On Gandu

The last time I was told about the genius of a film that will never come above ground was when a group of Delhi University seniors made fun of me for not having watched Paanch- “the greatest Indian film of the last twenty years”. It came to a bad end when I finally watched and thought what a messy, unpolished and even under-developed film Paanch was. The same kind of glow is gathering around Quashiq Mukherjee’s (Q) film Gandu. There is mainstream cinema, alternative independent cinema and, apparently, something known as an alternative to ‘so-called alternative cinema’. The example offered being the Slamdance Film Festival (where Gandu was screened) which aims to be a truer representation of independent filmmaking than Sundance, which is organized at the same time and at almost the same place.

The secretly acknowledged joy of attending film festivals is the sliver of hope that you’ll watch something so outrageously off-kilter that it will remain with you, irrespective of merit, and provide a shifty template for a dark underside that is breathing and alive when you sit down to watch the world TV premiere of Tees Maar Khan. Not so much with Paanch, in my opinion, which- I was led to believe- created a privileged community at its Osian Film Festival screening. Gandu’s merits are debatable too; but it definitely scores on the kookiness.

Gandu is part-chronicle and part-collage, attempting to expose the life of a freewheeling loser who aspires to cut his own rap album someday. The film wobbles around the songs and the songs are written in joyful abandon- exploring the deliciously dirty variety of empurpled Bangla. The reason I write ‘wobbles’ is because the film is often in danger of becoming a string of music videos held together by an ambiguous theme.

The title character- because he is called ‘gandu’ (played by Anubrata Basu) throughout the movie- is a loner who hopes to win the lottery. He spends his days listening to music, wandering aimlessly, listening in on the intimate conversations of an attractive older woman in a cyber café and masturbating. Gandu steals money from a man called Das babu while he has loud sex with his mother. He crashes into a Rickshaw puller and they become fast friends. They smoke crack and ruminate on the meaninglessness of their existence. The film then takes a quick turn- helped by a funny but perhaps a little childish attempt at postmodern high jinks- and it proceeds to unspool in a bizarre manner throwing a lot of our pre-conceptions in doubt. We wonder if the friendship with ‘Rishka’ is real, if the lottery does come through for Gandu at all or if the only colour sequence may have actually happened or not. The film could have been a boring document of Gandu’s priapic adventures- imagined or otherwise. But it tries to confound our expectations from a film of a similar genre in the west. Consummation, when it arrives, is staged very ostentatiously in a dreamy colour-drenched sci-fiesqe scene (think 2046) and we are left hanging with a scene that is explicitly executed, but mysteriously hewed off from the rest of the film.

It remains to be seen if Gandu’s attempt to merge a popular form like rap music and art-school aesthetics will succeed in drawing crowds outside the small film festival circuit. While studio films in India still seek to cultivate a distance between their films and their audience (which makes it impossible for them to operate without employing broad and often damaging cultural stereotypes), Gandu unabashedly forgets about a mass of audience and addresses the body of the viewer and sublimates its base desires to high art. It’s either the sensibility of a fine independent filmmaker, or a concept meaningfully explored with narrative. Although breaking down silly screen taboos is a fine achievement, it is a landmark that must be assessed in retrospect- some years from now. Q has attracted comparisons with Gaspar Noe for his extremism, but I wouldn’t rush into this comparison. Gandu is handling somewhat different issues, and its specific idea of artificial escape from a general cultural malaise is far from the contrived trash-extremities of someone like Noe or Harmony Korine. As was pointed out to me by a fellow-audience member, this film works excellently as a companion piece to P.K. Mehrotra’s wonderful collection of short stories, Eunuch Park. It should give you a good idea of the kind of approach that is adopted by Q.

Gandu may have been made on a shoestring budget, but the cinematography is delightful. The black and white frames tend to simmer with gandu’s impotent rage and sizzle with the hot, white sky as Gandu and Rishka cart out into the open fields. The film is shot around the dingy back alleys of Howrah and you know it’s the kind of film that will situate a story in Howrah and ignore to include a random shot of the popular bridge.

At the public screening of Gandu in Puri, for the Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF), Q said he was trying to get Gandu a ‘proper’ release. I hope this film finds wide distribution and commercial release, although it does not seem likely. The soundtrack, though, you should definitely buy when it is out. Meanwhile, you could watch the trailers here:

Gandu trailer for Berlinale

Gandu Trailer