In this new installment of his This Day That Year feature series, Subhash K Jha looks back at the 2013 film Zila Ghaziabad, directed by Anand Kumar which starred Sanjay Dutt, Vivek Oberoi, Paresh Rawal, Arshad Warsi, Chandrachur Singh, Ravi Kishan, and Divya Dutta.
Wasseypur’s gangs never had it so good. Seeing the glorious guttural outflow of gore, blood, bullets, and profanities in Zila GhaziabadKai Po Che is as far removed from its competition as flying kites are from speeding bullets. To be fair one can’t compare two films as disparate in intent, purpose tone and treatment as Kai Po Che and Zila GhaziabadZila GhaziabadZila GhaziabadDabangg is missing here. These scowling, growling, barking, and biting characters take themselves and their anarchic hinterland too seriously. They speak in a self-confident drawl in words about bodily functions that Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap’s characters might use on very lazy Sunday to shock their neighbours. But make no mistake. The people who inhabit Zilla Ghaziabad mean business.
The business of being mean is perpetrated in a torrent of rapidly-staged drama where aggression is King. The film has a sprawling banquet of actors,and some very competent ones at that. Sanjay Dutt delivers a punch-filled performance as a cop inured to ambivalence. He strikes swaggering postures that suggest John Wayne never really hung up his hat and boots. Vivek Oberoi displayed a mean streak quite convincingly. So does Arshad Warsi, better known for his comic acts, here slipping into a rugged roguery with relish.If you look around Chandrachur Singh and Paresh Rawal also show up to add muscle to the mayhem.
Every character seems to have fun with his part on this Khichdi Western , a distant doomed dastardly spiced-up teekha cousin of the celebrated ‘Spaghetti Western’, though whether we as the audience share the characters’ sense of enjoyment or not depends entirely on the frame of mind we are in. If judgemental one could be deeply offended by the unstopped flow of aggression and profanity. However, if in a lenient mind-space the bloody battle for indeterminate causes could provide some amount of lowbrow fun.
As expected in this ode to mayhem and machismo the ladies have little do besides shake a leg and shed a tear. Minissha Lamba shows up somewhere along the way trying hard not to look lost in the stag party. It’s hard not to laugh out loud at these heroes of a subverted hinterland who live and die by the gun .They deserve the death they get. But what about us?
