Black Friday - Movie Review

Black Friday

Last February, Black Friday was finally released after a delay of over 2 years. I felt that at least in this one instance, the delay was justified in a way and not due to some censor board member’s whims or minister’s fancies. The objection to the movie was that it pronounced the accused as guilty even before the court has passed their judgement in the 1993 Bombay blasts case. Finally the movie was released in February 2007 after the court had passed their final judgement.

I happened to miss it in the theatre due to some pressures at work and it did not have a long run. Finally I saw it on DVD. Black Friday got some good reviews and justifiably so. But there was something in the movie which did not work for me, something which made the movie fall short of being a truly good work.

The story, as is well known by now, is about the investigation and arrest of the culprits behind the Bombay bomb blasts in 1993. The movie starts off like a police procedural until the first batch of suspects are arrested, after which it becomes more a narrative on arresting the people who have been named by these first batch of arrests. Anyway in India, police procedural is more like torturing the hell out of the suspects and not like your typical Henning Mankel book.

The movie runs for the most part like a docu-drama and shows the planning for the bombing in impressive detail. The real strength of the movie lies in its realistic depiction of the lives of the bombers – most of whom come from poor families who have seen someone close lose their lives or livelihoods in the Bombay riots. The induction, indoctrination and training scenes are all very well shot. The detailing of the bombers’ personal lives is strong. The places they hang around, the friends they keep, the clothes they wear, are all depressingly normal. The fall of the bombers comes not when they are arrested but when they sink into a harrowing hole after their bosses forsake them.

Anurag Kashyap earlier wrote excellent screenplays like Satya. Even here the script is very tight. For instance, the only scene where you get to know that Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) is even married is when he gets a phone call at office which his constable hands over to him saying “Madam ka phone hai”. You do not him see him having the conversation too. Here is a movie you can’t fault with not giving too much importance to minor characters as the story is not about these characters. The story is about the bombers and the character of Badshah Khan is used as the lens through which we see everyone else’s.

Where the movie falls short is in editing and screenplay. The Imtiaz Ghavate chase sequence, the scenes of Badshah Khan (nicely underplayed performance by Aditya Shrivastava) on the run are stretched out for too long. The screenplay falters in requiring the audience to digest too many names of suspects too early into the movie. I did not have a clue who each character was and what was their role in the bombing. In fact I do not need to. I can do this in a book where I can flip through the earlier pages, but I do not have this option in a movie. The movie is close to 3 hours long – Anurag could have made it 5 hours or 10 hours adding on a few more suspects. Where does this stop? Focussing on a few key personalities and building stories around them would have made the movie a better watch. I can envisage the movie just being about Badshah Khan/ Tiger Memon and Rakesh Maria and expanding their universes slightly more. Anurag has tried to do justice to the book and has tried to cram too much into the movie. To use an analogy – you can make a documentary on the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” but for a movie you would go with a “Schindler’s List”, “The Pianist” or a “Life is beautiful”.

The movie gave me the feel of watching a Discovery Channel re-enactment, except shot in a more cinematic manner. Not that I do not like these, it is just that I may not want to watch them on a DVD or theatre. This is not to take away any credit from Anurag Kashyap who was made one of the better Hindi movies in some years, but just some regret at what might have been.