The Seventh Art

My issues with what I’d seen of Zoya Akhtar’s work so far were related to the question of perspective. The outlook of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Bombay Talkies revealed an overprivileged life out of touch with the rest of the country, a personality entirely shaped by Western liberal notions having little empirical grounding. The works came across to me as unwieldy transpositions of popular ideas – McPhilosophy – onto Indian narratives. So, when I heard that her latest film, Gully Boy, was about a youth from Dharavi rising to stardom as a hip-hop idol, I had my prejudices: another Bollywood-Hollywood crossbreed, an underdog rap movie embodying a bourgeois ideology of making your own life, middle-class attitudes to poverty and shop-worn wisdom about following one’s passion, tailored to Western tastes with suitable amount of local colour added. While these tendencies are still discernible in Gully Boy, Akhtar and her co-writer Reema Kagti mount a powerful rebuttal to these prejudices. With great intelligence and feeling, they pre-empt the objection that wanting to transplant a musical phenomenon rooted in the African-American experience onto the slums of Mumbai is false consciousness. Their magnificent film demonstrates to us that, at this particular juncture in Indian history, it’s this very objection that’s reactionary, a product of false beliefs about what our society is and isn’t, that the image of a boy recording his voice on an iPad through a tea strainer is not the figment of an uprooted imagination.

Gully Boy is a portrait of “young India”, the dreamers as a recent book put it, a pan-social generation that is still embedded in old traditions, but takes its behavioural and aspirational cues from a wider international community. All they need is food, clothing, shelter and internet. When Murad (Ranveer Singh) writes his first rap lines in Hindi/Urdu, it’s in the roman script, a hybrid form just like the film’s bilingual titles. He sleeps, works and rolls cigarettes in the attic of his matchbox house in Dharavi. Murad goes to the mosque on Fridays and is answerable to the strict codes of the family hierarchy. He dreams of becoming not a movie icon or a ghazal singer – enticements that his immediate surroundings offer – but a hip-hop star, a notion foreign to his milieu. Words surround him all the time; he lives in a noisy environment and wakes up to the creeping sound of his parents quarrelling. He desires peace and privacy, also concepts foreign to his milieu, but the attic can only offer so much. As his father (Vijay Raaz) brings home a second wife less than his age, Murad plugs in the earphones to drown out the Shehnai and the sorrow. Akhtar cuts to his perspective. We hear a rap track as we see the newly-wed being welcome by the first wife. This escape from reality through music from another world, later amended by a return to reality through the same music, is dissonant and incongruent. Incongruence, however, is the point.

All through the film, Akhtar and Kagti emphasize the outsider perspective to the story and foreground their own foreignness. They populate their film with outsider figures: slum tourists whom Murad surprises with his knowledge of hip-hop, a European traveller who decides to stay back with Murad’s friend and guide MC Sher (Siddhant Chaturvedi), the rich family that Murad chauffeurs and, most notably, a Berklee student Sky (Kalki Koechlin) who produces music with Murad and Sher as part of her project. An alter ego of Akhtar’s, Sky brings to Murad’s universe an undiscriminating perspective, new social codes and modes of thought. She takes Murad on a night crawl to spray paint at construction sites, bus stops and shopping malls – artistic interventions which, in Murad’s world, are acts of vandalism. The kitchen of her quiet, spacious apartment is bigger than Murad’s house.  “I can’t believe I’m doing a music video” says Murad to her, to which she responds, “I can’t believe you were going to take up a job.” Gully Boy recognizes that change can come neither from within nor from outside but from a dialectical interaction of the two. Thanks to her material, Akhtar is able to refuse looking at Dharavi as a self-contained ecosystem isolated from the rest of the globe. The residents of her Dharavi are not poor-but-happy fatalists content with their everyday victories and limited social mobility. They dream big, they form their self-image from the outsider’s gaze. Murad derives his worth from the feedback he gets online. In a climactic showdown with his father, he points to the number of likes and comments on his videos and claims that he won’t let someone else tell him what he should aspire for. In doing so, the film throws a loaded challenge: a viewer tempted to judge Murad’s internationalist consciousness and ambition as shallow and false falls in line with the father’s point of view.

If it’s hip-hop that promises a ticket out of poverty for Murad, it’s the safer route of education for his long-time girlfriend Safeena (Alia Bhatt). Higher up on the economic ladder, Safeena is determined to become a surgeon and lead a life with Murad – in that order – whatever that takes. When she learns that a friend of hers is flirting with her boyfriend, she goes to the girl’s workplace and beats her up. This scene of two women fighting over a man seems overreactive and questionably comical, but it soon is revealed to be part of Safeena’s pathological jealousy: when she breaks a bottle over Sky’s head for courting Murad, it isn’t funny anymore. Safeena articulates her reason: she has one life and she will not let anyone run roughshod over it, even her boyfriend. Safeena is the counterpoint to Murad’s mother, who must resign herself to a life she didn’t choose. (In a nice bit of mirroring, Murad finds his temperament and muted masculinity echoed in Safeena’s father.) If Murad runs up against tradition in direct, confrontational ways, the headscarf-sporting Safeena fights it from within. She constantly lies and uses her perceived vulnerability to get what she wants. She will even weaponize the system of arranged marriage to suit her ends. In an astute bit of writing, the threat that she faces as a woman – of being withdrawn from the economic ladder and getting married off – is opposed to the threat that Murad faces as a man: the thread of being chained to the workforce. The freedom she desires she had? To be able to put on lipstick, go to parties with friends and stay out late – another loaded challenge to the audience to judge these as petty and shallow.

Every time we think a characterization, an event or a turn of phrase seems out of place in the film’s milieu, the film turns the suspicion back on to us, asking us why not. Why shouldn’t, in a film full of failed father figures, Murad’s masculinity be untouched by his circumstances? Why shouldn’t the words (“mazboot” to mean solid, “awaaz karo” to mean make some noise) sound translated from English? There’s a monologue towards the end questioning the 9-to-5 life, which sounds like the product of middle-class professional anxiety. But, the film repeatedly asks, why shouldn’t Murad question it, why shouldn’t he rap to a different beat? Why should this heightened consciousness about life necessarily be the prerogative of those higher up the social ladder? If the film characterizes this YOLO wisdom as being typical of a generation, it doesn’t skirt questions of class. Murad is forced to briefly take over his father’s job as a chauffeur to an upper-class, strawberries-for-breakfast family. In a heavy-handed scene saved by Ranveer’s lack of reaction, the man of the family urges his daughter to do her post-graduation, pointing to Murad’s status as a graduate. A while later, in the film’s best sequence, the girl storms out of a party back to the car. Murad observes her crying on the rear-view mirror. He doesn’t say a word and, as they drive home together, yellow lights from Mumbai’s street lamps washing down their faces, a voice-over begins: Murad has converted his inability to console her into a verse. Akhtar throws into relief their physical proximity and social distance with a shot of the car from the side. The voice-over provides Murad a liberty he doesn’t have in the diegesis.

Akhtar is responsive to the class-coded nature of the various spaces in the film. Murad’s presence in the recording studio, at upscale pubs or at Sky’s gated community have a friction matched by Sky’s decision to shoot her video in Dharavi. The austere warehouse where the rappers meet, on the other hand, promises a utopian space free of class distinctions. Several scenes take place at a playground in Dharavi, a zone of horizontal male bonding outside of community strictures, and Murad’s success story is one of being accepted into and assimilated by traditionally exclusionary spaces. In one scene on a New Year’s Eve, Murad is turned away by a bouncer from the vicinity of a rap concert. He shuts himself in the car in rage and shame and raps a verse. This response to being excluded from a public space by turning the private space of someone else’s car into a personal space for creation is part of Murad’s innate adeptness with space, his constant slipping from his attic to the terrace, to the bridge, to the round or to Safeena’s house. There’s an endearing romantic scene between the two, a spin-off of Romeo and Juliet, where Murad calls Safeena on the phone from outside her house. They speak to each other over phone but looking at each other: she’s on the balcony, he’s down below. This culturally-defined but entirely-comfortable distance is to be contrasted with the scene in the car with Murad and the rich girl.

Akhtar’s keen sense of space is coupled to an equally-sharp attention to behavioural detail. She observes the (predominantly male) hip-hop subculture with an ethnographer’s eyes, touching upon the various rituals, rites of initiation and social codes involved: the head-banging and arm waving, the animalistic circling around before a faceoff, the “bohot hard, bohot hard” (“hardcore, hardcore”) chants of encouragement, the spontaneous recruitment of groupies, the putdowns hinged on perceived lack of masculinity, and the class anger sublimated in performance. The attire, accessories and hairstyles of the participants, their body language, and even their choice to play the Dozens are derived from Black hip-hop culture and Akhtar makes no effort to disguise or attenuate this. She recognizes that this whole space is an opportunity for youth, marginalized and privileged, to leave behind their given identities and play out ones they have chosen for themselves from a sea of internationally available sub-cultural identities. These gestures and behaviours don’t exist outside the space of the warehouse and the concert hall: their being unrelated to the real world is their reason to exist. Hip-hop here is an external agent of change – like Sky, like Akhtar – offering an alternate mode of life, a parallel community outside of family, work, mosque, free of judgment and hierarchies. Notice the scene when Murad walks into the warehouse for the first time. He starts rocking to the music as soon as he hears it. It’s an instant recognition of one’s lot, a spontaneous initiation into a brotherhood forged on a beat.

The terrific rap is written by a battalion of hip-hop artists and music producers on whom the film is partially based: Divine, Naezy, Kaam Bhari, Spitfire, Ace, Dub Sharma, MC Altaf, MC TodFod, Desi Ma, the list is long. The verses are top rate and so are the roasts. But as pleasant is how Akhtar and her dialogue writer Vijay Maurya, who plays Murad’s uncle, show a great sense of prosody. The words they pick and the way the actors deliver them have a cadence and vitality rivalling the rap tracks. When Murad is christened ‘Gully Boy’, his friends repeat the name like an incantation. A moment earlier, the word ‘export’ was brilliantly rhymed with ‘visfot’ (explosion). One of the quarrels between Murad’s parents yields this bit of verse: “Baccha hai?/Haan/Baccha hai yeh?/Haan/Saala saand ki tarah chhati pe baitha hai baccha hai yeh?” (“A kid?/Yes/He’s a kid?/Yes/He’s sitting on my chest like a goddamn bull and he’s a kid?”). An exchange in Marathi between MC Sher and his father sounds straight out of a rap battle. Akhtar’s knack for picking up rhythms from Murad’s environment – the sound of door knocking, a passing train, the footsteps of Murad coming down the attic, the ubiquitous “bhai” (“brother”), the vowel-dominated Mumbai Hindi slang that ends imperative sentences with ‘ka’ (“pyaz katne ka, cooker mein dalne ka, teen seeti ke baad nikalne ka”) – hints at the source of his gravitation towards hip-hop, just as the factory noise of industrial Britain is said to be responsible for the blossoming of heavy metal music in the country.

Ranveer Singh is extraordinary as Murad and it’s one of the great Hindi cinema performances. Several scenes in the film would’ve simply collapsed had he interpreted his role differently. When you see him first as the unwilling participant in a carjacking, he is in the background of the shot, out of focus. Even when he is in focus, he’s barely conspicuous. Donning sweat shirts and jackets over a kurta or a loose shirt left untucked, a backpack, a talisman on his neck, mascara under the eyes, he cuts an awkward figure. There’s a constant softness to his voice, even when he becomes increasingly comfortable with the rap scene, that is in contrast with the coarser textures of his peers’. In his first open mic session, Murad is pushed by MC Sher to rap out his own writing. Ranveer reads the text out from his notebook to an “old-school” beat in metre, without any deviation or improvisation, like a primary-schooler forced to recite a poem for a competition. He misses the beat once: a calculated amateurishness worthy of Gary Cooper. This apparent innocence gives his tracks a moral power and rounds off the rough edges of the roasts. Notice the pitch drop in the final battle when he goes from “Tere kaale noton ki raid lag gayi” (“your black notes have been raided”) to “ab yeh sikka mera bolega” (“let my coin do the talking now”). The shifts in his tone when he speaks to Safeena, to his friends or to characters outside of Dharavi go hand in hand with his changing body language in different spaces. Just looking at him you could figure out the kind of location he’s in.

There’s a distinct lack of a feeling of bruised masculinity in Ranveer’s Murad – no rage or resentment – contrary to Vijay Raaz’s rather flat characterization. Unlike Safeena, Murad is not irreverent or calculating. His verses aren’t controversial or especially provocative, nor is his rhetorical style. They’re inward-looking, less about societal evils than about self-realization. With an unassuming Mumbai accent, Ranveer minimizes Murad’s own experience in front of others. He thanks MC Sher for the warm reception on the first day. When Sher tells him not to pay heed to rich kids dissing his provenance, he gently replies “no, brother, they’ve seen the world.” The first meeting with Sky at a pub is a lesson in modest cordiality. He will later thank Sky for not insisting on sleeping with him, innocent of the power dynamic at hand and of the etiquette of class relations. Look at Ranveer’s reaction to the recording of his first appearance: a toothy grin with his thumb on his lower lip, followed by a half-suppressed Charlie Chaplin laughter when a peer compliments him on a line. Or his first gig at a studio, where he measures his distance from the microphone with a trembling hand.

Ranveer’s self-subtraction is made more striking by being pitted against three remarkable performances. We first see Alia Bhatt’s Safeena, ironically, in a wordless scene with Murad, where the two, showing obvious signs of familiarity and comfort with each other, share a pair of headphones at the back of a bus. Safeena is diminutive and, her hair wrapped up under a colourful scarf, has the air of a soft-spoken schoolgirl. But her pluck and self-determination, bordering on hysteria when she gets violent, are in stark contrast with Murad’s timidity and constant doubt. She shouts and wails if necessary and segues from her standard-accent Urdu to Mumbai slang when needed. In her breakup call with Murad, a scene that is the conceptual reverse of their first romantic call, she sits on the bathroom floor with her hair untied, grilling her boyfriend at the top of her voice, her nose all red. Murad and Safeena’s complementing temperaments and command of space is also reflected in Murad’s relation with Siddhant Chaturvedi’s MC Sher and Vijay Varma’s Moeen. Chaturvedi’s is a patently star-making turn. In the scene at MC Sher’s tenement house with his alcoholic father, the simmering resentment and violence in Chaturvedi’s eyes is evident as glances at his father or when he says his mother ran away. The thrill and success of Murad’s first open mic session hangs entirely on approving reaction shots of Chaturvedi. Varma’s Moeen is a street fighter, residing in moral twilight, more rooted in the reality of Dharavi. He’s always in Murad’s orbit, supportive, but won’t share any of his lofty moralizing. Varma is always doing something interesting with his hair, hands and mouth, and his funny, moving performance, like Chaturvedi’s, seals a claim for a long haul in Bollywood.

Gully Boy is kinetically shot with a shoulder cam, as is par for many action movies, and it puts the audience on stage with the rappers. The rough yellow light of Mumbai outdoors is complemented by soft, bounced light of the interiors and the subdued colour palette. While the big dinner scene with the family is disorienting in its vague spatial relations, two particular scenes are lucidly edited with fine economy: the sequence at the hospital where Murad’s father promises his employer that his son will take over his job conveys the rigid chain of command through a fluid series of glances, and the scene at the party where Safeena assaults Sky superbly triangulates between Safeena, Murad and Sky’s points of view conveying their mutual jealousy and grudge. There are moments where the screenwriters pull the strings a little too hard and, I think, there are a handful of directorial missteps too. Sky’s video starring Murad and Sher is shot in Dharavi and features a questionable montage of workers posing for the camera. It’s an employment of the poor as wallpaper that Akhtar avoids elsewhere in the film. But Gully Boy is almost a unique phenomenon in that it manages to scoop out a piece of reality that brings into perfect harmony a social-historical analysis, the needs of the genre, and Zoya Akhtar’s position as a privileged artist. I doubt she can surpass this work. I also hope I’m wrong.