As Pankaj Tripathi’s
Sultan leads a group
of marauders through twisty side-streets, Anurag Kashyap’s film has, within seconds, evolved from soap opera to First Person Shooter. We’re jolted into its noisy, brutish world. Then, yet another metamorphosis: into a history lesson. And this — in keeping with the lamentable way most schoolteachers use the subject to provoke yawns and force dates down student throats — is instantly boring.
The magnificent Piyush Mishra narrates this sprawling tale, lifting his first two lines almost verbatim from the start of Omkara. We’re told about Wasseypur, legendary dacoits, impersonators and trade unions. It is clear from the very onset that coal — which, we’re taught, is light till it soaks up water — isn’t the darkest thing about a colliery, and that we’re in for a real blood-feud. And, in keeping with most phrases in this film, we mean literally. Tigmanshu Dhulia’s portly and effortlessly sinister Ramadhir Singh kills a fearsome foe and anoints his bereaved son with a drop of his dead father’s blood. The son, vowing to keep his head shaved till he finishes Singh off, grows up to be Sardar Khan, played by Manoj Bajpai
Entire sequences that could be compressed into clever throwaway lines are staged in grand, time-consuming detail; while genuinely sharp lines are often repeated, as if too good to use just once. The characters are a wild, fantastical bunch of oddballs and trigger-happy loons, but attempting to do each fascinating freak justice with meaty chunks of screen-time may not even be film’s job.
Wasseypur may have worked better as a long and intriguing television series, one deserving a spin-off movie only after six seasons.
Here it feels too linear, and even too predictable: scenes themselves often surprise, even delight, but the narrative is cumbersome and unexciting. And, as said before, Godfatherly. (Agencies)