Saturday, December 27, 2014

On Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly - power struggles, mindgames and innocence sidelined

One of my favourite Anurag Kashyap-directed scenes (and one that is a lot of fun to watch and discuss with students) is the chase through the slum in Black Friday. The scene begins in a purposeful, no-nonsense vein – Imtiaz Ghavate may have been involved in the Bombay blasts. He must be apprehended. Senior cops, shouting instructions, and their minions, who will do most of the running, gather to make enquiries. Everyone looks very determined – but then, as Imtiaz keeps eluding the police's welcoming arms and everyone starts tiring, the tone becomes almost comical. There are many stops and starts, the cops-and-robbers theme is deglamorised, we see how mundane and chancy such pursuits can be. A flabby policeman bleats “Imtiaz, ruk ja yaar” (and there is a contrast with Amitabh delivering fiery dialogues from a nearby TV). By the end of the scene, trapped as we are with the characters in Dharavi’s labyrinths, we have lost sight of the Big Picture, the fact that this is part of an investigation into a major terrorist attack. What matters are the little details: what we learn about Imtiaz and these cops and the world they are stumbling around in – a slum so congested that a large pipeline running through it performs the function of an arterial road.

And then he is finally caught, smacked hard by a senior officer – this is as much a bucket of cold water for the viewer, who has been enjoying the circus – and the next scene, an interrogation in a menacingly lit room, returns us to that larger picture and to the razor-sharp focus that is the need of the hour.


Something comparable happens over the course of Kashyap’s powerful new film Ugly. The serious situation that demands our attention is established early on – a little girl has vanished, probably been kidnapped – but then the narrative enters a warren of side-lanes to examine the shadowy back-stories and inner lives of the many people involved. And the thing that matters (or the thing that we thought mattered) is lost sight of and returned to, very unsettlingly, only in the film’s final moments.

When a struggling actor named Rahul (Rahul Bhat) and his small-time casting agent Chaitanya (the excellent Vineet Kumar Singh) realise that Rahul’s daughter Kali has disappeared from his car, they begin a frantic search. A suspicious man is encountered, a chase ends with a gruesome accident… but all this fast-paced action is immediately followed by a protracted scene in The Police Station Where Time Stood Still. Rahul and Chaitanya find themselves being interrogated by cops who are more interested in cracking gratuitous jokes than in recognising the urgency of the situation. They ask what “casting” means, discuss the real names of famous actors, make judgemental noises about talaaq causing problems by breaking up society’s moral fabric, and dwell on frivolities (how is it that Rahul’s daughter’s phone displays a photo of him when he calls her? How does that phone-camera work?).

At first this scene looks like one of those extended Kashyap setpieces that sometimes invite accusations of self-indulgence. After it had gone on for a bit, I thought “Okay, can we get on with the story now?” But later, after seeing the whole film, I felt that the scene’s meandering on was part of the point. We are aware that time could be running out for the little girl, and already the need to find her is being eclipsed by mind-games and irrelevancies. In this case, the game of one-upmanship involves policemen using their position to
toy with people who are otherwise more privileged than them, people who can afford to buy shiny pink phones for their children, and who need to be pulled down a peg or two. (“Mere saab tum dono se bahut zyaada padhe likhe hain,” Inspector Jadhav tells Rahul and Chaitanya.) But this isn’t the only such game that will be played here. 

Much of Ugly is about a power struggle between two men who knew each other in college and whose lives have taken very different turns since then. One is Rahul, the other is police chief Shoumik (Ronit Roy), who is married to Rahul’s ex-wife Shalini (Tejaswini Kolhapure), and information about them comes to us in layers. When we first meet Shoumik, he is intoning that women must be kept in their place, and we see that he maintains an iron hand over his depressive wife, tapping her phone calls, even supervising how many litres of petrol she has in her car. His resentment about her falling for Rahul in their college days manifests itself in withering coldness. “Tera first choice bhaag gaya,” he tells Shalini when he hears of Rahul escaping custody, and he also implies that she came to him “second-hand”. (There is a close connection between this character and the part played by Roy in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan – another hard-edged, controlling alpha-male who may once have had a sensitive side but has now settled into a regimented view of social norms and gender roles.) Rahul, on the other hand, comes across as a nicer guy at first, because we see him as a concerned father, the underdog, and a contrast to the autocratic Shoumik. But still waters run deep, it turns out that the man who is now a failed actor may have had the cards in his favour in the distant past, and that he may not have been a likable winner at the time. Our feelings about these people, and the others around them, keep shifting, which adds to the sense of paranoia, the suspense about who is conning or double-crossing whom.

Ugly
is, on one level, a police procedural, a view of investigators trying to get their work done while also dealing with a perplexing new world of technology, and learning on the job. But it is more effective in its depiction of wasted lives, and the lengths people will go to so they can break out of their private traps. There are affecting touches, such as a scene where the dowdy Shalini mentions a glamorous red dress she had bought thinking she would wear it at one of Rahul’s premieres when he became a star, but there are also flashes of humour when you don’t expect them: a hood wearing a “Prem Rogue” T-shirt; the priceless expression on Shoumik’s face when he hears the lyrics of “Tu Mujhe Nichod De”, a song performed in a sleazy video by Rahul’s girlfriend.

One easy way of describing this film is to say that it is about innocence lost and forgotten in a world where being hardened and competitive is everything: fending for yourself, battling or nurturing your personal demons, looking for small and big ways of getting back at someone who has wounded you. It leads up to a last scene that is calculated for maximum visceral effect, confronting us with exactly what we don’t want to see (even if we know beforehand that this will be a dark film). Kashyap often deals in excesses, and often overreaches, but I thought that final unflinching scene was absolutely necessary. It is almost as if the viewer is being told, “Remember what all this was originally about? It didn’t really matter all that much to the characters in the story – they were too caught up in themselves and in their adult games. But does it matter to you?"

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P.S. The Inspector Jadhav character in this film (played by Girish Kulkarni) reminded me just a little of one of the most memorable characters in Indian English fiction of the past year, the fat, seething policeman Ram Manohar Pande in Shovon Chowdhury’s novel The Competent Authority, haunted by the thought that rich, English-speaking people are laughing at him behind his back, and determined that the laughter must stop. Consider this a plug for the book.

17 comments:

  1. "Kashyap often deals in excesses, and often overreaches.."

    Understatement of the century.. :D

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    1. Oh no. I'd say "understatement of the century" in this context is pretty close to being the "overstatement of the week" at least! I don't think AK is more "excessive" than many of the filmmakers he has been influenced by, or the great stylists of the past 30-40 years.

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    2. Can't think of any of his influences who have insights that are so obvious and heavy-handed, re: UGLY at least. So, the style seems particularly excessive. I think I may have outgrown cynicism for cynicism's sake.

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    3. I think I may have outgrown cynicism for cynicism's sake.

      Oh, congrats then! If and when I "grow" into that exalted state of being, I will of course change my mind about Ugly.

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    4. Sorry. I didn't mean it as a slight on you. Poor choice of words on my part. I guess this movie just isn't for me.

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  2. *** SPOILER ALERT ****

    What is the reason Rahul kills Chaitanya at the end ? Some of the dialogue in that part was just not clear.

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    1. It's a little ambiguous (and honestly, by that point I wasn't paying close attention to every detail of what the characters were thinking or imagining - was content to get an abstract sense of the paranoia that everyone was experiencing), but the way I interpreted it was: Rahul bought into the idea Chaitanya sold him earlier, that Shoumik is behind Kali's disappearance (as a way of getting back at/dominating Rahul) and that she isn't really in danger. When he speaks to Shoumik at the end and realises this wasn't the case, a dormant fatherly emotion (or at least the need to express such an emotion in a macho way) resurfaces, and he goes berserk.

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  3. The last line of the movie when one of shoumik's colleagues states 'We could have saved her' (Had they not got misguided because of their inter personal baggage) something along those lines. That for me sums up what I felt about the movie. AK could have saved the film had he not got too indulgent in trying to show that all of us have an ugly side and we are capable of extreme things and may be overdid that. He could have may be weaved in the larger issue of child trafficking running in parallel with what was happening at a micro level.
    I am okay with unhappy endings but sometimes one gets a feeling AK is trying too hard to be a rebel against the main stream where everything falls into place in the end.

    On one hand we have Hirani who will pick up a grave issue but ensures that we leave the theatre smiling and there is Anurag who ensures that we go out with heavy cynicism.
    Being able to capture Gray is the toughest thing.

    I enjoyed watching the film despite my issues , Girish Kulkarni and Vineet singh were excellent.

    PS: Ironically in Dev D he chose to have a happy ending showing the Dev start afresh in life unlike the novel.

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    1. Meet: points taken, but if the film had gone down the child-trafficking route (most other things remaining the same), I don't think that would have worked for me. It would have made it too much about a specific subject. And anyway, I think they did manage to show glimpses of that anyway, in the mentions of the kidnapped children who were incidentally found as a result of the Kali search, the scene on the bus, etc.

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  4. Yes, They did show those bits about child trafficking about 8 children who were saved while investigating the case.

    But somehow I am still not able to get my head around how these adults one of them the father and the other an honest and upright officer when it comes to his job could get so misguided by their personal baggage and shared history, which is the crux of the film as you have pointed out

    “Remember what all this was originally about? It didn’t really matter all that much to the characters in the story – they were too caught up in themselves and in their adult games'



    .

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  5. Jai,

    I agree with all that you have written about Ugly. If a film's primary motive is to engage with its audience, then I found this film engaging down to the very last second. It is one of Kashyap's best written films and also one of his best edited films.

    On a related note, the scene involving Rahul and Chaitanya where they visit the police station the very first time and the subsequent humour that follows with Inspector Jadhav, immediately brought to mind some of the scenes from Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur and his film in Bombay Talkies - Murabba - where the very same Vineet Kumar Singh (Chaitanya in Ugly) when told about his father's deteriorating health rushes to be by his side, but also finds it necessary to make a wisecrack about someone he sees urinating on a wall. To my mind, this has become something of a style with Kashyap (I think you wrote also about GoW that such moments left you ambivalent whether to laugh or be drawn in by the seriousness of the situation) where he looks to balance/break the seriousness of the moment with wit/humour. I think he takes this same thing to an altogether different level with Gulaal (a much earlier film), where Piyush Mishra's character is often mocking the seriousness of Kay Kay Menon's ambitions of creating a separate state. Perhaps, this is all in my head, but I would like to know your thoughts on this.

    Akshay

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    1. Akshay: yes, this is a complicated subject, and I think the thing to do is to take each individual case/scene on its own terms (while of course acknowledging the general point that AK enjoys mixing darkness with humour). In the case of GoW, I'm still conflicted because I didn't really think the film was expecting us to be emotionally invested in any of the characters (at least the characters from the Manoj Bajpai generation onwards) - it was more about being hip and clever, using cinematic references constantly. (Ramadhir - who doesn't care for cinema at all - was the only one in the second film who seemed to me like a real person with a possible inner life. Which may or may not have been part of the point.)

      With the police-station scene in Ugly, or the chase scene in Black Friday, and possibly the "Murabba" scene, I think the intended effect was different. Here I feel the little flashes of dark comedy actually strengthen the overall emotional impact of the situation, when we are jerked back into the "drama" and are reminded of the things that are at stake.

      And I need to see Gulaal properly - saw around the first two-thirds on a DVD that kept skipping/freezing before giving up the ghost altogether. Was enjoying it, but also realised I needed to see it with full concentration. Soon.

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  6. I loved 'Ugly'. Of all movies he has made, Kashyap went the least over board here. And yet he made the point so well. I also feel it could have been a lot uglier. For instance, Shalini's parents give her Rs 65 lakhs. It could be a film in itself as to why should parents bail her out. Besides, for all the so-called dark things done by characters, there is enough logic behind their actions. If one is living in a hell of a flat in Bombay, can not work, has a kid, and a husband who wants to be an actor and hasn't found any work, it is very believable that one will behave like Shalini. What could have been uglier is people behaving in the worst manner just for the sheer heck of it.

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  7. What is the title of English song played in movie, when Chaitanya had sex with Shalini and returned to Rahul...

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    1. Hi Dev, I think the song you are asking about is Reckoning song/one day by Asaf Avidan. There are many versions of that song but i think they used the wankelmut remix version, but i am not sure.Check it out.

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  8. Hello Jai,

    What did you make of the suspense around what is eventually revealed to be a child, in the cell where the doctor arrives to check Rahul? It seemed to point towards some sinister significance of the child being there which was lost upon me. Could you make something of it?

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  9. If you watch closely, you'll notice that the "cell" is the same place where Chaitanya was stripped and interrogated and later where Rahul confronts a naked, handcuffed Chaitanya about the knowledge that Kali was in his car. It is a makeshift torture chamber, ineffectively soundproofed with egg trays, inside of a small apartment in a ramshackle building that serves as residential quarters for the families of constables of Mumbai police. The knowledge that there is a kid living in the same apartment, within earshot of the screams emanating from within, probably creeps the doctor first, and then Rahul, as he escapes.

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