Finally managed to catch Gulaal this weekend. I went in with a lot of expectation after having watched Dev.D last week and getting soaked in Gulaal’s amazing music and lyrics all of this week. I have no complaints about the movie, but Piyush Mishra’s moving lyrics were a bit overqualified for the subject of the movie. The movie itself is another solid follow through from Anurag Kashyap. A movie created in the backdrop of neon signs proclaiming the existence of hell in the middle of their more brightly colored brethren selling democracy beer. Additional nuances enhance the imagery of the failing republic and it’s depressed public – a blue eunuch and its Lennon crazed poet master who rewrites Bismil Azimabadi’s “सरफरोशी की तमन्ना” to lament about the loss of indigenous undergarment manufacturing mills. The fact that this movie took over five years to can, shows in some stale references of planes and towers in classic mujra songs. Anurag Kashyap draws from his DU experience yet again while continuing to dabble in larger issues facing our democracy – state vs. the union, youth identity, generation gap and the unending romanticism of the youth trying to realize its own version of “सोने की चिड़िया”. On the character front, the movie has some brilliantly sketched women protagonists. Ayesha Mohan as the firebrand youth leader Kiran, and Mahie Gill as the bar dancer Madhuri, play the prey and the predator at the same time to a bunch of cuckolded men who revel in their paradise of drunken pride and false machismo. Jesse Randhawa is a pure waste as the victimized teacher Anuja, which is a very well defined character, central to the story. Among the male leads Raj Singh Chaudhary as Dileep Singh is the only one worth a mention. Overall, the movie comes across as the labor of love that it really is but a lot of it will be lost in translation.
