Ok. Split the hairs if you want. Does not matter. It will be fine. Even trash and smash it if you do not have the stomach to digest it. I know your stomach and what it can take. Every Friday faeces creep out of the amoebic corners of Bollywood. We have all smashed popcorn with our bare teeth in frustration and come out happy and satiated. From our pop corn eating, not the movie. Whoever was watching the bladder bursting treacle of RDB; or for that matter the utter rape of sensibilities which were thrown in by Akshay Kumar and his goons? We were eating pop corn and drinking coke and inflating our already inflated bodies in hope of an early end.
Digest and keep taking in shit if you want. Who is complaining? Whoever complained when for 15 years the demonic daughter of jeetendra in her sadistic glory kept pushing the slime of a thousand swamps in the name of the saas-bahu serials down everyone's lubricated throats? We all digested that and were happy and ran in front of our TV sets punctually at 9 every evening.
When a movie like Gulaal comes after a lull of 3 decades (since the demise of parallel cinema and the sucking in of everything by the johars and the chopras) you all are free to react any which way you want. Who cares?
You can talk about edgy characterization; I will agree and even talk further about the half baked teacher by Jessy Randhawa. You can talk about excess violence and I will agree that it should be made mandatory that all Indian movies should only have Switzerland songs and chiffon clad navels and violence in style of Dev Anand of 60s. You can talk about no good songs and I will desperately miss the tunes which likes of Pritam Chatterjee shamelessly robs from wherever he can get them.
I will agree with you on everything you talk about not liking or negative in Gulaal. I will not even talk about the brilliance of the body hanging on the chowk and “jab seher hamara sota hain” playing ominously in the background. Or the gripping violence of the climax and the final journey of the main protagonist bleeding his way to his shack and his death. But in your split-hair analysis and over-analysis of the movie (something u cannot do with the big banners as your newspaper takes money from them) you will miss out something which will make you the loser.
You will miss out the heart of the movie. The anger of the maker, the heart wrenching agony of the lyricist. The sheer agony which flows out of the pen and into our ears in the startling retake of Sahir’s “Yeh DUniya Agar mil Bhi Jaye to Kya Hai”. Rising above all the rough edges of a movie made in 7 years is the soul of the movie. The soul of the everyday men who get turned into the werewolves under the moon of the greater cause; of the society; of twisted and trampled sense of power. Power lost power regained and lost again. The cycle which has been going on since man started becoming a social animal.
The power of the rogue students over the lady teacher, the power of lust of the lady over the hapless man, the power of the man of the house to debauch or kill people at will. And then the ultimate manifestation of power. The one which converts the brother-sister duo into the monsters they have become- the power that they derive from rejection. It is the power of Hate. That is the ultimate power. Hate. It takes over all souls who fall for it. It makes a brother shoot another point blank and hang him in the main market. It makes a normal girl become a whore to get a position of power. It is what hate does to you. Rejection and hate. This is another cycle which keeps turning on. The crusades, the world wars, the Napoleons and the Mongols, the Talibans and Bin-Ladens of today. It starts with rejection and then hate and then the ultimate struggle to overcome.
Gulaal in itself speaks of this very cycle. And it does so, so brilliantly. For all the loudness and the gore, this very theme of the movie is so subtle that it is silent. At the fag end, after the poet has lamented on the world and that even if the world is served on a platter, nothing changes. It is only half a minute. Announcement of the untouchable as the Senapati of the revolution- the ultimate recognition. And a silent stare between the brother and the sister. A trickle of a tear drop from the hardened eyes. Telling one another- we have done it. And then the poet asks again the futility of it all- yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai?
The ultimate power game speaks to us and wonders at the futility of it all. We hold our breath for a few minutes. We forget to munch our pop-corns. And then it ends. We go out of the theatre. We walk our into the next Mcdonald store and start our hair-splitting and or show of stupidity.
Long live johars, chopras and the nerve gases which help us to stop thinking…
