Gangs of Wasseypur I è stato distribuito ieri nelle sale indiane, e l'afflusso da parte del pubblico sembra in costante crescita. Le recensioni sono in generale positive. Ve ne segnalo alcune:
- Mayank Shekhar, 22 giugno 2012: 'So you know Sardar’s the hero, Ramadheer the villain, and the film, a revenge drama seeking poetic justice. And yet the worst mistake you’re likely to make is to walk into this film thinking like that. It’ll kill your fun. In fact, it’s advisable not to even perceive this as a feature film. It’s more of a multi-part mini-series. (...) Your patience is likely to wane after a point. And yes, it does. Yet, just as it does, the makers manage to successfully slip in an inspiring scene, an entertaining snippet or a limited twist in the plot and you go back to engaging with the picture all over again. (...) The film gets the atmospherics, beats and nuances just right. This is quite rare for movies placed in provincial towns. (...) GOW is fictionalised, blood-soaked, demented history that alternates between sharp grittiness and delicious grotesquery. Movies have a gender. This is animalist, male. Given how easy it is to kill off people in this picture, it’s a miracle that they’re all not dead yet!'.
- Raja Sen, Rediff, 22 giugno 2012, ** 1/2: 'And the yawns are the primary issue with Anurag Kashyap's GOW, an impressively ambitious - and excellently shot - collection of memorable characters and entertaining scenes, set to a killer soundtrack. The film never recovers from the unforgivably tedious first half-hour, and despite many laudable moments and nifty touches, never quite engages. This is (...) mostly because Kashyap is defiant in his self-indulgence, piling on more and more when less could have done the job more efficiently. (...) His film tries too hard to be more: more than just an actioner, more than just a drama, more even than a bloodied saga. This overreaching desire to be an Epic makes it a film that, despite some genuinely stunning individual pieces, fails to come together as a whole. There is much to treasure, but there is more to decry. Entire sequences that could be compressed into clever throwaway lines are staged in grand, time-consuming detail; while genuinely sharp lines are often repeated, as if too good to use just once. The characters are a wild, fantastical bunch of oddballs and trigger-happy loons, but attempting to do each fascinating freak justice with meaty chunks of screen-time may not even be film's job. Wasseypur may have worked better as a long and intriguing television series, one deserving a spin-off movie only after six seasons. Here it feels too linear, and even too predictable: scenes themselves often surprise, even delight, but the narrative is cumbersome and unexciting. (...) Yet it is the excess that suffocates all the magic, originality dying out for lack of room to breathe. Kashyap gets flavour, setting and character right, but the lack of economy cripples the film'.
- Shubhra Gupta, The Indian Express, 22 giugno 2012, ****: 'GOW is a sprawling, exuberant, ferociously ambitious piece of film making, which hits most of its marks. It reunites Anurag Kashyap with exactly the kind of style he is most comfortable with: hyper masculine, hyper real, going for the jugular. (...) Wasseypur is not just a place, but a state of mind. (...) There's history here, of the kind almost never attempted by Hindi cinema, bouyed beautifully by geography: the locations are part of the pleasures of the film'.
- NDTV, ***1/2: 'The smartly filmed vendetta saga tosses and turns convulsively from one shootout to another as a bunch of amoral human bloodhounds sniff around for their next kill in a volatile, lawless landscape. The unbridled violence and fetid language - the expletives fly as thick and fast as the bullets - are, however, only one facet of this cinematically layered shot at a time-honoured and popular genre. (...) GOW benefits immensely from a towering performance by Manoj Bajpayee, who immerses himself in the central character of Sardar Khan with such conviction and controlled flair that it becomes impossible to separate the actor from the part'.
Per quanto concerne la spumeggiante colonna sonora, vi segnalo:
- Gangs of Wasseypur - Lyrics translations, MoiFightClub, 7 giugno 2012
- Songs in ‘Bhojpurised’ Hindi, Kashika Saxena, The Times of India, 15 giugno 2012:
'Never underestimate the power of music, because we love to have a song for every occasion. Filmmakers seem to understand this sentiment all too well, which is why even though Anurag Kashyap’s “Gangs Of Wasseypur” is a film about gangsters, its music is being talked about as much as its storyline. The filmmaker explained the quantum of music in the movie in a panel discussion at the Cannes Film Festival saying, “You can’t really get away from music in India. You walk on the street and you’ll hear music from some corner, somewhere. Music is omnipresent in our lives. And the second thing is that music has become a very important part of marketing. If you have good music in your film, you get free airplay, you get awareness about your film, because each Friday you have ten films competing for audience attention and you need to build that awareness. In fact, today, when sometimes a film in India doesn’t have music, marketing teams look for ways to introduce music, such as in the rolling credits, and release that music. I have learnt to try to use music in a way that does not impact the flow of the film, that it becomes as an extension of what is going on in front of the audience - then it’s not a forced insert just for the sake of marketing.”
The attention this film’s music is getting comes as no surprise, what with lyrics like “I am hunter and she want to see my gun”. Twenty-seven-year-old music director Sneha Khanwalkar has used a mix of eclectic artistes from places like Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Garbandha, among others, for the songs of the film, and she says that the idea was to use simple, vernacular lyrics that can be sung and understood easily. The feedback that she got from Cannes, where the film was praised by many international critics, was that the music wasn’t “very Bollywood”. “It was sounding very global to them because they probably haven’t heard these voices before. These voices are so authentic and from such interior parts. For instance, I went to Trinidad to record this guy Vedesh Sookoo for the song “Hunter” and he only speaks English, but he’s a Bihari who has never been to India, which I find very interesting. I then merged his part with other singers from more of core Bihar and made this song. ‘Shut up’ and ‘my name is’ are words and phrases that are used very easily in small towns like these and I’ve used the accent to show the vernacular influence,” she tells us. No other song except “Hunter” has Hinglish in it, but the lyrics are, in what Sneha calls “Bhojpurised Hindi”. “It is basically core interior land music. The vocal nature is quite cool, and I don’t think one would care about what is actually being sung. They could understand it, but even if they don’t, it’s all right because they would still get the meaning. Even I didn’t try to learn the exact language,” she says.
The people she met while she was making the music for the film, the ones who ended up singing these songs, aren’t professional singers. They’re people who would “probably start singing in the middle of the night in their village, if at all,” she says, adding, “They aren’t professional, but authentic. Like one of the women who sang “Womaniya”, Rekha Jha, is a housewife. Her father taught music and that’s how she did chorus for me. But later I found out that she’s from this place called Mithila, near Ganga, and that’s why her voice is so different from other voices in the Bhojpuri belt.” “The good part is that there was no hurry when I was making the music of this film. There was enough time to do this process because there was no rush; we were thinking only of the music. I gathered all this and then decided who to put where, and then the music got intertwined with the film,” she says'.
