The compulsory post on Kanti Shah's GUNDA

This is the compulsory post on Gunda, required of any self-respecting film-enthusiast-cum-blogger. However, I won't go over most of the cult-fawning, and will direct you elsewhere if that is required and meanwhile, like all other posts on Gunda, pretend to say something different about the film. This requires you to have watched the film or at least, read some of the other posts on the film that talks about its characters and details the plot, especially since I won't be able to name some characters at all- like Bullah's brother- out of a pure sense of shame.

Bizarre films have a reputation that is built around one major consideration: that it is constructed around a sense of being bizarre. By being bizarre, one means that all the referents in the film are stripped of daily familiarity to such an extent that it seems, yes, bizarre. However, what contributes to this feeling is not the specific nature of bizarre-ness, but the ways in which regular constructs of what is 'normal' or 'sane' is constantly undermined by throwing these notions in a disarray. In Bunuel's celebrated short film, Un Chien Andalou, commonly regarded as a highpoint in surrealist filmmaking, the things that make the film 'weird' are simple subversions of regular acts by only juxtaposing them with things that one would not normally put them up against. Harmony Korrine's Mister Lonely (2008), supposedly his most 'accessible' film, centers around a Utopic commune that is peopled by impersonators of famous cultural icons like Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe- married to Charlie Chaplin, with their daughter Shirley Temple, the Three Stooges, James Dean, Madonna, The Pope, a foul-mouthed Abe Lincoln, The Queen and a few others. They stay together in the commune and get together to perform 'the greatest show on earth' annually to generate an income. However, when almost nobody shows up to watch them perform, things take a turn for the worse. The film has been perceived by many as bizarre. It is bizarre for the same reasons as mentioned above. It not only constructs its bizareness out of cultural referents that are used to make-up what is sane and normal, but relies on them, nostalgically, to point out their own difference and, if I'm not pushing it already, it's own unmeanings. In other words, it is impossible for films like these to appear bizarre if a constructed sense of 'normality' did not exist.

The case with Gunda is entirely different. One is tempted to douse any writing on Gunda with extreme profanity, adulatory quoting of its immortal dialogues and generally repeating how effing good it is. However, a near-perfect amalgamation of these things have been realized by greatbong already, so I won't go there. I'll merely attempt to see how dangerous is Gunda's bizarreness.

This has been hinted several times by many posters who have attempted to even subject the film to existential critiques and, of course, allegorical readings of India's economic liberalization in the '90s (read the greatbong's hilarious, but astonishing attempt). But what I'm driving at is the sense that almost nothing prepares us for what Gunda assumes as its own, mundane, reality. Most of the film is shot, for no given reason, at an airport tarmac and the docks of, I suppose, Bombay. A sudden leap in the first scene makes this assertion also beyond comprehension. A brothel is portrayed as a wide room filled with beds hanging from ropes, and the hero (Mithun Chakraborty) goes to a pub where his girlfriend arrives and starts dancing, making the whole place look like nothing one can ever describe or hope to describe as anything other than a Bollywood set. Everybody speaks in perfect rhyming couplets, added to the fact that they are penned by a person called Bashir Bhai Babbar, and they not only don't reassure one as they did in Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajar Deshe, but convey a feeling that is so antithetical to feelings normally evoked by any poet (even Charles Bukowski) that even Neruda's plea for an impure poetry sounds pristine and victorian. Here, I'll fall into the first predictable trap and quote from the film: The arch-villain Bullah's signature line runs- "Mera naam hain Bulla, rakhta hoon main khullaaaaaa", Ibu Hatela's "Mera naam Ibu Hatela, Ma meri chudail ki beti, baap mera shaitan ka chela, khayega kela?", or Bullah's anguished cry on seeing his dead sister “Munni meri behen munni, munni meri behen munni, to tu mar gayee? Lambu ne tujhe lamba kar diya? Maachis ki tili ko khamba kar diya?". The women have precisely two types of characters in the film: minor and incidental. All the incidental women characters in the film are prostitutes regularly bad-mouthed by their pusher and the minor characters are Mithun's sister, his girlfriend and, if you allow, the villain's woman Haseena- named thus so one can fit in a couplet regarding the villain, Haseena, spare time, physical exertion and sweat. All the minor women characters are raped (Mithun's sister- twice, almost) and the perpetrators normally declaim happily before the act- "Chatri hotee hain kholne ke liye, chadar hotee hain orne ke liye aur ladki hotee hain cherne ke liye".

The point is not to prove how essential it is to disregard the film as having any empathy with 'reality', but to see how far it pushes the attitude of fetishizing in Bollywood and its axiomatic principles of plotting. Because really, if you choose to ignore all the exaggerations (impossible though it is) , Gunda is just a revenge film at heart, not unlike, say, Oldboy. The fact that Gunda appears bizarre is not because it subverts things we hold as fixed markers of cultural meaning (Chaplinesque, Bergmanesque, Punk is not dead, etc.) but, because it completely invents a grammar of what is 'normal' for itself, and then goes along subverting it! An Andalusian Dog challenges our conception of reality and everybody can interpret its motivations in a wide manner of possibilities, because it has challenged a reality that we all share. Whereas, Gunda assumes a reality, a filmind, so completely alien to our own that we are left baffled for entirely different reasons. Most have called it a work of pure genius, and it is not parodic, although the director's- Kanti Shah- other films haven't shown much promise. It bears a steady rating over 8 at IMDB, with 1,607 voters last time I checked (Shahrukh Khan's Billu is rated 6.4 by 803 voters). It's probably one of the funniest films ever made, but has none of the ingredients of a comedy. Self-reflexively, (there are several striking self-reflexive moments in the film; now I'm not yelling Lyotard) at one point, Pote (another sub-villain) threatens Shankar (Mithun) by saying that his (Shankar's) life is a comedy for all of them but will end in tragedy. Make sense who may.