Vi segnalo l'articolo 'Gangs of Wasseypur’ is like a virus, di Avijit Ghosh, pubblicato oggi da The Times of India:
'The strange thing about Gangs of Wasseypur is that one cannot fathom what chord it has exactly touched. (...) Director Anurag Kashyap’s blood epic leaves you drained even as you get drowned in it. The dark and bleak universe that Kashyap conjures underlines the power of cinema. No movie has evoked a more passionate reaction this year. And it doesn’t matter that not all are laudatory. As a movie, Gangs of Wasseypur makes primary departures. Kashyap blends the global with the regional to create a new aesthetic cool. The movie has a transcending quality that enables even those unschooled in its regional nuances to enjoy it. Stylistically, the movie has the distinct stamp of the usual Hollywood suspects but the visual and aural landscape is uncompromisingly its own. (...) The music and lyrics are stylised folksy. The dialogues are raw and rooted, though cusswords seem to be used sometimes also for effect and cheap thrills. (...)
But viewing the movie as a biography of Wasseypur or as a document on the Dhanbad coal mafia would be inappropriate. Kashyap’s movie is essentially a bleak, unsettling morality tale. The coalfields of Dhanbad are just a theatre where two parallel feuds - between Sardar Khan and Ramadhir Singh and between two Muslim communities (Pathans and Qureshis) - play out. Yet in its barebones, Gangs of Wasseypur is about a son seeking revenge for his father’s murder, a story told countless times in Indian cinema. If the movie is still able to keep the audience transfixed for two hours and 40 minutes, it is because Kashyap takes you inside the anarchic world that he creates and keeps you there. The movie becomes a compelling ballad of a certain kind of people, their idea of morality and relationship, patriarchy , the evolution of a criminal’s weaponry and much more. So much so that its flaws - and they are quite a few - cease to matter.
The credit partly goes to the craft. In Kashyap’s hands, much of Wasseypur’s violence almost becomes erotic; the bylane stabbing scene is like choreographed artwork. It is scary and thrilling and leaves you gasping for air. But it is the film’s characters that we really take home. Wasseypur’s men and women arise like smoke from the bowels of the stinking drains that they live around. They aren’t amoral; they just have an alternate version of morality, indispensable for their survival. (...) The characters (...) tell us that the evil and the good are not separate particles; they are rather entwined and live comfortably and without contradictions in us.
Wasseypur not only creates an alternative model of the ‘cool’ film but also throws up another model of success in Bollywood. It doesn’t really matter that the film is only a modest box-office success and will not cross the coveted Rs 100 crore mark. Many will be enthused by the fact that even after staying honest to a script’s core, you can make a movie that makes money, gets screened at a select section in Cannes and becomes a reference point for serious discussion on cinema. That it can be done with largely unknown actors and technicians from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, which underlines the vast creative energy that these regions have in store, is another plus. Perhaps the power of Gangs of Wasseypur lies in its ability to leave us with something which in absence of a better word can only be described as “an experience.” Like a virus, the movie almost forcibly creates space inside you and becomes a part of you'.
