Black Friday Vs. Laga Chunri mein daag

When I first watched Black Friday on DVD (as I was away when it released in theatres) I couldn’t sit past the first half hour finding the scenes too raw and gritty for my taste. I didn’t connect and ‘a time for everything’ concept was working its magic on me (or so goes the sheepish excuse).

Then, I watched the movie again after reading the book and was glad to know that the force, fear and horror translated through. In fact, in some places Kashyap does even better than a mere translation on celluloid. Like the scene where boys are running after one another and the police are running after the suspect in the opposite direction. Brilliant. It shows how the game of chor-police is still very much on.

Few other quick notes I made:
Framing
Tone – mood of desolate (the removed from archives feel)
Passionate concentration with which the movie is made
Dialogs stick to the character’s state of mind
Choices of apt locales: toilets, rooms, hotels, booths, police station, red light area etc. depicting the real environment of the character
‘real conversations’
The characters are as alive as some of the fictional characters like Ellsworth Toohey or the more recent Teza in The Lizard’s cage. (It should be the other way round, I know, where fictional characters should be equated for their realness.)
Indulgence in efficient cinematography in spite of a tight minute-to-minute shot scenes

Striking observation: the humanness of the perpetrators, the victims and the police provide a balanced display without judgment. Clean. A peek into S. Zaidi’s mind: when you understand everything, you forgive everything. (and ironical.)

Word play: passion, light, color, raw

Half of the movie is told through:
TV file footage of the actual rescue operation
Music and song (shows the state of mind of Badshah khan)
Dialog
Voice over on other occurrences
Narration (by an outside, invisible authority)
Witnesses’ confessions: voice over on the unfolding of those scenes

Trivia:
The chances at comedy: Amitab Bhachan’s dialog playing in the background when a suspect is on the run through the slums. Wicked.
The toilet scene: a policeman standing on either side of the toilet where the ‘suspect’ is shitting
The man at the police station who is shunned every time he gets up to speak to the officer. (Metaphorical)
And the dialogs stick to the book as much as they can. When not they extend very skillfully from the book.

Other things:
The book brings in the context and makes the film more accessible. If I hadn’t read the book, I would have found the film too fast for comprehension. There are too many characters and too many things happening.

Also, the structure of the film is a challenging (from the viewpoint of the student in me) and complex though efficient (from the viewpoint of the viewer in me) one.
Not all details are covered in the film e.g. Rakesh Maria’s life or the back stories of victims like the chaiwalla who dreamt of owning a cloth store some day and supplemented his earnings by selling t-shirts on Saturdays at Churchgate station. Or the stories of the victims’ families.
There was a sense of disjoint but I can’t pin from where that was coming. The editing, perhaps or censorship woes?

Laga Chunri mein daag
When one knows the taste of blood, all there is to say is:
Resources like star power, big banners and generous budgets should to be used wisely.
A patchy film shrouded in mediocrity.

Well the idea was strong, some of the characters well-shaped, but the plot a handicap.
If the end of the story was so important that a call girl finds a husband who accepts her with her soiled choonri and blah, then their relationship should have been developed more than glossing it over with a mere train song and ducks in a pond.
The story didn’t hold together. Good thing I have a short memory span for rubbish.

-Rochelle Potkar

*these movies were viewed on the same day.