Anurag Kashyap is no doubt a talented man. Black Friday is a brave and commendable effort to show some of the details behind the infamous 1993 Bombay blasts. The movie is based on a detailed account by Hussain Zaidi in a book of the same name. The movie progresses in a series of chapters that zig zag in time and show us the blasts, the chance finding of an unexploded van, tracing it to Tiger Memon and the subsequent capture of his manager. At this point the case busts open and a slew of arrests are made and the conspiracy uncovered. Fingers are pointed to ISI as being ultimately culpable in the crime as they fund Tiger Memon's scheme, which seems to have been concocted in a fit of rage, and purely for personal revenge as opposed to any communal feelings.
The good: For the most part the movie has a very real and gritty feel to it . The cast is chosen for their ordinariness in looks and great acting ability and is led by the very able Kay Kay Menon. Here he is the police officer Maria - has vowed to solve the case but is also shown as the anguished man, torn at what has to be done to break each and every arrested man by any means necessary. Pavan Malhotra very believably plays the rabid eyed Tiger, and Aditya Srivastava is very real as the hunted man Badshah on the run from pillar to post. Documentary footage is well used in the film and the run from Delhi to Rampur to Jaipur to Calcutta to Delhi to Rampur very realistic. One can almost smell the dust in the locales. The music is haunting and sparingly used. Arre Ruk Ja Re Bande is beautiful.
The bad: The movie is shot is an extremely repetitive manner and reminded me somewhat of the Betaal stories from Chandamama - they too always ended with the Betaal taking the corpse and hiding in a tree. Here a different body is being chased in every chapter and then caught. Why have different chapters if they will all show the same thing with different people? The story zig zags back and forth in time and Anurag does not trust us to be able to keep it straight - so he obliges by color coding the past and present as blue and regular. The torture scenes are strangely coded a blood red! The blasts left a trail of devastation and we are shown the obligatory child eating out of a garbage can, blown up bodies, blood splattered torsos. Such INDIVIDUAL pictures of the aftermath of terror take away from the big impact of the terror and are only useful when they show someone we already care about. Mani showed us the gasoline soaked twins in Bombay and sent a chill down our spine - these could be our children. Anurag's bodies are remote by virtue of being so close. In fact this remoteness is a flaw in the film, it smacks of a docudrama where the only character you can even remotely identify with is the police officer. There can be little or no audience involvement in such a film.
Nevertheless, this is a brave attempt and one will expect better and better from Mr. Kashyap in the future.
The good: For the most part the movie has a very real and gritty feel to it . The cast is chosen for their ordinariness in looks and great acting ability and is led by the very able Kay Kay Menon. Here he is the police officer Maria - has vowed to solve the case but is also shown as the anguished man, torn at what has to be done to break each and every arrested man by any means necessary. Pavan Malhotra very believably plays the rabid eyed Tiger, and Aditya Srivastava is very real as the hunted man Badshah on the run from pillar to post. Documentary footage is well used in the film and the run from Delhi to Rampur to Jaipur to Calcutta to Delhi to Rampur very realistic. One can almost smell the dust in the locales. The music is haunting and sparingly used. Arre Ruk Ja Re Bande is beautiful.
The bad: The movie is shot is an extremely repetitive manner and reminded me somewhat of the Betaal stories from Chandamama - they too always ended with the Betaal taking the corpse and hiding in a tree. Here a different body is being chased in every chapter and then caught. Why have different chapters if they will all show the same thing with different people? The story zig zags back and forth in time and Anurag does not trust us to be able to keep it straight - so he obliges by color coding the past and present as blue and regular. The torture scenes are strangely coded a blood red! The blasts left a trail of devastation and we are shown the obligatory child eating out of a garbage can, blown up bodies, blood splattered torsos. Such INDIVIDUAL pictures of the aftermath of terror take away from the big impact of the terror and are only useful when they show someone we already care about. Mani showed us the gasoline soaked twins in Bombay and sent a chill down our spine - these could be our children. Anurag's bodies are remote by virtue of being so close. In fact this remoteness is a flaw in the film, it smacks of a docudrama where the only character you can even remotely identify with is the police officer. There can be little or no audience involvement in such a film.
Nevertheless, this is a brave attempt and one will expect better and better from Mr. Kashyap in the future.