Born in 1972, director Anurag Kashyap began his career as a screenwriter at just twenty-five years old, before ending up behind the camera in 2003 at the helm of his first film Paanch, a film that was never released in theaters and is still looking for a distributor.
His passion for writing has continued over the years with some major productions such as the Oscar-nominated film Water by Deepa Mehta, and the uncomfortable reconstruction of the 1993 bombings in Bombay, Black Friday, which also saw him in the role of director.
Anurag Kashyap personally presented his latest work, the exceptional Gangs of Wasseypur, to the audience of the River to River - Florence Indian Film Festival. Initially shot as a single 318-minute film and presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight section, the film was later split into two parts of 160 and 158 minutes respectively, given the reluctance of many Indian theatres to screen such a long film.
Gangs of Wasseypur - Part One
At the end of British rule in India, Shahid Kahn makes ends meet by robbing English trains by pretending to be the legendary bandit Sultana. Discovered by the Kureshi clan, of which Sultana is a member, he is chased, along with his pregnant wife, from the city of Wasseypur and begins to work as a miner for the English.
After the fall of the English government following Indian independence, these mines are criminally acquired by shady characters, among whom stands out the name of Ramadhir Singh who, fascinated by Shahid's abilities, decides to take him under his wing and make him his right-hand man. But Shahid's thirst for power is bottomless, as well as naive and careless.
Confiding in his partner and friend Nasir that he wants to kill his boss to take his place, Sahid is inadvertently discovered by Ramadhir, who decides to send him to Varansi for work and has him killed. The death sentence is also issued for the family, but Nasir saves them.
With Shahid's body buried and believing him to be heirless, Ramadhir feels safe and ready to continue his climb to power, managing the entire mining sector through the unions and creating a reign of terror throughout the Dhanbad region.
Years pass and Sardar , Shahid's son, learning of his father's murder, decides to have his revenge, thus starting his criminal career by robbing Ramadhir's vehicles and assembling his own criminal gang with which he begins to climb the heights of the criminal world.
Having married Nagma and had two sons, Danish and Faizal, Sardar decides to look for a woman with whom he can vent his sexual frustrations. He falls in love with Durga , a young Bengali girl who he decides to marry against the wishes of his first wife. The two women will thus begin an internal feud that will lead the family to further divide, leaving Sardar to simultaneously manage his criminal life and his private life, with results that will be fatal.
Gangs of Wasseypur - Part Two
It is the 1990s and Sardar is dead, killed in an ambush by the henchmen of Sultan, nephew of the bandit Kureshi Sultana and ally of Ramadhir, a true eminence grise of the entire region. The city of Wasseypur is no longer what it once was and, like its population, has been consumed by the violent war between Sardar Khan and Ramadhir Singh.
But the sons are ready to take their fathers' place in the feud and Sardar is succeeded by his three sons from his first marriage, Danish, the eldest, Faizal, a young man uninterested in the family business and who lives his life between drugs and parties, and finally the fifteen-year-old Nawab, nicknamed Perpendicular for his skill with cutting weapons and the insane violence he is capable of.
Sardar's second wife, repudiated by the family, works as a housewife for Ramadhir Singh and raises her son Definite Kahn, feeding him with her hatred for Sardar. After swearing revenge on his family, he begins his criminal career.
Profits become increasingly higher as the racket goes from coal to wood to scrap metal and a small spark is enough to rekindle the old feud that will mark the city indelibly with a violent and bloody war. Danish is killed by Sultan, leaving the position of head of the family to Faizal who will discover that he is thirsty for revenge and capable of terrible atrocities.
In the fight for the control of the city of Wasseypur, only one family will emerge victorious and, between politics, corruption, shootings and attacks, this feud that has continued for over sixty years will finally reach its bloody conclusion.
Ray-Ban, knives and machine guns
A film that wants to tell half a century of Indian history through the eyes of three generations of mafiosi fighting for control of the city of Wasseypur gets off to a great start: a flashforward in a sequence shot in which a death squad attacks the house of the boss Faizal Kahn.
A scene lasting several minutes that immediately demonstrates all the technical and stylistic skills of the director Anurag Kashyap . Skills that will be used to the best of their ability to hold together a film of over five hours, divided into two parts strongly linked to each other.
Starting with the desire to tell the epic story of a region of north-eastern India, Bihar, Anurag Kashyap was struck by Zeishan Quadri's idea at the base of Gangs of Wasseypur. The theme at the base of the film is changed but not the staging because it is still an epic story.
In the true sense of the epic, it tells the story of three anti-heroes, three generations of a family consumed by a thirst for revenge and unparalleled power, but it also tells the story of an entire region, that of Dhanbad, and even more broadly of all the historical changes that have marked India in the last seventy years.
What the film ultimately tells us is precisely the story of a secret India, the India of the underworld, ideologically so distant from this nation but strongly rooted within it.
A mafia saga that in many ways recalls the most famous one by Francis Ford Coppola and that manages to reach absolutely remarkable heights, even if it remains below one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema.
Where there it was the reluctant Michael Corleone who took the reins of the family and discovered himself as a ruthless mafia boss, here it is the young Faizal, kept out of the family business because of his drug addiction, who transforms himself into a brutal angel of death and carries on the never-ending feud that has claimed the lives of his father, grandfather and two brothers.
His thirst for blood will make him walk on the road to self-destruction like a romantic hero of Bollywood cinema. Because it is Cinema, with a capital C, that accompanies us throughout the story of Gangs of Wasseypur, with Faizal's eyes we discover the charm of celluloid dreams and how the passion for music and entertainment of an entire people, the Indians, is born, who see cinema as the only way to escape a life of squalor and suffering.
For the pure spirit of emulation, the young man will start wearing sunglasses and acting like a damned hero until he transforms himself into a real film character, an anti-hero about whom songs will be composed.
After a first part that is all in all weak and that dwells on the roots of a feud that will cover more than half a century, the film explodes with all the force of a time bomb.
With the arrival of firearms on the territory, everything changes: the clashes with bladed weapons that still retained a modicum of honor disappear, leaving room for brutal ambushes, which however appear more detached, distancing the concept of death from the hand that pulls the trigger.
Even the various protagonists will thus pass from the intimate violence of bladed weapons to the aseptic cleanliness of firearms, losing sight of any contact with reality.
Only a brutal close-range shootout, which closely resembles the hospital scene in John Woo 's Hard Boiled , will succeed in giving Faizal the feeling of having finally achieved his goal.
Finally, the closing is masterful with a finale where everything must change so that nothing changes. At the moment in which all the revenges have ended in blood and only the winners remain, the doubt remains as to whether Faizal's son will remain immune to the call of blood or will in turn set out on the path of revenge.
Gangs of Wasseypur is an exceptional fresco of a world, that of organized crime, from which India believed itself immune. With a high-quality, clean and at the same time brutal staging, Anurag Kashyap manages to tell a family saga made of blood and bullets, managing to give us some truly great scenes, such as the opening sequence shot that will be connected in the second part of the film to another parallel sequence.
Although derivative in some of its parts - see all the references to the Godfather saga, as well as those to De Palma's Murder on Demand for the sequence shots - Kashyap's film manages to be one of the highest points of Indian cinema in recent years, demonstrating the great maturity reached by this cinematography that for years now has surpassed Western productions in quantity.
