For the longest time, popular Hindi cinema and realism stood on two opposite ends of a spectrum. Unfortunate, but understandable — for this is an industry that was built and thrived on the promises of escapism and larger-than-life fantasies, giving a common man hope to go about their daily life. Watching something close to life — that is not what we went to the movies for.
A select few like Bimal Roy attempted to capture the social realities around us, Salim-Javed created the ‘Angry Young Man’ as a response to the disillusionment that had grabbed the nation in the '70s, while some other well-meaning filmmakers pushed forward the idea of secularism while sticking to the mainstream formula — but rarely did we see the socio-political strains of our society been addressed in our popular films through the actual stories of our times. Before making Waqt and Deewar, Yash Chopra had made Dharamputra, a film about Partition woes and the ensuing bigotry, and it bombed at the box office.
Circa 2007, our mainstream cinema was opening up to newer stories, and showing great inclination towards ‘realistic’ storytelling. And yet, a film like Black Friday must still have felt like a huge jolt back then — for we were not used to films based on an actual chapter of our modern history, let alone such a discomforting one.
Based on the book by S Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday delved into the horrors of the 1993 Bombay blasts that followed as the horrific aftermath of Babri demolition and ensuing communal riots. Though rather journalistic in its telling and relying on actual accounts of everyone involved, Black Friday cannot be called a documentary. The greatness of Black Friday lies in its precise assembly of dramatic recreations of real events interspersed with documentary footage to create a gripping docu-drama, a genre our audience was hardly familiar with back then — and there probably could not have been a better filmmaker to helm this project than Anurag Kashyap.
As his later films proved, Kashyap brought a new visual language to our mainstream cinema with films like Dev.D, Gangs of Wasseypur, and Ugly. With this in context, it is rather stunning how deftly Kashayp walked the tightrope between form and content in Black Friday. In collaboration with cinematographer Natarajan Subramaniam, Kashyap created a distinct visual palette for each fraction of his narrative - the lock-up interrogation scenes come in a terrifying red tint, the gritty investigation and procedural scenes have an oversaturated warm hue, and the scenes from the past and the conspiracy have a cold blue tint. But frankly, that is the extent of him indulging himself in his love for eye-grabbing imagery — largely, it is the gripping non-linear narrative, told with great nervous energy that keeps us hooked.
Kashyap also makes great use of his penchant for dark humour, weaving in plenty of comedic moments that fit perfectly in a narrative that is otherwise brimming with a constant sense of terror and uneasiness. A stern-looking cop steals a banana while investigating the abandoned house of a suspect. Dialogue from an Amitabh Bachchan film plays in the background as a cop chases a criminal, ironically mirroring the life outside of it.
But Kashyap’s cruelest trick arrives in form of a six-minute chase sequence that jolts out of nowhere. While most of the other arrest scenes are treated like a montage, this particular arrest gets a grand non-sequitur treatment that goes through the whole nine yards. It begins with a low-angle shot of Imtiaz, one of the suspects. And within seconds, we enter a long chase sequence as Imtiaz gets caught and escapes repeatedly, just refusing to give up as he pants his way out of cop’s clutches, we feel mired in a never-ending loop. Eventually, it reaches a point where a constable requests in a tired voice asking him to stop. “Arre ruk jaa yaar” — words of a policeman to a terrorist — and yet they ring so true at that moment, in that universe. And just when we have let down our guards, Kashyap follows it up with a brutal sequence of police interrogation — the violence is largely implied, but we sense the horrors courtesy Maria’s face and the accused’s screams as he fails to hold a pen, and the scene ends with the visual of Imtiaz’s tapered-off fingernail as he is coerced to give a thumb-print on his statement.
After chartering the course like a cold-blooded police procedural for a while, the film very smoothly shifts to a subjective terrain as we find ourselves accompanying Badshah Khan [a brilliant Aditya Shrivastava], one of the accused as he spirals down an existential crisis while being on a constant run, almost relating to his helplessness. This segment also features the only song of the film, the haunting ‘Bharam Bhaanp Ke’ [Indie band Indian Ocean provides a stunningly tense soundtrack, in great sync with Kashyap’s treatment]. Even later, we are made acquaintance with several ‘negative’ characters as Kashyap lends us a look into their inner lives in very limited screen time, treating most of them as a protagonist of their own little chapters. Somehow, it all fits in place in this free-flowing narrative that technically does not have a regular hero-villain template.
Having said that, Kashyap never forgets his primary job here — that of providing an untainted look into the unfolding of events.
There are no sides to take — in many scenes, the police’s brutal methods are laid out as naked as the brainwashed ideologies of the terrorists.
As evident in one particular interrogation scene where a cop sexually humiliates the daughter of a suspected accomplice, the lines between good and evil blur a little too much for comfort — and all we do is silently stare at the uncomfortable haze.
And yet, that does not mean Black Friday does not take a moral stand. Right after the emotionally most indulging segment of the film where we follow Khan, the film has its ‘protagonist’ Rakesh Maria [Kay Kay Menon playing the role with his signature intensity] deliver a riveting monologue as he rubbishes Khan’s claims of having achieved jihaad, rubbing his face in the futility of his fanatic efforts.
In the last 20 minutes, Kashyap suddenly breaks down the wall of a fictional cocoon, and the uncompromising objectivity of the film comes blazing out [which suitably comes with the title, ‘what is past is prologue'], where we are transported to a chapter largely comprising hard-hitting documentary footage — those of Babri demolition, of hapless victims caught in the riots’ crossfire, interspersed with staged recreation of the horrors that unfolded around then. The impact is visceral, and this is where we realise we cannot take refuge under the garb of watching a story — this is as real as it comes, and we cannot ignore the truth anymore — that is the thought we leave the auditorium with.
We become all the more appreciative of what Black Friday achieves here, considering its constraints and limitations. Depending heavily on real-life locations, a limited budget of Rs 4.5 crores, and yet with the need to capture the period of the early '90s, Kashyap and team went entirely guerilla-style in many of its sequences, shooting in crowded places which only added to its gritty rustic quality.
Another fascinating thing about Black Friday’s gradual journey to official release is how Kashyap used to actively blog those days, and ended up documenting that entire phase, including the acclaim Black Friday opened to. Strangely enough, Kashyap decided to take the glowing reviews with a pinch of salt, and yet wrote that “Black Friday is not a great film, but it is an important film.”
And this is what we need to remember and remind ourselves frequently. In a film culture that has by and large consciously stayed away from addressing the real discomforts of its nation, Black Friday stands out to date as a film in a league of its own. And considering the current climate where we see a significant amount of censorship being practised at all levels, it is highly improbable that we will have another film like this for a couple of years.
BH Harsh is a film critic who spends most of his time watching movies and making notes, hoping to create, as Peggy Olsen put it, something of lasting value.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/fifteen-years-of-black-friday-revisiting-anurag-kashyaps-untainted-look-at-the-unfolding-of-1993-bombay-blasts-10359951.html
