Sardar’s chapter is the most fully realized, partly due to his complicated love life. Yet “Gangs of Wasseypur” is also a scrapbook of Bollywood references, observing the industry’s hold on India’s cultural imagination. On a fundamental level, the Khans mirror the power pyramid of postwar India, which, if one believes the film’s mix of archival photography, footage and analytic commentary, is run by a few clans behaving like gangsters. Stirred into the hard-hitting action is a heady cocktail of spontaneous romanticism, cockily humorous dialogue, period-sensitive music of staggering range, and songs with lewd lyrics that form a caustic chorus. Part two plays out in frenetic fashion as Sardar’s sons - libidinous Danish, pothead Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), money-grabbing Perpendicular and power-crazed Definite - take turns auditioning for the role of most ruthless don.Īs the town ushers in a new order in which every boy is a Godfather wannabe, the finale culminates in a spectacular orgy of bullets and blood that impresses even after five hours of murder, rape, castration, beheading and random carnage. When his eldest son, Danish (Vineet Singh), marries Shama Parveen (Anurita Jha), daughter of butcher Ehsan (Vipin Sharma), an uneasy truce emerges, but it can’t last: By the end of part one, Ramadhir (now played by Tigmanshu Dhulia) has become Sardar’s nemesis. Soon, he becomes sidetracked by empire building, a fracas with a guild of Qureshi butchers and, most of all, his bigamous pursuits. When Shahid’s son Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee) grows up, he moves back to Wasseypur in the 1960s and makes vengeance his vocation. The family pioneer, Shahid Khan (Jaideep Ahlawat), blazes a trail as a train robber, exile, coal worker and merciless enforcer for mine owner/kingpin Ramadhir Singh (Rajat Bhagat), who has Shahid dispatched as soon as he becomes a threat. The origins of the strife between the two clans are then traced back to 1941, when the movement to oust the British left a power vacuum in the coal-mining industry, the only livelihood in a Muslim-populated region in North India. The pulse-quickening prologue opens in 2004, with a shootout in Wasseypur that catches auds as off-guard as it does the Khan crime family, whose members are ambushed in their home by their rivals, the Qureshis, from neighboring Dhanbad. The pacing is machine-gun relentless, sweeping incoherence and repetitiveness under the carpet as it barrels forward with hypnotic speed. D” and “The Girl in Yellow Boots.” Even with a tapestry of more than a dozen central characters, the screenplay is structured in such a way that half of them are granted their own chapters, so their personalities, foibles and mixed-up feelings toward each other emerge with coruscating clarity.Ībsorbing styles as diverse as those of old-school Italo-American mafia classics a la Coppola, Scorsese and Leone, as well as David Michod’s taut crime thriller “Animal Kingdom,” Kashyap never lets his influences override the distinct Indian color. Unquestionably the magnum opus of Kashyap’s seven released features, this saga allows the helmer to harness his visual flair and snappy narrative technique to a formidable subject, an extended historical timeframe (over 70 years) and a sizable production scale, while the quasi-rural backdrop requires him to rein in the kitschy excesses he displayed in urban-set works like “Dev. Although it will probably blast through international festivals where Kashyap is perceived as an edgy alternative to Bollywood, only part one has been booked for domestic theatrical release. Pic screened in two segments (159 minutes and 158 minutes, respectively) at its Cannes Directors’ Fortnight preem.
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