Paanch: Flash of Brilliance
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I choose the word Flash very carefully because Paanch at the end of the day is just a flash of Anurag Kashyap’s nascent brilliance. In fact, there are a slew of those flashes throughout the movie, but somehow they remain disjointed and don’t add up to form anything awesome. Though the film is restlessly volatile throughout, it doesn’t quite deliver that final punch in the gut, and instead chooses to deliver intelligent filmy thrills.
Paanch starts of as a crime tale told in interrogation flashbacks. The underground mood is setup very deftly in the flashbacks, which introduces us to the Paanch. They are a bunch of weed-smoking binge-drinking college going guys whom every one of us has met at some point of time in the college years; the guys with a care-a-damn exterior and with a fuck you attitude all over their body language. And such a group is always incomplete without a butt-of-the-jokes guy. Someone has to endure all the ridicule and is also expected to take it all in the right spirit. The fuck you guys need him to feed their already expanded egos. They exercise their power, their attitudes relentlessly on the guy. The problem with the fuck you guys is they are so used to putting up the I’m fearless and ruthless image that whenever that image is breached their defense mechanism sets in motion and hell breaks loose.
Luke (Kay Kay Menon) is that archetypical fuck you guy and Pondy (Vijay Maurya) is the butt-of-the-jokes guy. And Luke is not just another guy with an image problem. He is THE guy with an image problem. His defense mechanism drives him to sheer lunatic levels. He bullies the other guys to intimidating levels. And if anyone of them tries to oppose or counter bully him, violence grips Luke and he breaks loose. With him in the room the atmosphere is always volatile. When a certain caper goes wrong, things get ugly and in a blood boiling moment Luke murders a guy. This event triggers further mishaps and the five of them quickly spiral down into an abyss of guilt and helplessness.
So as you can see Paanch has a very potent premise and in fact a perfect setting for Anurag Kashyap to revel in with his kinda characters and dialogues. The film starts off choppily but slowly gathers momentum and rises occasionally to gut-wrenching levels. Half the credit here goes to Kay Kay’s mind-numbing performance. And again half the credit of that performance goes to Anurag Kashyap. The performance is monstrous. It chews the scenery as well as the people around. Every other character complements it in their own humble way. The two places where the bunch frequently hangs out; their house of course and a garage where they jam together; are lit and shot superbly to lend a very queasy claustrophobic feel to the proceedings.
Something horribly wrong happens with the last ½ an hour. *SPOILER START* Suddenly the movie shifts gear and enters into a Usual Suspects kinda mode. *SPOILER END* The story suddenly feels contrived (maybe it is supposed to) and the entire unsettling feeling, which had build up due to the larger part of the film, vanishes. This certain change of gears felt very jarring, clearly robbing the film of the grim and grit. *SPOILER START* The characters suddenly loose their identifiable vulnerabilities and become Joker like schemers. *SPOILER END*
The performance and character which stood out for me apart from Kay Kay was of Aditya Shrivastava. His character is essentially someone like us who, though is smack in the middle of the proceedings, is observing things around with a steadfast yet laidback presence. He too is completely baffled by Luke’s lunacy. And the moment, when he stands up against Luke towards the latter part of the movie, is purely exhilarating.
Main Khuda was very amateurly shot. It looked like a home video. I’m not saying it should have been shot with a huge stage and laser lights ala Rock On. The song is special. It deserved something better. The subway idea was good, but somehow I couldn’t feel that on-the-streets thrill. Maybe because of the unreal lighting used or the thanda sad bhaade ka crowd. The energy was missing. The last part of the song delivers the sorta punch I expected from the whole song. The part when Kay Kay and Aditya Shrivastava get teary eyed followed by Kay Kay and crowd crooning the song alternately ‘Saans lo. Dum bharo. Chillakar Sabse Kaho…Sar jhuka khuda hoon main. Aasmanon pe khada hoon main…Main Khudaaaa…’ That pumped me up big time. That’s how I thought the whole song should have been shot. Anyways the song entered my system again after all those years, and I’m desperate to download or even buy a CD if available.
Without Kay Kay’s performance, Paanch could have easily had a ‘Love sex Betrayal’ caption and passed of as an above average fare. But Luke compels me to rate the film much higher than the choppy screenplay and a flat out bad finale allows it to be. It is after all an Anurag Kashyap film. His mastery of individual scenes doesn’t transcend to the film as a whole. I had similar issues with Gulaal. His films somehow don’t have the fluidity or the poetry of events which Vishal Bharadwaj’s films have in abundance. They seem to be a collection of great scenes. Great scene-cut-great scene-cut and so on. Black Friday was no doubt an exception. But Paanch, Dev D and Gulaal, all of them show this same weakness. But anyways like all his films Paanch has Kashyap’s distinctive intensity driving things forward, and for that alone, it deserves a theatrical release and thus a much wider audience.
Tags: Aditya Shrivastava, Anurag Kashyap, Kay Kay Menon, Paanch
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Rahul Dholakia
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Varma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Sachin Kundalkar
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
I did not read the review for fear of spoilers, just skimmed through..how did you manage to see it? Is it going to release at all?
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available on youtube
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“Saans lo. Dum bharo. Chillakar Sabse Kaho…Sar jhuka khuda hoon main. Aasmanon pe khada hoon main…Main Khudaaaa…”
I agree with you that the song did not leave as good an impression as it could have.
I disagree with you that AK’s films show a weakness of his. For me that is what distinguishes hime from other filmmakers, and it could be termed as ’style’ instead of weakness. Worked for me.
what a shame – had to watch it on a shabby leaked copy.
KK is the Luke of the industry. What a performance !!
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Awesome review boss..completely agree with all the points you mentioned.Especially “the last half an hour”.You’ve hit the nail!
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yes…last 30 minutes of the movie was a shocker..! I would hv been ‘ok’ if it looked like usual suspects , but suddenly this turned out to be an abbas mastan finish….twist…and twist…sad.!
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Where did u guys watch d film??
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If you can’t find it on Rapidshare, you can check the movie in Youtube as well: here’s the link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdkUxK1DpmA&feature=related
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not whole 1/2 hour .. just the way Luke dies is kinda anticlimax also last song should not be there. otherwise outstanding movie
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Silly ending to a dark, heavy, sickness and guilty laden movie.
BTW, correct me If i am wrong. The promoter of the Main Khuda song is Anurag Kashyap right. We can just hear his voice as KK fights with him.
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there r many things beyond ur intellectual capacity. better watch the product of bollysluts :rofl:
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To the poing, precise and bang on money !! loved this one from you
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to all those who wants to see the film : the movie torrent is available on internet…. ‘preview copy’… not a great quality but watchable…
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i somehow think that kashyap does not know how to make good endings to a movie. devD,gulaal and paanch all suffer from similar issues.
more so in paanch the last half hour breaks from the chilling movie it had been till then. and to end the movie in a song picturing the lady and then displaying a crime does not pay image completely baffled me.
kay kay just rocked. stunning actor. i loved the mein khuda performance by kay kay it was mindblowing.
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i disagree. gulaal and dev d had awesome endings. gulaal was one of the best movies ive ever seen. the only common point in all those movies and probably what always goes through anurags mind is..”women are bitches”.
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Thanks for swimming against tide.. I came to agree with you on the Gulaal and Dev D. I haven’t seen Paanch but you might be right.. I was wondering why Anurag’s movies feel hollow if you see them as whole and I think I found answer in this post – its because of chopping and continuity of the scenes.. Thanks for wonderful description.. Like the critical element in this review..
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Aren’t you guys of tired of KK.
Why does it *alyways* have to be ” kya bey , gaandu, madar choth ..chup bey”.
Omkara that way did a huge disservice by making gaali galouch mainstream. I mean all of us get a high with gaalis but I think we have had enough.
I cant stand the same guys over & over again. Aditya Srivastva..thanks.
Next let’s get a AK movie minus all expletives & a fresh cast.
vivek
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Is it mandatory for every Indian film to have some public message? Paanch begins and ends by saying Crime Never Pays, this and that… Satya glorifies violence, but it also begins with similar message… to hell with obligations… movies are movies…
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yea i also think AK should make a clean movie …just one atleast
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iam a tamilian first when i saw the movie paanch its really a new experiance when watching other stereo type fils .nice cinematography and i feel ak is like indias stanley kubrick
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