'Gulaal' is intense, but doesn’t go anywhere

Gulaal
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Raj Singh Chaudhary and Abhimanyu Singh
Rating: **
CBFC rating: A

Student politics and youth rivalry have always made for gritty thrillers. Back in the 70s, Gulzar cast a very young Vinod Khanna and a villainous Shatrughan Sinha in Mere Apne - the story of a battle between two groups and the futility of violence.

Ram Gopal Varma announced his entry in the Hindi film world with Shiva, while Mani Ratnam’s Yuva, set in a very politically-charged Kolkata, established Abhishek Bachchan’s credentials as an actor.

A film that stood out in the last few years, although it didn’t exactly set the box-office on fire, was Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil. The film was a big boost to Irrfan Khan’s career, where he was cast as a student leader. However, it had a tepid ending where political gameplay was sacrificed for interpersonal relationships and a love story. Gulaal, sadly, succumbs to a similar problem.

The film sets off to a flyer. Anurag Kashyap transports you to Rajpur and the Rajputana party, headed by the fiery Duki Bana (Kay Kay Menon) whose only passion is to achieve by revolt an alternate state ruled by Rajputs.

The character is contrasted by the non-ambitious and non-power seeking Dilip Kumar Singh (Raj Singh Chaudhary). Having come to the city to pursue a law degree, he gets sucked into the politics of the region. What starts out as political rivalry at the college level soon gets snowballed into bigger and more intense political games.

Dilip finds an ally in Ransa (Abhimanyu Singh), the brash, confident youth who Dilip initially resists, but eventually looks up to. Duki sees in Ransa what he needs to win over the university crowd and persuades him to stand for the post of the university’s general secretary.

However, Duki’s rival and Ransa’s step brother Karan (Aditya Shrivastav) gets Ransa out of the way, so that his sister Kiran (Ayesha Mohan) can be general secretary. Duki replaces the fiery Ransa with the meek Dilip and wins him the post with some political wilyness.

From this point, the film takes a different route. The political game play gives way to more complex issues – Dilip’s dealing with his newfound power, his inability to comply with what Duki wants to do with the power, the realisation that Kiran feigned romance with him only so that she could usurp from him the post of GS and Duki Bana’s intense yearning to achieve power.

The film touches on a number of issues, but not all of them seem convincing enough. Why Kiran would stoop to the level she does only to win the university elections seems quite absurd.

The post of general secretary is made to look like that of the prime minister, even though Dilip winning the post doesn’t seem to make any direct impact to Duki or his revolution.

While Duki may look at it as a way to involve the youth in his movement, why would Karan want to win as badly is unclear. Also, a lot of subplots are unexplained and left to the viewers to understand for themselves. What happens to the teacher (Jesse Randhawa) who was molested?

How and why did Duki and Karan come together to form an alliance? In fact, after the initial impact of the first few scenes wears off, you really can’t see any point to the film at all.

Anurag Kashyap is in fine form, extracting great performances and keeping it intense. However, it’s the writing that lets him down. Among the other things that stand out in the film, it’s the music.

Each song is brilliant, greatly forwarding the impact of the story, and credit for that goes to music director and lyric writer Piyush Mishra who has also given a spending performance as the slightly insane Prithvi Singh. Kay Kay Menon gets just the role he can dig his teeth into, while Aditya Shrivastav’s character hardly give him any scope to perform. Both newcomers, Raj Singh Chaudhary and Ayesha Mohan, are fitting for the roles they are cast in, but don’t show any great promise for the future.

The film, however, belongs to Abhimanyu Singh in the role of Ransa. Unassuming and charming in a funny way, Singh takes you by surprise in a more than competent performance. Hopefully, we’ll get to see more of him in other films.

For him, and the great music, Gulaal is somewhat watchable. But a visit to the multiplex for this one could be regretted. You’d rather watch Kashyap’s Dev D (still running in theatres) instead.