Qalandar’s Note on GANGS OF WASSEYPUR II (Hindi; 2012)

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I hadn’t thought there would be much to write on Gangs of Wasseypur II; in the sense that I’d thought it would be just like the first film (my review HERE; discussion thread HERE) — indeed director Anurag Kashyap had gone to some lengths in stressing that we were dealing with one film here, and that the second film was simply the latter half of a whole. This, to my mind, and especially because I had enjoyed Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s character the most in the first film (he looked to be the lead protagonist in the second), was, in my mind, a good thing.

Ouch. I didn’t enjoy the second outing very much.

Qalandar Reviews GANGS OF WASSEYPUR (Hindi; 2012)

Updating this post as Qalandar’s piece has now been published on the Outlook site

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Gangs of Wasseypur opens with two of my pet peeves: a voiceover, and an explanation of where we are and how we got there (it’s cinema, people, show me, don’t tell me!). But – and I’m not sure how he does this – director Anurag Kashyap uses these clunky props to pull off some of his best filmmaking yet, in a fantastic hour that situates us in Dhanbad, in Bihar’s (now Jharkhand’s) coal belt, the casual and systematic brutality of its mining industry, and the complicity of the state (both pre- and post-colonial) in all manner of oppression. Marking incident, place and time is Piyush Mishra’s gravelly voice, informing us that our special Purgatory is Wasseypur in the 1940s, south of Dhanbad, a Muslim-village locked in permanent struggle between the Qureshis (butchers by trade) and every other kind of Muslim.