'‘Gandu’' as art… and becoming a tad less hypocritical

I recently saw a film everyone’s been talking about, but no one has seen. It’s called Gandu. It’s in Bangla and it’s the coolest and baddest Indian film I ever saw. If you don’t like bad, now would be a good time to quit reading this piece, because you may be shocked by what follows.

Gandu is set in Kolkata and tells the story of a wannabe rapper who lives with his mother and hates her. He has no other family or friend. His days are punctuated by the loud moaning of his mother as she has sex with a local businessman named Das. Gandu gets his pocket money by crawling on all fours into the bedroom and picking Das’ pocket while he’s in the act. He keeps buying lottery tickets with part of the money in the hope that he will win big someday.

One day he is slapped by a rickshaw-puller who turns out to be a Bruce Lee fan. They become friends. The movie gets crazier from here on.

Sequences are punctuated by rap songs with heavy guitar riffs. There are a lot of shots of drugs being consumed, and sex scene follows sex scene. The most graphic is one which shows Rii, director Qaushiq’s girlfriend, giving a blow job and more to Gandu. It’s full frontal nudity and it’s shot very well.

The movie obviously isn’t out yet. Q, as Quashiq is known, hopes it will see light of day in theatres in India. I missed hearing him tell how this would happen, though he did say between drags that he’s working on it. I would personally be very curious to see a Bengali audience brought up on Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen reacting to this film.

In person, Q comes across as an amiable Bengali. He’s soft-spoken except when he’s fronting his new rap band, Gandu Circus. The crowd at the Escape festival in Naukuchia Tal caught the first performance of this band. TLR in Delhi last Wednesday was their second gig, and there were already people chanting along with Q as he sang “Nara nara, bara nara”, which means “Shake it shake it, shake your penis”. Q later explained that Bangla is a soft and phonetic language, so only the bad words have the hardness required for rap.

A guy named Lal Miah from Bangladesh, who  raps in the Sylheti dialect of Bangla, gets around  this limitation by rapping romantic songs. He uses  the softness of the language, but ends up sounding rather soppy.

Punjabi doesn’t suffer from problems of excessive softness. Ip Singh of Menwhopause does a mean Punjabi rap in his song Kaatil Sardar. A guy who calls himself Badmash raps in Hindi. His music is softer than the other two in tone, though the emotions are strong.

Audiences seem to love the extreme stuff. Perhaps it’s a small demographic I’m talking of, or maybe we’re just becoming a tad less hypocritical as a country. I mean, it’s not like we are shy about using expletives in daily conversation.
We’re certainly less easily shocked.
Gandu managed to shock me in bits. For example, the sex scene involving Rii was a shocker. I didn’t expect it to be so explicit, for more reasons than one. She is, after all, the director’s live-in girlfriend!

Then again, sex is only one aspect of a relationship. That Rii did the scene she did with Q directing would suggest who one has sex with may not be very important in all relationships. The film made me think about possession and love, among other things.
It also made me feel surprised, amused, disgusted, even briefly aroused. It was entertaining, but it was more than that.
It was art to me.