Gulaal Review – A Triumph by Anurag Kashyap
Anurag Kashyap has bloomed into a formidable storyteller, he takes all the rules of film-making and bends them to his will in this evocative piece on student unrest during times of intense politicking. Gulaal embraces this genre and comes across on screen as a brutal, yet life- defining film. It blatantly displays the culture of decadence which is well known in Typical North-Indian towns, and takes no prisoners! Gulaal is both powerful and brutal while depicting a culture which flourishes on cowardly bullying tactics.
There is no room for polite niceties in this Anurag Kashyap film which took 7 years to come to the making, so if you are sensitive or squeamish, I would suggest you stay away. There are some classic moments in the dialogue and one very poignant one which springs to mind is “If your father had withdrawn in time you wouldn’t have been born a bastard”
Gulaal pays tribute to the film making of Vishal Bhardwaj in this squalid world of lawlessness which undermines any quality of life. The writer-director spares none of us the details of a world where people both live and die by the gun. It is a kingdom of complete anarchy and the film is not for the faint of heart.
This portrait of an overcrowded, claustrophobic world in some ways mimics the Martin Scorceses Italian mafia genre. The egocentric characters portrayed in the film have a similar disregard for human life, and Gulaal depicts just this type of scenario. The mood of the film is perfectly pitched to depict characters who are nasty, just because this is the only means of self preservation they know, and women who scheme by means of their sexuality to get what they want.
The sound track is completely cohesive with the nature of the film, whilst at the same time displaying a certain incongruity. In Gulaal, we could almost perceive a meeting of William Shakespeare and Quentin Tarrantino which propels us forward at a furious pace to a dusty death.
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Its a fairly okay film. nothing great about it at all.