still, the movie would have been more watchable if everything were a bit toned down, including the length. All in all, watching this one wasn’t a very good experience for me. I wouldn’t recommend this one at all, and is a strict no-no for the weak-hearted. The numbers with folk touch are good and I plan to include some of them on my playlist.    

My rating: 2 on 5