And yes, there is Yashpal Sharma, the resident stage singer of Wasseypur crooning a 1980s song for every occasion. A whole thesis can be written on the interesting caller tunes from the 1980s and 1990s used by the characters in their mobile phone. The ceaseless shower of bullets gets a hand-up on the visceral soundtrack from Sneha Khanwalkar’s excruciatingly evocative folk songs of Bihar (some of which are used in two versions, ironical or poignant, but always intensely definitive) and with excellent use of the puerile film songs of the 1980s, which used to be out on the T-Series label back then when music piracy was as rampant as political hooliganism.Įven when the epic narration moves into the 2000 millennium, the characters are stuck in the 1980s. The price for any crime, petty or grave, is the same. In Kashyap’s version of the Wild West, you could get killed on the spot for anything, for asking the time or raping your neighbour’s sister. The violence of the politically corroded north Indian town (Wasseypur, or what you will) is exaggerated to a point of utter outrageousness. Does that make sense? It had better! That so-real-that-it’s-unreal tempestuous twilight zone is where Kashyap’s film belongs. The gang wars are so real that they are unreal. Kashyap crams in-house jokes into every nook and cranny of this diligently-constructed breathtaking ode to the culture of street violence.
This, if you are familiar with the language of commercial Hindi cinema, is in character with the image of the filmy police force. “Why don’t you hand over the body to us and come with us?” “We understand,” squeaks a khaki-clad gentleman. “Don’t you see I’m taking my brother home,” Faizal bellows.
Cops stop Faizal and politely ask him to accompany them to the police station. There’s a typically wry Kashyap joke just before interval when the raging protagonist Faizal (or ‘Faijal’, as everyone including his sexy wife calls him), carries his kid-brother’s corpse home. In any case, no one in Kashyap’s god-forsaken kingdom takes cops seriously, not even the cops themselves. Caught in the crossfire of vendetta and redemption, the characters of “Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2” are so on-the-edge, they don’t fear the abyss that awaits them at the end of their vengeful voyage.
If you try to count the numbers of bullets that are fired at unsuspecting victims in the ferociously violent world inhabited by Anurag Kashyap’s trigger-happy goons, you might end up cross-eyed. Subhash K Jha reviews Gangs of Wasseypur 2
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