Filmi Geek

Kahaani 2 (2016)

Dir. Sujoy Ghosh

For Sujoy Ghosh to call this film Kahaani 2 inevitably sets certain expectations, and Kahaani 2 inevitably fails to meet them. It is a competent and entertaining thriller in its own right, but it lacks the freshness and riveting energy of Kahaani, lacks the vibrant sense of place, lacks most of the qualities that made Ghosh's 2012 work such an intense and special film. Even Vidya Balan is less compelling here, without the trembling intensity and sense of rage just bitten back that made her fill the screen and drive Kahaani through its terrific twist and conclusion. 

In particular, in comparison to its outstanding predecessor, Kahaani 2 bears a structural weakness that makes the twist and reveal disappointing. (I don't consider it a spoiler to say that there is a twist and reveal, because that's part of the expectation Ghosh sets by choosing the name. And I won't disclose any of the facts of the twist and reveal here.) In Kahaani, there is only one key fact concealed from the viewer that is revealed in the climax - that Vidya Bagchi isn't really pregnant. That one new fact unravels nearly everything in the narrative, and this is shown from flashbacks, in the style of The Usual Suspects, to moments from earlier in the movie that take on entirely new significance in light of the newly revealed information. In Kahaani 2, though, the structure is almost opposite. Rather than presenting one momentous fact that forces startling reinterpretation of everything that came before, the reveal comes in the form of quasi-flashbacks to moments that had been omitted, moments had simply not been shown to the audience as the story unfolded in its apparently straightforward sequence. It is a legitimate enough narrative technique, but it feels cheaper, lazier; it is inherently less satisfying.* 

Kahaani 2 also lacks an anchoring sense of place, the way Calcutta provided a thrilling, shifting presence in the earlier film. Kahaani 2 is mostly set in Chandannagar, a small city in West Bengal, but to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there's no there there; it could be anywhere. Even one of the film's characters, Rashmi (Manini Chadha), wife of the slightly disgraced police officer at the center of the film, Inderjeet Singh (Arjun Rampal), complains repeatedly of the boring sleepiness of Chandannagar compared to Calcutta, as if she is apologizing for the film's failure to replicate this superlative aspect of Kahaani. The scenes from the hill station Kalimpong provide a little more visual interest, but not much in the way of atmosphere.  

But it isn't entirely fair to keep picking at all the ways in which Kahaani 2 is not Kahaani. Mostly, it is a serviceable and entertaining movie. Arjun Rampal is never a very expressive actor, and the most one can hope from him, typically, is that he does not ruin the movie one has used him in. He achieves that here, though he adds little, considering how much time he spends on screen. There is a fairly amusing collection of side characters, such as a couple of comical police officers, or the passport forger Goopy who makes a brief but funny appearance. (One excellent blink-if-you-miss-it sight gag occurs during the sequence in which Inderjeet Singh chases Goopy through his warehouse; one room they hurry through contains an easel and a collection of evidently forged masterpieces, such as the Mona Lisa.) The contract killer of this film is no Bob Biswas ("ek minute..."), but she's entertaining in her own right, a frighteningly cold-blooded badass done in by her completely mercenary approach to her job. And Jugal Hansraj as the villain is pleasantly disorienting, as his face still calls to mind the sensitive tear-jerking cutie of Masoom.

And then, of course, there is Vidya Balan. Though she gives a less crackling performance than Kahaani, to be fair to her, this movie's "Bidya" is a less crackling character. In Kahaani 2, she is an anxious, frumpy survivor of childhood sexual abuse, frizzy-haired and tired-looking, and the very ordinariness of her makes both her character's wounds and her occasionally questionable judgment accessible and sympathetic. Balan's character seems an extreme introvert whose life and circumstances push her badly outside her comfort zone; a damaged woman who has fled Calcutta and her past for an isolated life in Kalimpong, she nevertheless comes into relationships and situations that have life-altering consequences. With that theory of her character in mind, Balan is both effective and affecting.** 

The points Kahaani 2 has to make about childhood sexual abuse are important, but occasionally heavy-handed; one speech of Vidya's on the subject is especially indulgent. Still, it's rare for a film to take on the most adult aspects of the scars that such abuse leaves.  Highway covered the restlessness, the fractured sense of self and broken trust that often comes from it, and though I hated many things about that movie, it was a fairly sensitive handling of the issue. Kahaani 2, though, points its camera straight on at the lasting damage abuse can do to the victim's sexuality and relationships once she is grown. Sujoy Ghosh deserves full marks for taking that on.

* Kahaani 2 suffers too from its use of that hoariest of cinematic plot devices, the debilitating automobile accident. Car accidents that kill or incapacitate key characters at key narrative moments are, I think, disappointingly lazy storytelling. (I was about to say the one I'd seen most recently was in Kapoor and Sons, but then I remembered that I rewatched An Affair to Remember a month or two back. And it was probably already a hoary device by then, in 1957.) 

 ** One thing that Vidya Balan does well, and has done well in many ways in everything from the first Kahaani to Bobby Jassoos to Ghanchakkar and even The Dirty Picture, is allow herself to be completely unglamorous, and here again there is absolutely nothing glamorous about her character. I read that in the early stages of the film's development, Aishwarya Rai was considered for this role, and perhaps the mediocrity of Jazbaa - a story in which Rai, like Balan here, searches for a kidnapped daughter - is a measure of how wrong her perfect-haired, perfect-bodied glamour would have been for Kahaani 2.

Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (2015)

प्रेम रतन धन पायो

Dir. Sooraj Barjatya

Some of the most awkward moments of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo come when it tries to be progressive and modern while still hewing to its regressive Rajshri roots.  When our hero Prem (Salman Khan, of course) learns that the princess Maithili (Sonam Kapoor) has slept with her royal fiancé before the marriage was solemnized, he tries to look shocked, then tries to shrug his shoulders in acceptance. The whole scene falls flat; it's not cute or hip, it's just uncomfortable for both Khan and audience. Later, when Maithili makes it clear to Prem that she wants to have sex with him (he's a doppelganger stand-in for the real fiancé-prince, incapacitated by an assassination attempt), Prem just looks stern and pained. Is he wrestling with his own desire for Maithili, a temptation to take advantage of his resemblance to the prince, and of her?  Is he a little repulsed that the woman he idealizes and adores is so ready to succumb to an immoral desire?  The scene doesn't make it clear, and that inscrutability may be a bit of sleight of hand by director Sooraj Barjatya - you, dear viewer, may supply whatever interpretation best suits your worldview.

Points to Barjatya, anyway, for daring to acknowledge (under the Rajshri banner no less) that an adult woman in 2015 might have sexual desires and be bold and aggressive about acting on them.  And then some points docked, at the end, for having the royal family - including the recovered prince - offer Maithili to Prem as their gift to him. What could better underscore that women are mere property to be negotiated for and transferred as their families see fit?  Maithili gets her happy ending, but only because her fiancé and her grandmother are willing to hand her over to another man.  

Admittedly, life is different for royal scions, even in the 21st century when their regality is only a matter of tradition, not a matter of power and military allegiance.  Maithili has been raised to value such traditions and know her role in them, and promised to Prince Vijay under that same set of values. But Maithili's submission to them, as cinematic message-delivery, is really no different from a spirited village girl submitting to her family's expectations in a movie of 30 years ago.  Though Barjatya's worlds are always scaled by enormous sprawling mansions and populated with the most extreme members of the leisure classes, the people they portray are stand-ins for an aam aadmi audience. Viewers are meant to identify with them, as a means of escape - imagine yourself, for three hours, a part of this world where everyone is beautiful, where people gift exotic sports cars to one another on whim, where even the crummy substandard home occupied by cast-off royal bastards is twice as big as anything you've ever lived in.  And if you want to be like them, you also of course must also act like them. So the packaging and sale of Maithili is not just a matter of royal obligation; it's a model for young women, even sexually forward young women, to follow. Kings and princesses, as Shakespeare had Henry V point out, are the makers of fashion. 

And what about that Barjatya world - is it still entertaining, 20 years after Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, to be whisked away into a sparkling kind of Maine-Pyar-Kiya-meets-Mughal-e-Azam fairy tale world where princes ride in horse-drawn carriages while taking calls on their iPhone 6es and kings build crystal palaces on the precipices of waterfalls?  Well, yes - most of the time, it is.  Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is pretty to look at and loaded with good-enough songs and picturizations, and even a few excellent ones - a picturization that is a battle-of-the-sexes football match is especially fun, as is a song that breaks out when Prem and his buddy are left to cool their heels on top of a desert fort, and somehow find a set of giant drums to bang on.  Indeed, except for some melodramatic indulgence in the last third - including interminable fight scenes cleverly staged in a mirrored maze - its nearly-three-hour running time doesn't really feel that long.  It's a very simple story, with its mixture of Prince-and-Pauper tropes with classic Barjatya themes that elevate family above all other concerns.  But the grand visuals are appealing, and throwbacky melodrama can be unchallenging fun on its own terms. 

Salman Khan is not quite in his finest form; this incarnation of Prem doesn't match the sweet innocence of Bajrangi Bhaijaan.  He is too beatific, almost sanctimonious in his confidence that love can fix all that is wrong in the royal family.  He takes on a smarminess that Barjatya's Prems of 20 or 25 years ago never had. That means that if you already don't like Sallu, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo is not the film that will change your mind.  The rest of the cast ranges from serviceable to good enough to elevate the material they have to work with.  Sonam Kapoor gives a mostly adequate performance; I am not convinced she has rajkumari-level gravitas in her, but she is not distractingly bad.  The show stealers are the same folks who almost ran off with Tanu Weds Manu - Deepak Dobriyal as goofy Prem's manic sidekick, and Swara Bhaskar as the prince's estranged, illegitimate half-sister.  The latter so capably shoulders her melodramatic role and so expertly carries its heightened emotions that perhaps Barjatya should make her his lucky charm from now on, and finally put Prem out to pasture. 

Lorie (1984)

लोरी

Dir. Vijay Talwar

Lorie starts off looking like many a gentle middle-cinema film of its era.  A married couple (Naseeruddin Shah and Swaroop Sampat) are shown in intimately domestic scenes, engaging in playful (if weirdly hostile) teasing; the film opens on their roof, with Suman giving Micky a generous massage.  Then we meet Geeta (Shabana Azmi), a young, earnest teacher who, when criticized by her chauvinistic father for working at all, replies that she loves her work, but she's not opposed to marriage either.  (Shabana, as expected in films of this era, looks completely gorgeous in a deeply colored range of sarees and kurtis.)  And then comes Bhupi, Farooq Sheikh as the sort of cuddly sweetheart he plays so well.  The understated, middle-class ordinariness of this foursome sets a very familiar tone, in the vein of Sai Paranjpe, Basu Chatterjee, and the like. 

Bhupi and Geeta meet when Bhupi snatches one of Geeta's little students out of the path of an oncoming car, and both are instantly smitten.  In a touching pair of scenes the next morning, Geeta confesses to her mother (Rohini Hattangadi), and Bhupi to Micky and Suman (Shah and Sampat), that they've met someone they like, but failed to exchange addresses or other identifying information. Bhupi, remembering the color of Geeta's students' uniforms, hires a cab and zips around to every school in Bombay to track her down.  This gambit might cross the line into stalking in real life, but in Bhupi's almost preternaturally innocent hands it remains idealized and sweet. (And since we know Geeta likes him too, no harm, no foul.)  Geeta and Bhupi's romance proceeds apace; while getting married requires defying Geeta's stern father, who has another son-in-law in mind, the couple are soon enjoying domestic bliss; with a child on the way, a song montage has them cutting pictures of cute babies from magazines to decorate the nursery.  

Cutie-patootie all windswept and bearded; milady smitten and pretty.

Then tragedy strikes, and Lorie starts getting weird.  

Geeta miscarries and learns that she cannot ever bear children. All Geeta has ever dreamed of is to be a mother.  As a teacher she is shown to be more of a nurturer than an instructor, frolicking with her students, singing to them, cuddling them. Indeed, she states pretty explicitly that teaching is a way to tide herself over until her overweening craving for children of her own can be satisfied.  With the sudden loss of this dream, Geeta is (understandably) despondent and even inconsolable. When she finds a little boy, Laddu, left on a bus by his gaggle of siblings and their distracted and overwhelmed parents  (Madan Puri and Shaukat Kaifi), she takes him home and claims him as her own son. Geeta has come unhinged; there is a manic and almost willful delusion to her insistence that the child is hers, and at times even a clear consciousness of guilt behind her dreamy claims of motherhood.

For example, Geeta becomes alarmed in an elevator with a stranger and hides Laddu behind her, afraid to be sussed out as an imposter-mother.

It's one thing for Geeta to disconnect from reality in the face of such a grave loss.  It's not my favorite storyline; while I can understand some grief at losing one's ability to be a mother, the leap from grief to either criminality or delusion sends a message that I can't get behind about the significance of motherhood as a goal in itself, so centrally important that even a smart, capable woman can completely lose her moorings when it is taken away from her.  But even with that story to tell, Lorie would be a better movie if it were only Geeta who lost her mind. Instead, everyone around her loses touch with rationality as well.  Bhupi can't bear to see her suffering, so he plays along with her altered reality, only weakly challenging her delusion before backing off at the slightest hint of tears.  Even Micky and Suman look the other way while Bhupi helps Geeta evade the police. 

But the film's ending is where things get truly strange. I will spoil it here (it's a 30-year-old film, after all):  Apprehended and tried, Geeta is found guilty of kidnapping, but the judge sets aside the verdict and frees her.  Reasonable enough; perhaps he really is convinced that Geeta is sufficiently remorseful and not in danger of recidivism.  But then, stepping out of the courthouse, she is greeted by throngs of chanting supporters.  This is very odd - what could they possibly support about what she did?  One might be sympathetic toward her but it's a long way from that to hailing her as a hero. 

Then, finally, in the coup-de-grace of weirdness, Laddu's parents push through the crowd and press the boy into Geeta's arms, saying that she has become his true mother and should take him from now on.  

Um, what?  

Laddu's family is shown to be quite direly poor; there are more children than the indolent, prideful father can provide for. If Lorie were portraying a desperate family taking an opportunity to reduce the household burden while offering one of their children a more prosperous life, that might make sense as a tragic but understandable storyline.  But that's not the thrust of this ending at all. Earlier in the film, Bhupi and Geeta investigate adoption options, and make an offer to a poor family who seemed to have children to spare; that mother gives an angry and dignified dressing-down that you might think they would not soon forget. Thus Lorie emphatically rejects the notion that poor people are ready to part with their children out of financial necessity. So what the heck is going on with Laddu's parents?  It's a bizarre and nonsensical outcome.

 
But maybe it's not that much weirder than Madan Puri and Shaukat Kaifi as a couple, or a very young Paresh Rawal as an eloquent prosecutor. 

This turn into bizarro-land where women can permanently usurp the children of others without incurring jail time (or at the very least, court-ordered psychiatric care) undermines all of Lorie's gentle domesticity and tender relationships.  The movie has stuck with me after watching, but mostly because I can't figure out what it is actually trying to do.  It's a muddle, and just doesn't make very much sense as a narrative.   

   
But how pretty is Shabana Azmi!  How furry is Naseeruddin Shah. And Swaroop Sampat?  HOT.

Darr (1993)

डर 

Dir. Yash Chopra

Watching this movie made me think about the not-so-fine line between courtship and stalking. Hindi films have, frustratingly, blurred that line for decades. Occasionally, a film comes along that attempts to explore it artfully. Raanjhanaa is one such; it utterly failed for me, but it arguably did attempt to do say something about the boundary where courtship ends and stalking begins.

Darr doesn't explore this boundary. It doesn't even acknowledge that it resides in a vast industry of films that sometimes have trouble telling the difference.  Instead it blows right through the boundary, leaving it so far behind in the dust that there is never any question whether anything it portrays should be interpreted as romantic.  

Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a deeply creepy, dangerous, and psychopathic territory. He is not a superficially or initially charming man shown to turn dangerous upon rejection.  Rather, it is clear from the film's earliest scenes, in which he carries on spirited telephone conversations with his dead mother,  that he operates at a disconnect from reality.  Not a shred of subtlety in Rahul's conduct disturbs Darr's smooth sheen of bombast. There is no gaslighting, no insidiousness.  The crazy is obvious.  Kiran (Juhi Chawla) is its blameless, helpless victim.

I can see why fans of Shah Rukh Khan might enjoy Darr. In it, he dials his hamming to a different frequency, in which the famous quivering lip produces the name "K-K-K-Kiran" rather than a hero's declaration of romance. In that way Rahul is more interesting than Khan's villainous character in Anjaam, who, until he actually turns murderer, is almost indistinguishable from other SRK heroes of that era - arrogant, smarmy, entitled. Rahul is broken, has been broken for years by the premature loss of his mother; it's not clear whether his status as college weirdo is a cause or an effect of the pathology that makes him stalk Kiran. 

But other than this interesting, if stereotyped, portrayal of a man on the fringes of sane society, Darr veers off in odd directions - one especially clunky sequence is the the "just say no" speech that Rahul's drug-addicted classmate remorsefully delivers just before Rahul offs him and plants evidence that he (the classmate) is Kiran's stalker.  But Darr is still a Yash Chopra film, and it does offer some of the grandly satisfying filmi elements that one expects from Chopra. The apex of these is, of course, the Holi song "Ang se ang lagana," in which Juhi Chawla looks purely radiant while a mad-eyed, snarlingly sinister Shah Rukh Khan lurks threateningly among the musicians. 

Darr lacks the thematic layers that make the second half of Anjaam so interesting and satisfying. Here, instead of the demi-divine power of womanhood ignited by injustice, revenge for Kiran comes in the form of Sunil (Sunny Deol), a one-man naval commando unit. Sunil has a barrel chest and big strong arms and presses both into service to protect his young fiancée. This is, of course, Sunny Deol's wheelhouse; whether in service of India herself or India's most vulnerable young women, Deol is ready to set his jaw and throw a lot of punches.  It is always good fun to get a taste of Deol's jingoistic military-hero persona on full display.

Sunil's competence as a protector doesn't leave much for Juhi Chawla to do, though. She is wasted here, doing little more than swooning into Deol's arms and flash dimples in the larger-than-life snapshots that Rahul projects on his bedroom wall.*  I think she lands a few blows in the climactic scene in which Rahul traps Kiran on a boat, before Sunil swims in (navy commando, remember?) to save the day.  Chawla is lovely, for sure, and the little drag performance she gives for Deol is rather delicious. But it would be nice to see a woman who is perhaps a little less helpless in the face of male entitlement gone psycho.  What would have happened to Kiran if she had no strapping Sunil eager to protect his investment?  At least the people around Kiran - Sunil and Kiran's brother and sister-in-law (Anupam Kher and Tanvi Azmi) - take seriously the threat posed by her stalker, which is more support than Madhuri Dixit's character gets in Anjaam. But still, what's a woman to do who doesn't have a Sunny Deol hovering protectively just around the corner? 

* I seem to recall this device used in another movie as well - did Salman Khan project an image of Preity Zinta in his wall in Jaan-e-mann?  As I recall it wasn't intended as a symbol of psychopathy there, but perhaps it should have been.

 

 

Gangs of Wasseypur, Part 1 and Part 2 (2012)

Dir. Anurag Kashyap

 

With Anurag Kashyap's magnum opus recently becoming available on various streaming services in the US, I sat down to watch it with Beth as my teddy bear in case the violence got to be too much.  As it turned out, the violence wasn't as awful as I'd expected - more on that in a moment - and Beth and I had some good conversations about the movie.  In lieu of an ordinary review, I've supplied below a transcript of a discussion Beth and I had after watching both parts of the film.

A few additional thoughts first, though.  The films are not great, though I can see why a different sort of person from myself might get more out of them than I did.  The story spans several generations and has a lot of players, so there is a lot to pay attention to and keep straight in your head.  While the exterior world changes quite a bit - Wasseypur starts out as a small village and is later swallowed up by a growing city - the goals of the characters, moored in an endless "you killed my kin so now I must kill your kin" cycle of violence, are unchanging.  And while that is part of the point of the film, such an obvious statement as "the cycle of revenge is pointless and destructive" does not require five hours and dozens of characters to drive home.  

Several times in the second half, a new character is introduced, engages in a quickly-summarized sequence of deals with Faizal Khan (Nawazzudin Siddiqui, the savior of the film - more below), betrays Faizal Khan, and is killed.  The result is a film that is more repetitive than engaging.  It's frustrating to invest a lot of attention in figuring out who the new guy is, how he fits in, and what is happening with him, only to realize that this is the exact same arc you saw played out twenty minutes ago.  Again, this may be part of Kashyap's point, but it doesn't make for hugely engaging movie-watching. 

As to the violence - don't get me wrong, Gangs of Wasseypur has plenty of it - it doesn't get under my skin in the same way as, say, that in NH10. I've given some thought to why, and concluded that it is more cartoonish than it is horrifying, more hitting the "ew, gross!" parts of my brain than the sympathetic suffering parts of my brain.  For example, in a climactic scene, a man is cornered in a toilet, and his enemy empties an automatic weapon into him.  Blood and bits of gore fly everywhere in slow motion.  But the man is dead in an instant; there is no sense of suffering to go with this violence.  Stylized cartoons like this are merely boring to me; I don't need to see it, but it's not especially horrible or stomach-churning.  There's not enough emotional engagement to it.  I now understand that when I say I cannot tolerate movie violence, what I really mean is that I have a low tolerance for watching characters suffer.  I am far more horrified when a character is shot in the kneecap, crumples to the ground, and screams in agony, than by all the backlit jugular spurts of Gangs of Wasseypur.   

And now, on to some of the other things Beth and I thought about while we were watching the film.

Carla:  

If I had to summarize Gangs of Wasseypur in one sentence, I'd say that it demands more attention than it rewards. What do you think, Beth?

Beth:

I think that would probably be my averaged-out assessment – there were parts I found boring and parts that were great, parts that were too complicated and others that were really satisfying.

Carla:

Yes, I agree with all of that. What did you find most satisfying?

Beth:

Two things. One, thinking about what kinds of choices and power the (very, very few) women had/chose to exercise. Two, all the direct conversation about movies and their role in the lives of the characters. For example, the big baddie says that as long as India has movies, people will be fooled. But in the end it's one of the biggest movie nuts who triumphs – or two of them, depending on how you define "triumph."

Carla:

Yes, or none of them, depending upon how you define “triumph.”

Beth:

What were the high points for you, if any?

Carla:

I am trying to think about the times when I felt most engaged, because much of it did not engage me especially well. Nawazuddin Siddiqui's character, Faizal Khan, has the most arc, the most complexity – the most conflicting desires and goals. And so the parts that worked the best, for me, are some parts of his story.

Beth:

Based on how many times we said "Oh FAIJAL" while watching, he was more sympathetic to us than anyone else.

Carla:

Yes, and given how removed the lives being portrayed are from the lives of most viewers – certainly from yours and mine – Faizal being sympathetic is essential.

Beth:

I've been trying to figure out how much of his sympathetic-ness is the written character, and how much is just pure Nawaz, who elevates, if not flat-out saves, so many things he's in.

Carla:

As you know, I don't generally get a lot out of stories that are primarily about men expressing masculinity in its most toxic and destructive forms, for its own sake. There's only so much uninterrupted dick-waving I can take without throwing up my hands and saying “Good God, I just don't care what happens to these people!”

So yeah, there is definitely something in the way Faizal Khan is written and/or the way Nawaz performs him that, sometimes, can overcome that reaction for me – those moments when the movie is not just about the dick-waving itself, but about something else, of which dick-waving is a part.

Beth:

As much as I...liked? Faizal, I was not sad at the end. Because, DUH.

Carla:

Well, it's inevitable.

Beth:

But he came off as someone who tried, at least sometimes, in his own way. And he knew it.  That little speech he has with his wife on the balcony.

Carla:

One of the points of the film is the pointlessness of that cycle of violence – Faizal expresses that explicitly in that speech you just mentioned.

Beth:

Pointlessness yet LET'S SHOW A WHOLE LOT OF IT ANYWAY!!!!!!

Carla:

That's why I said earlier that maybe no one triumphs, because what is triumph in this context? Just that you get to be the top guy on the other team's hit list for a while, until they get you.

And yes, a whole, WHOLE lot of it. I think I said to you while we were watching that it don't think one needs five hours to make the point that the cycle of revenge is pointless.

Beth:

For viewers like we are, who don't want to see splatter and gore and suffering, this felt a little bit like a bait and switch, because at the end of Part 1 we thought "Yeah, okay, we can do this," but then preeeeetty soon into Part 2 it got gross. So at first I thought maybe Kashyap was going to make some points about the futility of it all without showing it, but no.

Carla:

There is a notable uptick in the grossness when Faizal takes over, when he beheads the friend who set up his father. And that uptick itself means something – Faizal is a new generation, and the rules change a little when he takes over. Everyone becomes more ruthless.

Beth:

And he's shown to be quite different from his father or older brother and man I feel like I'm talking about The Godfather.

Carla:

Surely Kashyap knows that you will think these thoughts while pondering his film.

Beth:

Oh of course. Faizal is at first kind of pleasingly weird. But then we see it manifest itself as psychotically violent at times instead. Whereas his dad was mostly...efficient? Rather than with a flourish?

Carla:

For Faizal's grandfather, violence was a means to an end – he used it for survival. For his father, it was all in the service of revenge. For Faizal, it is still revenge, but there's something else, too, isn't there?

Beth:

For Faizal and Definite it's for their moms. In different ways, but still for their moms.

Carla:

Yes, that's a good way to put it. And, it's a good segue to talk about the women in the film.

Beth:

After we finished Part 2, it occurred to me that I don't think we really see the women parlay any social power, do we? It's not as though they choose to be with these men – and I do think the younger generation chose pretty freely – because they gain a lot that we can see. They're not leading cliques of aunties or anything. They still do housework. Etc.

Carla:

Another comment I made while we were watching is that half of the lines spoken by women are turning down men's requests for sex. That is one power that they have.

Beth:

But even that doesn't seem to add up to much does it? I mean one of them STILL has four kids.

Carla:

Indeed, despite her best efforts. But I think you're right, we also talked about why a woman would want to be married to a man like Faizal, and there must be some social cachet to it.

Beth:

I don't know what social power would look like in their world but I don't think we saw it, either. They do get refrigerators? And TVs? But Huma's character had a TV in her room before she got married.

Carla:

Even in a mad patriarchal society, there are spheres where women can wield power in different ways, and there are occasionally stories that are about that – but Gangs of Wasseypur isn't one of them.

Beth:

No, it's not.

Carla:

It is about a wholly male set of interactions, and the women are marginal at best. I guess the social cachet in being Faizal's wife, for Huma Qureishi's character, Mohsina, wouldn't necessarily be in the form of things, but in the form of regard and respect of other people in the community. But that is speculation, because Gangs of Wasseypur didn't find a way to squeeze any of that into its five hours.

Beth:

No, there's pretty much no sense of community in this, except for perhaps before the weddings and at the funeral. But that's special occasion community, not everyday. They don't even give birth to women. There is no place in the family for them.

Carla:

That's right, I noticed that too – no daughters, at least none that we get introduced to.

Beth:

Yeah only the enemy family has girls, don't they? And one of the few female characters, Durga, has to be set up as the enemy of one of the others, Nagma.

Carla:

Of course. Pit women against each other, in competition for what? A man – Sardar Khan, Faizal's father. A man who, incidentally, doesn't treat either of them with a ton of respect. Remember the scene where he tells them he wants them all to live in one house, and he can't even fathom what the objection would be?

Beth:

He's one of those "well, he doesn't literally beat his wives, so I guess he's a catch" kind of characters – though at least the women seem to know it.

Carla:

That dynamic around the first and second wife is probably the only thing Gangs of Wasseypur has to say about how women's lived are damaged by the norms of the society they live in. The rest is all about the damage inflicted on men.

Beth:

I think the last scene between Mohsina and Faizal shows some. Or, implies it, anyway.

Carla:

Yes, Faizal's wife tells him she is pregnant, and he says, "say hello to my kid," and you know they both know he isn't coming back.

Beth:

I don't know how they managed to convey so much there, but they really did. But of course we knew the run time of the film too.

Carla:

They both do a lot with their faces, as actors. But all that interaction does for me is reinforce the question, what does Mohsina get out of being married to him?

Beth:

I think perhaps they're just genuinely attracted to each other. He's clearly amazed by her in the cinema. And then she's so flirtatious at the...engagement party, I think it is. Maybe she likes having him dance to her tune. Actually maybe she just finds the whole thing filmi, and we know she likes that.

Carla:

Oh yes, that is definitely true. They really dig each other. That's what makes the scene on the balcony work, even though it's a bit heavy-handed – he is imagining a different life in which he could just enjoy his amazing wife, without having to worry about killing and revenge and which family member he's going to lose next.

Beth:

A rare moment of clarity for Faizal when he's not high on drugs or killing.

Carla:

Yes.

Do you want to talk about those filmi connections some more?

Beth:

Sure! For example, the flat-out outlining of generational heroes by Ramadhir is kind of funny.  And how he tells his son, "You just can't hack it as a gangster because you're too busy watching DDLJ, you dope."

Carla:

It's clunky and clueless, which is very funny – he doesn't follow them himself, and doesn't remember them all.

Beth:

He remembers enough as sort of cultural signposts, but yeah, he does not connect with them. And we get different people identifying with different heroes. Faizal likes Mithun, right?

Carla:

Aww, yeahh. (But Faizal also does a Travis Bickle sort of thing in the mirror.)

Beth:

So I guess by default Sardar likes Amitabh but I can't recall if he says so. Oh and there's that GREAT moment where Faizal turns around in his chair and it looks like the start of the warehouse scene in Deewaar. And Mohsina likesMaine Pyaar Kiya, and also Amitabh – she's a cool girl that way, maybe even a Cool Girl.

Carla:

Perpendicular and Tangent are also big Sanjay Dutt fans. They are engrossed in an almost homoerotic fantasy about him when they are set upon by the goons who kill Perpendicular.

And Mohsina is definitely a Cool Girl. She can afford to be, because she knows Faizal digs her.

Beth:

And the whole family likes the TV serials apparently. There were like 20 people watching that!

Carla:

"Saas bhi kabhi bahu thi" ... that one line of melody is repeated so many times and gets stuck in one's head.

Beth:

And to open with it and then repeat it in the second film.

Carla:

So, when the ultimate male explosion happens, this huge raid on the Khan house with automatic weapons and bombs, all the women of the house are gathered watching some saas-bahu serial, and the repeated line is all about the relationships of household women. Everything the movie is NOT about.

Beth:

True. Many of the men are watching it too, interestingly. Maybe it's a reiteration of Ramadhir's point: If you just sit around watching movies/TV, your house is NOT in order and it makes you stupid.

Carla:

That's very bleak, though, because most of these people are collateral damage. They are not responsible for this war, just because they are watching TV.

Beth:

(Also a marker of changing technology, I would think, which the film likes to do.) Collateral damage is always part of stories like this though.

Carla:

Yes, it is. What I am saying is that it is very bleak if Ramadhir's critique that TV and movies makes people weak gets taken out on folks who aren't directly involved in the war at all. It's one thing for him to harass his son for watching movies; he'd rather have raised a son who is a strong general in his army and a worthy successor. It's a very different thing to apply that criticism to people whose only crime is being part of the enemy household.

Beth:

His soldier actually says that, remember? Kill them all, even the cook, the washer boy, the pets (or something like that).

Carla:

Yes. By that time, after Ramadhir's sister and Nagma have been killed, the rules of engagement (such as they were) are out the window. This is no longer an honorable conflict.

Beth:

The scope of the violence expands with technology, too. Sardar's dad starts out mostly hitting people, I think, and burning their property.

Carla:

Very true.

Beth:

And then Sardar has...knives and swords, etc., and then guns come in, and then bombs.

Carla:

The first time Sardar's father sees a gun up close, it is used on him. It's all downhill from there.

Beth:

And somebody, maybe him, has a line about "Wow, now every Tom Dick and Harry has a gun."

Carla:

Ah, interesting.

Beth:

So here are two questions to wrap up: 1) Why did we watch this and 2) do we think those rationales will actually be met or pay off?

Carla:

What are your answers?

Beth:

For me, this was a movie I felt like I Should See, capital letters – that somehow it's an important film from an important filmmaker. And I will admit that afterBombay Velvet was SO disliked by so many people but I loved it, I was more intrigued to see this one, even though I'd tried once and been turned off instantly by the violence.

I don't know the answer to my second question yet. If Gangs of Wasseypurkeeps showing up in conversations, I'll be able to participate more than I would without having seen it, and I like that feeling. But honestly, do I see it come up all that much now? I'm not sure I do.

Carla:

I don't think I see it talked about much either, and there may be a bit of a backlash against Kashyap because of Bombay Velvet (which I also did not think was as bad as all that), that will make people stop talking about Gangs of Wasseypur for a while.

However, my answers are very similar to yours. When I write, I put myself out there, and the more I have seen of the works that are significant and interesting, the less likely I am to make a complete idiot of myself. Also, while I don't like gangster films as a rule, I generally do like films about political machinations in India. And films that focus on areas other than the big cosmopolitan cities are also of great interest to me.

Beth:

I have definitely had enough of hinterlands assholes at this point.

Carla:

I would very happily watch more movies about how the machinations of hinterlands assholes affect women.

Beth:

If I had to watch hinterlands assholes, that would be the slant I would appreciate, I guess. But I'd rather not watch any at all, at least not for a while.

Carla:

Give me more Mrityudands, more Revolver Ranis, more Godmothers. Even more Gulab Gangs, if not that exact film over again.

I definitely don't regret watching Gangs of Wasseypur, even if I didn't find it thoroughly engrossing. It's a five-hour investment in the big picture and I do think it will pay returns.

Beth:

I don't want those hours of my life back, but I don't think I'd be particularly missing out in ways or arenas that I personally car a lot about if I had not decided to watch it. "Timepass" isn't quite the right word for me for this film, but it's somewhere in that general neck of the woods.

Carla:

And with those ringing endorsements...

Beth:

Carla, nobody cares what we think about Gangs of Wasseypur three years after it came out.

Carla:

WHAT????

Beth:

Haha!

Carla:

This was really fun and interesting, Beth. With this chat Gangs of Wasseypur is already returning on the investment.

Beth:

Good! Yeah we always make our own fun, don't we?