Asshole (Gandu)

By Kaushik Mukherjee

India

Panorama

If you thought Indian cinema = Bollywood, think again because director Kaushik Mukherjee (otherwise known as Q) is coming and his advertising - music video - documentary background is changing things big time! The story itself is rather classical for a movie dealing with the problems of adolescence. Young, rather poor Gandu (played by Anubrata) lives with his sister under the constant threat of being thrown into the street for his uselessness. He is being confronted with the regular sex, drugs and rock&roll (to be read ‘rapping’) issues most teenagers face on their way to adulthood, and has to find a proper way of making a living.

You might think you’ve heard it all before, the trick is however that Gandu is not constructed based on a story but rather evolved from the music Q previously fancied and selected for the sound-track. For this reason the music/images relation is different from what we have been used to, in the sense that only in the video-like scenes, can we actually grasp the true self of the characters. The protagonist is searching for his purpose in life, a definition for what he is and what he should be. Rather than showing this through Gandu’s exposure to various situations, Q brings the documentary genre to the table and inserts in the film some interviews containing definitions regular people give to the key terms part of the character’s existence. This was in no way planned, since as the director confesses there was no actual script, the interviews being shot by Anubrata as one of his tasks for the audition, but the improvisations integrated perfectly in the project.

Having film, documentary and music videos combined, Q only needed one special genre to make the mixture “perfect” and that was porn. We have loads of explicit sex scenes and also characters constantly referring to drug usage (with the shots themselves seemingly ‘cut’ under the influence), plus even some occasional verbal violence, so it is only fair to say Gandu definitely takes things to another level, one in which they manage to tick not one, but actually all the NO-NO boxes of the producers and distributors.

Nevertheless the film is a necessary experience and should it find a way to reach larger audiences. It will probably become quite popular amongst rebellious teenagers everywhere. The use of black and white shots liberate the film’s settings from the traditionally exotic Indian spaces, while the secondary stories (like the love story in the internet café in which the protagonists talk only through the webcam) assure Gandu a feeling of universality. In a festival currently placed under the fear of political censorship by Jafar Panahi’s imprisonment, it is reassuring to see that cinema can always find a way to fight rules and conventions!