Let’s face it.It’s the truth. There’s the reality chic in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai , and then there’s the reality check in Paanch. Both films depict a Mumbai reality. The one so yummy and yuppie it makes us go yippie. The other so grim and gloom-gathering it makes you want to turn away in disgust and anger.
Often while watching writer Anurag Kashyap’s directorial debut Paanch which was in the eye of a censorial storm I wondered if Kashyap is pushing us into repudiating his reality. The film pushes the edge of sociopathic realism so near the brink, that the narrative nearly topples over and falls into the abyss.
Yes, Hindi cinema has taken the plunge into strongly redolent drama of metropolitan realism. Whether audiences care to go along for Anurag Kashyap’s nightmarish rollercoaster ride with his five outcast characters, he doesn’t care. Like Farhan Akhtar, Kashyap has made the debut film he wanted to. Like Farhan’s Dil Chahta Hai , Paanch conveys the scent of sincerity. Or perhaps the reek of realism is more to the point.
Kashyap’s film starts at the end with four of the five outlawed outcasts being interrogated by a cop. The entire jagged jigsaw that Kashyap has constructed . unfolds backwards from there. We meet the volatile Luke(Kay Kay Menon) and his flat mates , the quiet observant and intelligent Murgi(Aditya Shrivastava), the transparently un-cerebral Joy(Joy Fernandes) , the confused and frightened Pondy(Vijay Mourya) and the tartish queen of selfpreservation Shivli(Tejaswini Kolhapure).
They are part of Luke’s twisted dream-plan to form a successful rock band. When every attempt to do so fails, Luke decides to take his cronies on a journey into crime they would never forget.
Kashyap builds Luke’s bitter rage into an explosion of street violence. The way the main antagonist Luke humiliates and beats up a petty drug dealer and then roughs up a bus conductor after dragging him out on the streets , or bullies and taunts his friends specially the weak and indefensible Pondy, is certainly not a sight for the squeamish. Kashyap constructs a shrieking banshee of rage and bitterness in the demeanour of his characters.
When the killings begin one by one—first the moneyed associate Nikhil, then Nikhil’s old and frail father, followed by an investigating cop(Sharat Saxena) –we aren’t the least surprised, only appalled by the inevitable doom into which Kashyap’s narrative leads us.
The narrative structure follows no known convention, and is therefore distracting to the extreme. While the first segment of the film shows the five ‘friends’(are they really that?) singing loud rock numbers and passing filthy comments at each other, the second segment signifies a strident shift in mood, with Luke’s neurotic violence surfacing with brutal force.
It’s the third and last movement in the dark and morbid narrative that bothers me on both an aesthetic and structural level. For , here, more than anywhere else in the tortured narrative, Kashyap gets unabashedly selfindulgent. The five characters begin to play a dreadful and obviously lethal game of cat and mouse. Murgi, Shivli , Joy and Pondy hatch a plan to murder their control-fixated gang leader Luke. But hey, Luke isn’t really dead. That’s just a ruse to get away with murder. In a hastily shot climax on the beach, Kashyap turns the tables on the cocksure Luke. But we aren’t sure if conversion from street realism to film noire really works.
The crux of the film, its raison d’etre lies in its audacious effort to stretch the parameters of conventional cinematic expression. Rather than anything we’ve seen before Paanch reminds us of Danny Boyles’ film on Scottish angst Trainspotting. When compared with how close Kashyap keeps his nose to the ground in Paanch Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya which Kashyap had written seems , much closer to orthodox definitions of thriller cinema .
Kashyap’s characters speak a rough street-smart lingo that constantly reminds us of their proximity to the grassroots. Their body language is offensively aggressively bordering, as it does, on the lascivious . But to call their verbal and postural demeanour vulgar would be wrong.
Kashyap’s characters live, behave, sing and die the way they do because they know no other way. These are dark ugly morally dead characters with no redemptive qualities. But you can’t blame them for being what they are. Mumbai engenders innumerable such desperados who either take to crime or return to their origins before being sucked into a life of irreversible selfdebasement.
The Mumbai we see in Paanch is many shades darker than Dev Benegal’s dark and depraved Mumbai in Split Wide Open or Sudhir Mishra’s doomed and desperate Mumbai in Dharavi. In Paanch the city is a merciless adversary that pulverizes every good quality in the man on the street.
Kay Kay Menon’s portrayal of passionate perversity proves him to be the most intensely natural performer since Naseeruddin Shah. With one performance Menon has gone into the realm of great actors. He gets fabulous support from his colleagues in crime, especially Vijay Maurya as the mixed-up Pondy .
It’s ironic , but these brilliant actors represent the creative side of metropolitan cruelty and anonymity. What does it take for an actor as accomplished as Kay Kay Menon to wonder why he isn’t where some of the top stars in Mumbai find themselves by fluke?
By fluke or by Luke, Paanch makes a determined bid to stay true to its undefined form. The narration is akin to an unrehearsed gyration . The rhythms that Kashyap adopts are strictly unpremeditated . And even though his visuals and dialogues scoff at what we’ve taken to be celluloid realism so far, Anurag Kashyap isn’t really out to shock viewers.
That’s what makes the repugnant events doubly shocking. The film is certainly not suitable for all tastes and ages. It needs to be released selectively and discreetly. But release , it must get, if not for the sake of creative freedom, than to let audiences get a startling glimpse into the other side of Mumbai, far removed from the comforting world we see in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai.