Review: Gangubai Kathiawadi
Gangubai Kathiawadi, is a story of an exceptional woman in an exceptional circumstance, filled with the Bhansali-esque poise, poetry, and grandeur.
Based loosely on the true story in the book Mafia Queens of Mumbai by Hussain Zaidi with Jane Borges, the story revolves around Gangubai Kathiawadi, a mafia owner of brothels in the red-light district of Kamathipura in the 1950s.
Gangubai, played by the terrific Alia Bhatt, comes from an affluent family – her father is a barrister. Unfortunately, she has a grand ambition to be in the movies. Running away from home with a lover who betrays her, and sells her to a brothel for one thousand rupees, she ends up standing in a doorway, beckoning customers. Stardom, although a different kind, eventually does come to her, through her daring defiant determination. This even leads her to a 15-minute meeting with the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
A still from Gangubai Kathiawadi.
I have always been in awe of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema, especially his sets. The production design by Amit Ray and Subrata Chakraborty, transform the red-light district of Kamathipura into a bustling muhalla. Ray and Chakraborty, along with art director Pallab Chanda create a visually appealing version of the district, filling it with tongas, talkies, and plastered doors and walls that create a spectacle of a frame.
DoP Sudip Chatterjee also creates masterpieces with his camera. Each frame is poetry in motion. Although the sets were dumbed-down SLB signature sets, each set reminded me a little of Wes Anderson’s frames – symmetry in all its grandeur and spectacle.
In one beautiful scene, there is a power cut in Kamathipuara. All the sex workers come out of their homes holding candles to attract the clients. This is just visually stunning.
The performances by Seema Pahwa as Sheela Masi, the owner of the brothel where Ganga becomes Gangu, and Vijay Raaz as Gangu’s opponent Razia, are just spectacular. It was wonderful to see Pahwa outside the mould of the small-town mother.
However, this film truly belongs to Alia Bhatt. In her performance, there is no restraint. It’s almost as though she plunges into the character with utmost sincerity. Watch out for the small nuances of the character such as the dialect, or the body language. She brings her own swagger to the character and yet with her girlish face, she owns it.
A still from Gangubai Kathiawadi.
From the beautiful swaying bodies in visually choreographed, beautifully staged songs like Dholida, to the time she goes out with Afshaan (Shantanu Maheshwari), Bhatt pulls off an array of emotions. In a superb single-shot sequence, in the song Meri Jaan, she talks about consent, and sex without uttering a single word. Its beautifully choreographed with her co-actor Maheshwari. She is flirtatious, controlling, angry, vulnerable, wounded and desperately sad, and all of this is conveyed to us just by her eyes and expressions.
In an interview with Anupama Chopra, Alia Bhatt said how Bhansali’s briefs always had the opposite – angry but humorous, happy but disapointed. And this is beautifully shown in the sequence in which she talks to her mother after 12 long years. She is constantly pestered by the operator with the amount of time left on the phone. While being sad, and crying, internally she is furious. Her body language is one, while her eyes convey another emotion almost flawlessly.
Clad in a radiant white sari, Gangubai is almost there in every frame of the film, and I can’t complain. In one scene she explains the different colours of white – chand, badal, baraf, doodh, namak - bringing out the sanity and ‘purity’ of her profession and politics.
A still from Gangubai Kathiawadi.
The magic of lyricism, and violence, both physically and emotionally, can never be missed out in a Bhansali film. Gangubai Kathiawadi brings out this poetry in beautifully staged sequences. The film is also adorned with various tip-offs to yesteryear cinema. With bringing out single screen theatres like Alfred, and New Roshan talkies, to gigantic posters of M. Sadiq’s Chaudvin Ka Chand, and K. Asif’s Mughal E Azam, the film tips its hat to the golden era of cinema. There are also posters of Dev Anand and Meena Kumari that adorn walls in the brothel. In a sequence with the Prime Minister, Gangubai also quotes Sahir Ludhianvi from the famous Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, saying: Jinhe naaz hai Hind par, woh kahaan hain?
These tip-offs eventually add up to the culminating factor of the film. In a narration while being paraded, Gangubai is spoken about. “She came to Bombay to become an actress but ended up being cinema.”
Gangubai Kathiawadi is magic, right from the performances, to the staging, dance, and sequences. However, with Heeramandi (the red-light district of Lahore where ‘courtesans were queens’) coming up on the slate of Bhansali Productions, I wonder how the maestro will experiment.
