Review of Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1, an Anurag Kashyap movie starring Manoj Bajpai, Richa Chadda

Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 by Anurag Kashyap has a nice quality that makes it easy to watch and addictively. The episodic nature of the film makes it not much different from a soap opera saga, and its director Anurag Kashyap perhaps realized this point during filming. That is why his film begins with the opening credits of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because a Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law), a very popular television series that aired in the 2000s about three or four generations of a family. who lives under one roof. Fortunately, Gangs of Wasseypur does not have the dominant melodrama that Indian soap operas have; the film is about gangsters, guns, gore, gaalis (profanity) and revenge. Also about having many babies, which is perhaps when the film is closest to a soap opera.

This film, combined with its sequel, would have been a fantastic four-part television miniseries, but Kashyap chooses to split his five-and-a-half-hour masterpiece into two feature films, giving them both theatrical releases. Maybe that’s why I thought Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 was like a tome with no major turning points to translate it well to the big screen. The movie unfolds like missions from the latest Grand Theft Auto games, but unlike the video game, it doesn’t let us rest when we need to. One guy I knew was a speed reader who could finish a volume in one sitting; To see Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1, one may need to be a “fast viewer” to see the movie in its entirety. The movie is made up of too many exposures stretching to the end, and there are times when you feel like your hard drive is loaded with much more information than its storage capacity. For me, the most important turning point in the film occurred only with the entrance of Nawazzudin Siddique, which occurs much later in the film; until the flurry of superbly written, well-acted, and impeccably choreographed scenes blew me away, but I found myself a bit lost and confused about where the movie was headed.

Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 covers six decades, beginning in the 1940s, where our narrator Nasir tells us the story of Wasseypur, a region located in Dhanbad in the state of Jharkhand. The place is dominated by Sunni Muslims, with the Quereshi animal butcher subcaste being the most feared in the area. We learned that British trains passing through the region were robbed by robbers, mostly Quereshi Muslims led by Sultana Quereshi. When word spreads in the city that someone is posing as Sultana to steal trains under his name, Quereshi Muslims are suspicious of Shahid Khan after they discover his business is suddenly flourishing. One night, when Shahid Khan’s men plan to rob another train, the Quereshis attack them and kill everyone except Shahid and our narrator Nasir.

The two men are exiled after this incident and Shahid finds work in a coal mine. His pregnant wife dies in childbirth leaving him with a son and Shahid later kills the muscular man at work who refused to leave the day his wife died. He is later hired as the new muscle man in the coal mine by Ramadhir Singh, an industrialist in charge of some coal mines after the British Raj. Their alliance develops until Singh hears Khan’s plans to kill him in the future; Later, Khan is shot and killed by Mr. Yadav, an ammunition supplier, on Singh’s orders. However, his son Sardar escapes along with Nasir, leading to a twenty-year jump in history. Sardar Khan, now a grown man, vows to avenge his father’s death and gradually gains control of Wasseypur. His enemy Ramadhir is now a blatantly corrupt politician who forms an alliance with Sultan, a feared butcher in Wasseypur belonging to the same Quereshis who banished Shahid Khan, to prevent Sardar from taking revenge.

What’s interesting about the cinematography in Gangs of Wasseypur is that the movie doesn’t have a lot of close-ups and when it does, it’s certainly for the best scenes in the movie. Consider the scene where Ramadhir Singh summons Quereshi to confront him for lying about killing young Sardar. We first have a still shot with Ramadhir to the left of the screen, and Quereshi walks in through the door on the right and sits down, taking a quick look at Ramadhir’s office as guests often do. He is then cut to half shots (covering from head to torso) of Ramadhir and Quereshi while Ramadhir asks him if he remembers Shahid Khan. After this, the camera takes close-ups of their faces as Singh talks about seeing the ‘ghost’ of Shahid’s son and asks Quereshi to excavate the bones of the ‘dead’ child, as they are to be used for a ritual to chase away. to the ghost. Quereshi nods uneasily and the camera stops on his face for a second before Ramadhir slaps him. The rest of the time, Anurag Kashyap allows Director of Photography Rajeev Ravi to capture the panorama of Wasseypur, with outdoor scenes interspersed with spectator shots and evocative landscapes such as the dormant lake at sunrise or the mining sites. Unconventional music and storytelling seamlessly tie together the various scenes that take place over six decades, and the lighting works fantastic, especially during filming sequences that take place at night, where the street lights act as the only source of illumination.

Despite all the praise I’ve given, I still feel that Gangs of Wasseypur, due to its episodic nature, would work best as a TV miniseries. On the big screen, the saga feels stretched and you feel a bit stressed.