Qalandar on Masala and DABANGG (Hindi; 2010)

EXCERPT:

“Abhinav Kashyap attempts to answer my questions. Acting like it’s 1983 won’t do, but neither will spoofing all the way to a gag-fest — leaving everything else aside, masala-as-slapfest just isn’t funny. Nor does the tongue in cheek cleverness, or rather, the cinematic presentation of cleverness (a la Bluffmaster!), sit comfortably with a mode the very lifeblood of which is “as if”: masala cinema takes the absolute significance of the story and characters that it is presenting for granted. What’s left, then? In a word, the world of Robert Rodriguez (something like Desperado), the exaggerated gesturality of which, combined with the complete seriousness of purpose, makes clear that this world must be taken seriously, even if it seems a bit like kabuki, sending us missives in a language that is no longer completely retrievable, evoking a mode that can only be viewed through a screen. Kashyap must walk a tightrope: self-consciousness — the curse of recent attempts to resurrect masala, and unknown to the Southern remakes — cannot simply be wished (or willed) away, but too much of an emphasis on mode can itself betray that one is at a wake, with the films focusing almost exclusively on the hero’s gesturality, to the exclusion of everything else (this is, precisely, the shape of the Tamil and Telugu masala ruts). To the extent Kashyap has to come down on one side, he does so on the latter, but not before maintaining his balance for longer than most others on this terrain.

Dabangg, in short, is good fun: in an old-school way, it takes its narrative seriously, evoking the traditional tropes of mother, paternity, and dispossession; while its representation of a cheerfully corrupt, amoral hero, looking out above all else for himself, is of more modern vintage. Bridging the gap between the two, the one who holds it all up, is Salman Khan, whose Lalgunj Inspector Chulbul Pandey is cleverly drawn by Kashyap to give full rein to the audience’s skepticism — if we succumb to this film’s charms, Pandey’s own antics will stand for and sum up everything that can’t be happening on screen. Leaving us to imbibe the rest of the film as is, freed as it were. Sure, we can never feel for Chulbul Pandey — that isn’t his function. Instead, Salman is asked to function as a medium for the ghosts of a certain kind of hero; by making the character’s –and the actor’s — oddity explicit, Kashyap enables us to stop asking the question.”

Read the complete piece HERE.