Gangs of Wasseypur

I don't feel like I should write a wholly enthusiastic post about Gangs of Wasseypur just yet, because I am still only 15 minutes into the second part of this epic. It was made as one 5-hour-long movie by Anurag Kashyap in 2012 but had to be split into two parts because of the length. But still. Holy cow! What a movie! What a contribution to the world genre of mafia/gangster sagas! (And Kashyap was not even 40 years old when he made it. Damn you!)

The first part ends with a shootout that was an unabashed homage to the death of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, with the dual benefit of Indian authenticity and absurdist black humor. The movie is organized as a series of semi-incoherent scenes cut together with the intention of concealing as much as illustrating the narrative logic from one scene to the next. One could almost hear Anurag whispering in one's ear: Forget about why and how and who, and look at the details. So many delicious, blackly hilarious, and unexpectedly emotional details. It reminds one of how life is actually lived --- fumbling from moment to moment with no premonition of what is to fall in the next scene and no understanding of what has led us to this time and place.

Early in Part 2, there was a prolonged night scene of gruesome beheading. At first I was just taken by the bloodiness with a hint of absurdity, but then it dawned on me how hard it must have been to stage this scene uncut, starting with Actor A sitting and talking with Actor B to A's severed "head" ended up in B's hand. Very clever. And a lot of scenes were done similarly, almost trying to hide its technical brilliance in gritty realism.