MOVIE: REVIEW Black Friday

MOVIE: REVIEW
Black Friday
An audacious, daring and explosive piece of cinema. Watch the film and listen to the soundtrack.


Namrata Joshi

Starring: Kay Kay, Aditya Srivastava, Pavan Malhotra
Directed by Anurag Kashyap
Rating: ****


After watching the first cut of Black Friday in May ’04 I wrote in Outlook that with this film, Anurag Kashyap is likely to find himself in the centre of an ideological divide. I see that happening now. Rightists are peeved with the ‘humanisation’ and ‘de-demonisation’ of the terrorists, while the Leftists argue the revenge and conspiracy in the film might alienate the Muslim community further.

Three years later, with these ‘subversion’ theories playing at the back of my mind, I still find Black Friday an audacious, daring and explosive piece of cinema. Based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s book on the 12 bombs that tore Bombay apart on March 9, ’93, the film mixes dramatic recreation with documentary footage, uses a fractured narrative—a cinematic jigsaw puzzle of sorts—to recreate the horrifying happenings. Even while it unfolds like a thriller, it does not fictionalise places and events, doesn’t mask the real people by giving them assumed identities—the reason it can get doubly disturbing.

Kashyap is bang on in linking the bombings back to the Babri Masjid demolition and the riots thereafter. He does make a case for Mahatma Gandhi’s statement: an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. And the most hard-hitting line in the film is the indictment of a divisive religion: "dharm ke naam par ch***** ban rahe ho".

The second half does get too stretched. But my only serious issue with the film is the portrayal of the cop Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay). Kashyap doesn’t fight shy of showing the barbaric human rights violation at the cop station but still tries to justify and make a hero of Maria. However, for me it’s Aditya Srivastava (seen in the TV serial CID) as Memon’s frustrated, on-the-run, and later repentant henchman Badshah Khan who is the real hero. Srivastava is brilliant as the misled man, especially in the riveting sequence titled ‘On the Run’. Khan keeps moving from Delhi to Jaipur to Rampur waiting for Memon to call him over to Dubai, an escape that never happens. His plight and frustrations get magnified by Indian Ocean’s superb folksy Indi Rock score, Bhaga Re: Jung ka rang sunehra samjha, lekin baad mein gehra samjha, jung ka rang tha kala re. Watch the film and listen to the soundtrack.