Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal finally made it to the theaters after a long hold – very little love and lots of power plays and violence. And if you look really hard in between corpses and gulaal, there is a revolution brewing too.
It has it’s high points but the movie is paced too slow and is too loosely woven to be absorbing.
On the upside, the music, the audacious dialogues, locales and the performance by particularly Deepak Dobriyal, Piyush Mishra and Kay Kay Menon, is brilliant. Kashyap uses stage actors and non mainstream actors which makes them more relatable.
Jesse Randhwa plays Anuja, a marijuana smoking teacher who is ragged (?) while Mahi Gill as Madhuri has two songs and a handful of scenes as Duki Banna’s mistress who lets him kick her around.
It kicks off well with the opening scene, with Duki Banna calling for a separate state of Rajputana, powerful and violent and shows the madness of extremism. But some scenes don’t add up, like when Dilip falls apart as his relationship with Kiran is a sham.
Dilip (Raj Singh Choudhary) leaves home to study law and moves in with Ransa (Abhimanyu Shekhar Singh) who goes out of his way to help Dilip when he is ragged. Duki Banna convinces Ransa to stand for the election opposite Kiran (Ayesha Mohan) and then ugly gets uglier. Ransa is killed and Dilip gets caught up in the political machinations. The election is rigged and Dilip becomes the General Secretary.
Kiran with her brother Karan’s encouragement goes out with Dilip and turns him against Duki Banna and she ends up taking over as General Secretary after which she starts working on seducing Duki Banna, who for a powerful revolutionary leader is quite easily seduced, by tears no less.
People shoot each other left, right and center and it becomes a question of who is playing who. In the end, the madness continues.
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