Review: “Mirzapur” adds little to its borrowed world of gun-cradling gangsters and power-hungry mafia patriarchs.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

The wedding seems to be a vital element in a gangster picture. The iconic opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, in which a mob patriarch casually conducts his business as shrieks of laughter rise from his backyard, where his daughter is getting married and people are making merry, placed the sacred white of a wedding next to the fiery red of the mob business. The first season of the Amazon Prime original, Mirzapur, created by Karan Anshuman and Puneet Krishna, opens and closes with weddings soiled by blood. It begins with a bunch of intoxicated young men infiltrating a wedding procession going through the sleepy streets of Mirzapur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, and how a moment of revelry changes lives. A gun goes off and the groom is killed. The killing is accidental, and the victim isn’t eminent, but it sets in motion events that will ultimately transform the fate of the town.

In recent years the Hindi film industry has looked towards the north, especially Uttar Pradesh, for inspiration to make gangster films. Anurag Kashyap delivered a major work with the ambitious yet flawed Gangs of Wasseypur in 2012, which brought the flamboyance and unruliness back to the Hindi gangster film. There were several smaller films that tried to emulate its style but were not half as successful. Mirzapur appears to be one of those works that are indebted to Gangs of Wasseypur for its creative vision and courage, but it lacks its epic sweep, its startling imagination, its irresistible humor, and more importantly, its nerve. The concoction here comprises of a familiar set of elements: vibrant characters, colorful language, over-the-top violence, and a smattering of tongue-in-cheek humor. And the inspirations that help brew this concoction are diverse. I could spot overt references to Vishal Bharadwaj’s Shakespearean adaptations Maqbool and Omkara, the occasional bows to Gangs of Wasseypur, of course, and maybe a few touches of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil, too.

However, for any work to be complete, it must find a way around the inspirations that gave birth to it. It must, at any cost, come of its own. In this regard, Mizapur isn’t exactly a success; it struggles to find its feet and establish its world of gun-toting hoods and simmering rivalries, but fails. Its world doesn’t look lived in – rather, it looks borrowed – and the primary characters come alive only much later. But the more urgent problem that isn’t addressed soon enough is, there’s very little originality here.

Mirzapur traces the rise of two brothers against the backdrop of the Uttar Pradesh underworld, and how a stray shooting incident puts them in touch with Akhandanand Tripathi, an arms dealer, opium smuggler and reigning don of Mirzapur, who uses his carpet business as a front for his illicit activities, thus his sobriquet ‘Kaleen bhaiya’. It’s also not particularly surprising to see that he has shades of the character of Abbaji from Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool; both of them appear to have been bred in the same household. Both are married to much younger women and their right-hand men are called Maqbool. And yet, Akhandanand (played by the incomparable Pankaj Tripathi) doesn’t wield the same influence as Abbaji. Never do we believe the extent of his power. We are told about it persistently, though. It’s a little disappointing to pick up bits and pieces about the central characters and events through chunks of dialogue, and it’s one of Mirzapur’s bigger flaws. The writing lacks the polish often found in great cinematic works. The characters constantly articulate what they are thinking out loud, as if being unpredictable is a bad thing, and it robs them of the opportunity to be memorable.

The characters, in themselves, are not a bad bunch. We have the wayward, power-hungry son who is to be Akhandanand’s successor, and the two brothers who threaten his legacy. We have a group of supporting characters as well, boringly written and underused, that inexplicably vanishes for long periods of time. We have a corrupt politician eying higher office who also happens to be a nexus between rival gangs, quite the staple in Hindi gangster films these days. All in all, it’s a mixed bag, and it’s a shame that none of them sparkle. The accents appear to have been picked up rather than imbibed, and the actors seem to have a ball rattling off expletives. Given how the makers of direct-to-stream projects get to work with more creative freedom, it was always a given that Mirzapur would contain a healthy amount of swearing. (There’s little doubt that it would likely not have made it to the theatres if it had been a feature-length film.) And gore, the unwarranted amount of gore. It’s a truly visceral experience to sit through it all, but it’s also a bit of a letdown to see the boundaries of creative freedom being used in a way that eventually adds little to the characters or the plot. It does its bit to set the mood, but it strays far too often into indulgence.

In all fairness, although the brew here is composed of familiar elements, it is never less than fairly engaging. The performances might be a tad inconsistent in parts, and there is no revelation here, unfortunately, but they are strong. (Divyendu Sharma, in particular, is impressive.) And there is a reasonable amount of tension that is executed competently, and two or three powerful moments that clobbered me. I wasn’t fully convinced by how some of the character arcs developed (especially how the two brothers go from innocent students to hardened mafia henchmen in the blink of an eye), but the series moves briskly enough to ensure these shortcomings are not lingered over. The result, then, is a work of few highs and many lows, one that is not immediately promising, but one that ultimately managed to get under my skin well enough for me to look forward to its second season. Hallelujah.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Sriram Raghavan’s “Andhadhun” is the best Hindi film of the year.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Sriram Raghavan’s obsession with tributes would make a good drinking game someday. His films are littered with them; he reads James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich; he watches John-Pierre Melville, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vijay Anand. Every master gets a hat-tip, a reference. Johnny Gaddaar, his spectacular thriller from 2007, seemed to have sprung out of the pages of a great Hadley Chase novel. In Andhadhun, these inspirations coalesce to form something that’s utterly new and compelling. There’s a murder at the heart of it, as is usually the case, but the film isn’t about the murder, or who committed it; rather, it’s about the paranoia it triggers, and how it eventually forces those involved in it to get in touch with their rotten side, right or wrong be damned. It’s about people eager to silence each other, but even more eager to listen to each other if it involves a get-rich-quick scheme. And it asks, above all, a rather interesting question: What are you prepared to do to save yourself?

Indeed, good thrillers often hinge on a surprise or two, while great ones decide against it. Great thrillers, I find, are never about their bag of surprises. They are always about their characters. Raghavan excels at writing both. In a staggering scene in Johnny Gaddaar, a young man picks up a gun and pumps bullets into his unsuspecting boss quite suddenly, killing him. This isn’t played merely for shock value; there’s logic dictating his actions. He’s been pushed into a corner. He’s scared and helpless. It’s his only way out. But, would he pick up the gun lying in front of him and kill his unarmed master? Would he dare? He does. And when he does, it makes us gasp. It’s likely the most revealing detail about this character, something that rather skillfully influences not just our view of him but also what we can eventually expect of the film.

In Andhadhun, a young pianist pretending to be blind is a silent, almost idiotic witness to a murder. We don’t see the actual murder; we see a body and a pool of blood next to it. Two people – one of whom is the victim’s wife, the other her lover – dispose of it as he plays a somber tune, pretending to not have seen any of it. (This is, in a way, reminiscent of Chaplin’s dark comedies, particularly Monsieur Verdoux; a tribute, maybe?) When she lamely tries to cover it up, he goes along with it. The sequence plays for about seven minutes, seven glorious minutes, and it tells us all we need to know about the two central characters. Both sides are lying to each other: he about his blindness, she about being innocent. But little things also tell us about who they are when the masks they wear slip off. He’s smart enough to play dumb. She weeps silently when the body is finally taken care of. A lot of things are hinted at, and some are left unsaid. Neither of them knows what the other’s intentions are. It’s an amusing conundrum. He knows for sure she’s lying. But what does he do with the truth? She suspects he's lying. But what does she do about it?

Like in his previous thrillers, Raghavan puts his characters in precarious situations, adds a layer of intrigue, and then invites us to watch what happens. In Andhadhun, exuberantly written and performed sequences lead us down a cold and damp rabbit hole. The pacing is relentless; we have barely finished relishing one sequence, one marvelous surprise, when the film moves on to a better one. Sample for a bit that terrific sequence featuring a sly police officer arriving at the protagonist’s house and nosing about, waiting for his mask to slip off. The timing of this sequence is especially interesting: it comes right after two dramatic reveals which we are still trying to wrap our heads around. It’s pure cinema, and Raghavan orchestrates the hell out of it. But the same question prods us again: If the mask does slip off, what would happen? We know what the characters are capable of, but they never react in the way we expect them to. It’s the excitement of finding out that fuels the experience of watching this film, of knowing that, in one way or another, it’ll find a way to surprise us. It’s a tightrope walk for any filmmaker, and Raghavan more than rises up to the challenge.

In the second half, however, the film’s momentum does dip. The film, as we know it, is taken from the hands of these wonderfully mad characters and placed into the hands of those we barely know. It’s a risky move, not to mention how puzzling it is, the consequences of which could very well prove disastrous. For one, a substantial amount of screen time would have to be dedicated to develop this new bunch of characters and arrive at an acceptable answer to why we should be watching them instead. (This also explains the strange void at the beginning of the second half. But it mercifully doesn't last long.) Imagination is still very much at the forefront of things, but less patient viewers may disagree. Speaking for myself, I can’t say I was too happy with this change, but I was intrigued nonetheless.

What distinguishes Sriram Raghavan’s films from other Hindi (or even Indian) thrillers is his idea of what constitutes a great thriller. His thrillers seldom revolve around the ‘who’ or the ‘why’. We know why his characters do what they do, and so we aren’t really sure what to expect when things don’t go according to plan. In Andhadhun, we know who committed the murder and why they did it. He also lets us know who might go next. It’s out in the open. And yet Andhadhun manages to catch us off guard frequently, without making a big deal of it. He never draws our attention to how clever he has been nor seems eager to shock. His plots evolve organically, his character arcs develop beautifully, and his twists are deftly done. It’s consistently intelligent filmmaking.

It is not customary for an Indian thriller to place a red herring near the end. I find that in most Indian thrillers the last few minutes before the end credits roll are devoted to connecting the dots, sometimes several times over. Flashbacks are usually employed to do the job of achieving complete coherence, or something close to it. It’s a lazy, lazy move. Andhadhun subverts this cunningly; yet another example of how well the makers have structured it and how satisfying the experience is as a result. I have seen it twice and I saw two different films: the first with an ending that was agreeable, and the second with one that was astonishing. It really depends on how we see it.

Andhadhun might be the finest Hindi film to be released this year. It might just be the year’s funniest as well, and definitely the year’s most irreverent. With an ingenious plot, insightful bits of detail that are woven into the proceedings most scrupulously, and a clump of excellent performances, Raghavan has cemented his reputation of being Hindi cinema’s thriller pundit. I just wish this means he gets to script every movie death henceforth.

[Not for Reproduction]