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We watched this in May '09 and was about to be writing on this for last 5 months. Got sometime today. And thus has kept this really brief as I wont be able to detail this out :-). Anyways….
First of all it’s a very different backdrop and (per me) has got an immense influence of Omkara. It's all about college and small-town, cast oriented politics in a remote town in Rajasthan. It draws a graph of the life of a very cowardly (but Rajput!), be-spectacled, Urban guy, who comes to this small town for studying, how he gets caught under the dirty politics and how that changes his life completely in a negative sense. There are master-pieces thrown-in by Kay Kay Menon, Abhimanyu Singh, Deepak Dobriyal (Bhati, Omkara Fame). But the highlight of this movie I'd say is Piyush Mishra. He played an elder brother of kay Kay, who is mentally disturbed, but at the same is outstanding at writing and presenting the poems and songs of all genre in the movie. In fact he is the actual lyricist of those songs and has also sang a couple of them in the movie ('Arambh' and 'Duniya' are the master pieces). 'Ranaji' is already a hit. The songs actually talk about the local and global politics, culture, various other related aspects which are composed equally sensitively to retain the texture of the words.
All in all it shows how politics unless otherwise seen as glorified and value based from outside, can be vey mean, and at times cheap.
Anurag Kashyap comes out as a Burgeon director with a different vision and all the passion and an extremely great command on the medium. He is equally supported well in the cinematography, dialogues, lyrics and music sections. And one more time hats-off to him for giving a complete cinematic and creative justice while working on two absolutely different movies in Gulaal and Dev-D.
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Violence and language. Extreme abuses. There are some bold scenes by Mahie Gill and Jesse Randhava which come in as a 'need' of the plot, but could have been avoided in context of erstwhile Indian movies.
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A very apt title? while it comes out through an insane bloodshed. Must see for the acting juggernauts of Kay Kay with his expressive eyes (resembles of Sanjiv Kumar in that), Abhimanyu Singh who appears to be a Khandani Rajput, and Deepak Dobriyal. The latter two have tremendous acting talents, but not greatly utilized in Indian movies yet.
After Dev D, the expectations from Anurag Kashyap were naturally very high, and it doesnt take too long for one to start realizing that in him we have a world class film maker. Right from the beginning to the end, Gulaal is a different sort of movie, no clear agenda as such by the director, he is not out there to prove any point, he highlights politics in the raw-est form which he projects as his story. Its how low people can stoop in politics, and this is not even national or state level politics!
ReplyDeleteAll in all, great acting from all the actors concerned.
But hats off to Piyush, as you rightly pointed out, he has given some amazing songs, music and lyrics.
I dont know whether Gulaal was a commercial success or failure, but i definitely feel, we need more movies like this to actually feel Indian Films are coming of age!