Anurag Kashyap’s most sensitive film to date Mukkabaaz
Director: Anurag Kashyap Starring: Vineet Kumar, Zoya Hussain, Jimmy Sheirgill, Ravi Kissan Really, we couldn›t hope for a better start to our movie-going spree in 2018. Mukkabaaz is many things at the same time. To begin with it is a no, it not just an ode to pugilism. It is an ode to that thing called love.
Mukkabaaz is Anurag Kashyap’s most romantic film to date. It’s about, believe it or not, love at first sight when Bareilly’s selfproclaimed Mike Tyson, aka Shravan Singh (Vineet Singh, startling in his transformation into a ferocious fighter) happens to see Sunaina (newcomer Zoya Hussain, expressive in her silences).
The sequence where Shravan falls in love brilliantly yokes violence and tender- ness, and sets the pace for what is to follow. This is a film steeped in the ethos of ethnicity, immersed in the culture of caste and gender prejudices.
The small-town setting is chilling in its bold undertones of violence. Kashyap’s Bareilly (as we come to know the setting to be) is run by a glorified goon Bhagwan Das Mishra ( Jimmy Sheirgill) a sadistic patron saint, who early in the narrative asks the local Tyson to drink his urine from a bottle, “like holy water”.
We never know whether Shravan actually performs the offensive act of subservience. But knowing Shravan we can easily conclude he would never eat shit, or drink pee. This is a boy-man on a mission to prove to the world and his disapproving father, that boxing is not a soft option but a hard career decision. In the film’s most powerfully acted episode Shravan hits back hard at his father’s contemptuous reading of his son’s ambitions, taunting the older man for achieving so little in life. It’s a scene of abject filial cruelty performed with such guilt and hurt by Vineet Kumar, that a potentially stereotypical father-son confrontation scene acquires a towering personality denoting the entire gamut of conflicts that go into the aspirations of one generation as they are passed on to another.
Son says, father has no re- spect for his passion. Father thins son is talking about “fashion”. It’s a silly confusion that hides the larger growing tensions simmering in small towns where youngsters want to make something of their lives. But what? Linguistic confusion plays a major part in driving the plot forward. The actor Shree Dhar Dubey who plays the hero’s buddy insists on using smatterings of angrezi in his conversations. A conceit that infuriates our Shravan.
The dialogues and situations are pronouncedly scatological, as they are wont to be in a Kashyap film. But the tone changes oh-so-delicately when Shravan is around the love of his life. Balancing between bouts of boxing brutality and episodes of unfettered tenderness Mukkabaaz is Anurag Kashyap’s most vividly written and fluidly executed film since the underrated
The performances are so powerful you fear they would outdistance the director’s mastery over the patois of mayhem, and none more powerful than Vineet Kumar in a career-making role and performance that compares favourably with Robert de Niro’s boxer’s shots in Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull.
Not t hat Kashyap i s Scorcese. Heavens, no! Kashyap is on a trip of his own, tripping cheekily over the live wires that are thrown all over the bleak brutal and wounded landscape of his films. And it’s not just Vineet Kumar who comes forward with a performance that defines the director’s quenchless thirst for searching out the violence that underlines life lived on the fringes. Ravi Kissan and Jimmy Sheirgill are equally superb in their roles as the coach and the gang lord. These are actors who know the culture of caste and gender politics. They feel the throbbing veins of violence.
This is the Director’s most sensitive film to date. It hits a hard punch. And not just in the boxing ring. IANS