Saturday, August 11, 2012
Gangs of Wasseypur 2
Back To The Grind
Anurag Kashyap wanted to tell the story of the gangs of the Dhanbad coal
belt from the days of the British Raj to the present, but could not compress it
into one film. So Gangs of Wasseypur 2 came about.
It doesn’t seem to be the end of Kashyap’s wish to document the story of
organised crime. GOW 2 connects to Mumbai, and it will be no surprise if a few more films
on other gangs ultimately connect to Black
Friday. The opening scene of GOW comes in the middle of GOW 2 (Quentin Tarantino’s non-linear
style in Pulp Fiction inspired many filmmakers),
so Kashyap does not believe in the A to Z manner of storytelling.
Those who like GOW, will
probably like this one too, even though the violence is even more and
disturbingly casual. A man gets shot
right before the eyes of a cop. One reads
of the lawlessness in Bihar-Jharkhand, but still, there is at least a pretence
of policing The first film set the dark
tone and established the enmity between two clans and the politician, Ramadhir
Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) who keeps fuelling it.
Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpai) is dead, and his sons now take over. When the
hot headed Danish (Vineet Kumar) is killed, the dopehead Faizal (Nawazuddin
Siddiqui) heads the clan, while the lisping younger brother Perpendicular
(Aditya Kumar) runs his own small
extortion racket. Nothing really happens except the Khan side and the Sultan
(Pankaj Tripathi) side butchering each other.
In between Faizal manages to woo and marry the sharp and flirty Mohsina
(Huma Qureshi), who gets to sing the funky Frusti-ao
nahi moora song. The best song—a wedding
ditty-- goes to the widowed Naghma Begum (Richa Chadda), whose face remains
unlined even when she is really old. But like so many other characters, she is
also pushed to the side. Some new entrants, like Guddu and Ikhlaq are just guns
for hire, to swell the numbers in Faizal’s gang. In the last film, there were
startling characters like the quiet assassin in Benaras, in this film, there
are none. Definite (Zeishan Quadri), the
son of the Bangalan (Sardar Khan’s mistress from the first film) turns up with
his own agenda.
Anurag Kashyap’s skills as a filmmaker are never in doubt, even in the
general chaos and grunginess of the setting, he manages a visual flair and
authenticity. He has an amazing control
of his craft and can bring out the best in his team—cast and crew. Now if only
he’d get over his fascination for random, macho violence and make a film one
can admire... and like.
Labels: Cinemaah
