Rahul Desai
It might be about a man put through random hell to quit smoking. But it was largely about a filmmaker defiantly expressing a decade-long nightmare of random roadblocks and shelved projects.
Kashyap's kiddie movie suffered from an adult kind of "ambition". It was a bit of everything ('70s movie references, political and pop-culture nods), overstuffed and greedy
Had this beautiful, chaotic mess of a universe existed in a film not directed by Anurag Kashyap, it might just have been hailed a little. But the film-buff in him strangled the filmmaker, and the narrator in him the intrepid storyteller.
These boots, however, aren't made for walking – a notoriously difficult narrative, full of sharp turns and red herrings, is made watchable by some terrific performances.
The characters are typically murky, but one wished for a little more "stay" on the emotional quality of the adults (Loveless comes to mind) rather than the sheer quantity of them.
A partly inspired tale centered on the downward spiral of five college friends, Paanch excels at manufacturing a wasted atmosphere that sustains five everyday villains.
Just for that exquisitely crafted sequence where Rammana holds his sister's family hostage, 2.0 ranks as the director's most visceral cinematic achievement – in that even his trademark descent into uncontrolled insanity adds to the film's dichotomous palette.
Again, Kashyap wants everything, disorients with his musical indulgence, rarely allows a moment to settle and still manages to make his last-gasp hero (Vineet Kumar Singh) explode with the sort of pent-up career angst that only Kashyap might truly understand.
Rarely has an Indian filmmaker humanized the concept of democracy so directly, without really sugarcoating a universe replete with versions of his own ideology.
Dev.D was a personal breakthrough, but also a public one – in the sense that it proved Hindi films could function as raw sensory experiences…and succeed.
A bonafide mafia masterpiece, the two-part GoW became the one film that stylistically afforded Kashyap the scale and bandwidth to transform what are traditionally considered his shortcomings (density, information, tangential beats) into an enduring strength.
Black Friday is more of a feeling – singularly shocking, stirring, cataclysmic, yet journalistic and depressingly objective, and one of the great achievements in Indian cinema.