You really don’t need to follow all the details about Indian party politics and the corrupt post-independence economy inherited from the British Raj and how organized crime took over the miners’ union. In this particular dispute, almost everyone belongs to the same sect of Islam, and wants to kill each other over more ordinary bad reasons, like money, power and family honor. Early on, the film’s narrator – who we eventually learn is a Khan family lieutenant named Nasir (Piyush Mishra) – helpfully explains that the Wasseypur wars were never about Hindu vs. On one hand, the dense context of Indian culture, politics and religion can be dizzying, though I also found it invigorating. If you give yourself time to get used to “Gangs of Wasseypur,” the principal characters and conflicts come into focus, and the blend of familiar and unfamiliar ingredients (from a Western perspective) begins to balance out. I could spend several paragraphs trying to disentangle a plot that encompasses more than 60 years and dozens of characters, from British rule to the age of smartphones and Kalashnikovs, and I probably still wouldn’t get it right. (It took me a while to figure out that describing the Qureshis as butchers was not an epithet, but a reference to their trade.) It’s apparently true that for decades Wasseypur was dominated by the conflict between two crime families, the Khan and Singh clans, and their various attempts to outmuscle a Muslim caste called the Qureshis, who traditionally dominated the town.
#GANGS OF WASSEYPUR DIRECTOR MOVIE#
This movie is a violent, operatic melodrama, not a documentary, but Kashyap incorporates numerous snippets of archival footage and draws extensively on the region’s actual history. (I gather Kashyap mostly used locations in the neighboring state of Bihar.) Wasseypur is an insignificant flyspeck by Indian standards, a small industrial city with roughly the same cultural cachet as Scranton, Pennsylvania. Instead of playing out against some historical fantasy or luxurious playland built at a Mumbai studio, “Gangs of Wasseypur” is set in a real and distinctly unglamorous place, the grimy and impoverished state of Jharkand in eastern India, where most of the country’s coal is mined. Producer Adi Shankar has described “Gangs” as “an important and monumental movie for my people,” comparing it to other influential global hits from developing nations, like South Korea’s “Oldboy,” Hong Kong’s “Infernal Affairs” or Brazil’s “City of God.” He’s trying to hype the picture, of course, but that gives you some idea of how it’s seen in India. Whichever camp you fall into, the fact that something this unusual and distinctive is getting a glimpse in American theaters represents a breakthrough. The total audience for “Gangs of Wasseypur” is no doubt divided between genre enthusiasts who saw it months or years ago – it’s been floating around the Internet, and available on foreign DVD, since shortly after its Cannes premiere in 2012 – and ordinary civilians who’ve never heard of it. Instead of the saucy but virginal ingénues of mainstream Indian movies, we see the women of “Gangs of Wasseypur” screaming and dying in childbirth, elaborately cursing out their faithless, whoring husbands and threatening their rivals with violent death.Ĭreating a moment for a would-be cult movie isn’t as straightforward as it used to be, especially a movie as gleefully devoted to violating norms and conventions as this one. The film is being released in two parts, after the model of Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac.”) There are no stylized, candy-colored dance numbers in “Gangs of Wasseypur,” and it’s not a musical in the usual sense, although Kashyap frequently uses Indian pop, rock and hip-hop – some of it exceptionally nasty – to comment on the action. (Don’t panic! No one expects you to sit through all five hours at once. Describing director Anurag Kashyap’s blood-soaked, five-hour magnum opus as a Bollywood movie may be technically correct, but it’s likely to lead Western readers toward incorrect conclusions. Explosive, violent and profane from its very first seconds, the crime epic “Gangs of Wasseypur” simultaneously feels like a celebration of Indian cinema and an attempt to blow it up and start over.
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