Gunday is a kitschy pseudo-historical depiction of Bangladeshi migrants in Kolkata post the 1971 Bangladeshi war of liberation. Two boys, Bikram and Bala, crawl across the border into Kolkata and become some kind of messianic outlaws. The film glorifies a life of crime to a level of embarrassing exultation until we see the two ‘heroes’(ha ha) constantly on the run from the ‘the law’(as represented by the insanely sane and sensible Irrfan Khan).
But Bikram and Bala, who grow up to be two blobs of brainless brawn played by Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor, are no ordinary criminals on the run. They run in slow-motion, sometimes shirtless, most of the time brainless, their biceps and six-packs glistening in hairless glory. They are the Milkha Singhs of the internet generation, meant to eulogize wanton materialism by flaunting their physicality without inhibition or reservation.
They are the greedy generation from before greed was invented.
Gunday (Gun Day? Gun De? Gande???) is the kind of subverted cinema that reduces every incident, historical or fictional, to a dramatic distress. After the fairly impressive opening, there’s no narrative structure, only a series of clumsily punctuated episodes meant to spotlight a kind of heightened yearning for a life free of moral expectations and obligations.
The two heroes think they are cool when, in fact, the script highlights their stupidity in the clumsy conflicts of interest when they fight. Shirtless, of course. Chests waxed in the 1970s when wax was used only to make idols. A major portion of the narrative is devoted to the triangular courtship with Bikram and Bala wooing Kolkata’s hottest cabaret dancer(who isn’t what she seems, but shhhhh!).
Nandita (Priyanka Chopra) first meets her two sleazy suitors in a loo when they have their dhotis hitched up to their thighs to relieve themselves. Yes, you heard right. That’s the acme of below-the-belt humour in this downright absurd and offensive crime drama. Priyanka Chopra’s character is a seductress, partly Mata Hari, and wholly preposterous in trying to be many things in a script that isn’t sure of what it wants to be.
As for the two leading men it’s a toss-up between Ranveer Singh and Arjun Singh as to who hams it more to the flashy finale where they both make a desperate run for their lives while we do the same in our own far less exciting world outside.
Gunday extols the illicit presence of across-the-borders migrants and attempts to sanction them with a kind of legitimacy, much in the same way that the film tries to glorify the two street-smut protagonists as heroes of our times….rather, their times.
The film unfolds in Kolkata circa 1973. Periodicity is showily generated through a poster of the Big B’s Zanjeer here and a snatch of R D Burman’s ‘Keh doon tumhe ya chup rahoon’ from Deewaar there. Beyond these, the film doesn’t make any pertinent point of periodicity.
Of course there Priyanka’s low-cut blouses ending many inches above her waist in a neat bow. Alas, Priyanka’s blouses are the only neatly tied-up component in this anarchic world of guns goons, guffaws and gaffes. If I was a Bengali I’d be seriously offended by the loud caricatural ambience created in the name of Bangla culture. Of course, the Howrah bridge looms up on location and as studio props every once in a while. But the astounding amount of garish colours that Anil Mehta’s cinematography is compelled to shoot just numbs the senses.
The dialogues range from the strange to the very strange. At one point while killing a friend-turned traitor Arjun Kapoor (making more faces in every frame than Sridevi did in her entire career) says, ‘Never trust a Bengali who doesn’t like football.’
Huh???
Gunday is a dumbed-down version of Yash Chopra’s classic Deewaar, where the boy from a world of poverty grew up in a life of glamorized crime. There was strong matriarchal figure in Deewaar frowning deeply in disapproval of the anti-hero’s anti-heroic antics. In Gunday, there are no moral obstacles as Bikram and Bala whoop it up in the unruly rituals of disorganized crime. There is only the very talented Saurabh Shukla looking embarrassed, uncertain, and defeated, trying to tell the heroes they’ve lost the plot. He probably saw what the makers of this film couldn’t. The very talented Victor Bannerjee and Pankaj Tripathi show up in walk-on parts and are hastily packed off to focus on the two studs on steroids in the 70s slithering in slippery motions across the railway tracks stealing koyla from the carriages. How ‘coal’ is that?
Irrfan’s voiceover tries to keep the plot together.
Recalling the chaotic crime world of Gunday, director Ali Abbas Zafar says, “It was a lovely experience with such a powerful cast, Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Irrfan, great learning for me to shoot such a big scale film as my second film. It has shaped me as a director, and I was fortunate to have Adi as a producer to back it up; the music of the film was a huge USP. ‘Tuney maari entriyaan’ is still a chart buster. Gunday was a homage to the 1970s cinema and the rise of the Angry Young Man as the hero. Ranveer and Arjun were like brothers. To date, they are best friends.”
