Gangs Of Wasseypur is undoubtedly maverick filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s most ambitious film till date. Rarely do we see a film, not just in Bollywood but all around the world, which has been planned as a two part epic right at the onset. Following the screening of both the parts of Gangs Of Wasseypur at Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight section and a premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, the first part has been released with the second being tentatively scheduled for a release in December this year.
Anurag Kashyap has been long hailed for his unique storytelling, cinematic treatment and attention to detailing of every characterization. Right from the days of Satya, Shool, through Dev D and Gulaal, Anurag the writer has always been a class of his own but sadly, that writer takes a back seat in Gangs Of Wasseypur for the director to come afore. What is more unfortunate is that the director in Anurag this time falters to deliver an excellent film.
Everything is just about right in Gangs Of Wasseypur. The story is pretty simple. Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee) Khan’s father Shahid has been killed by a coal mine owner Ramadhir Singh (Timangshu Dhulia – Director of Paan Singh Tomar). Sardar grows up with a bald head and vengeance to avenge his father’s death. Shahid tried to usurp Singh’s empire hence he met with that fate, nothing exemplary in there. Sardar grows up, gets married, has a few kids and starts breathing down the neck of Ramadhir who is also an MLA in present times. The story moves forward at a snail pace when Sardar falls in love again, goes through numerous ups and downs and by the time the story culminates to its end, there is a lot you may have missed owing to the lack of urgency or enticement.
A lot of detail has gone into the characters but some just do not age with time when Sardar’s kid becomes a grown up man (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The cuss words work and so do the heaps of dialogues of which some are funny, some hard hitting and some badly used. Anurag and his team gets the town of Wasseypur perfect, the coal mining and the characters have been firmly established and so is the story but by the time everything happens and shapes up, we are running more than half an hour late on the timeline. At 2 hours 40 minutes, Gangs Of Wasseypur needed a much crisper narrative, tighter screenplay and had to be a bit fast paced to make an impact. The music works, so does the background score and every actor (almost) shines in their bits and pieces with Richa Chadda, Timangshu Dhulia, Piyush Mishra standing out. Manoj is great but we have had better performances from him. Nawaz does not have much to do which surely would change in Part 2.
Gangs Of Wasseypur is a onetime watch if you are a patron of good cinema but one expected a lot more from Anurag’s most ambitious magnum opus.
Source: Bollywood Hungama
