If nothing else, Ghamasaan at least reminds you how rugged and gritty the texture of a Tigmanshu Dhulia movie can be. The Hindi heartland accents sound authentic, and the gangsters seem unusually dangerous and realistic. The hair and makeup are perfectly suited to the setting, and the daily rituals, routines, and habits are keenly observed, making the characters look almost true to life. No wonder you intuitively find Dhulia's characters quite convincing. In Ghamasaan, as soon as you first notice Maharaj (Arshad Warsi), a feared dacoit leader, devoutly performing his morning prayers, you immediately believe that this is something he has been doing for a long time. You also quickly buy into the fact that he has always been a casteist. But in a state like UP, it's not just the bad guys who are casteist, and Dhulia underlines this problem effectively in the scene where a policeman expresses shock when Aditya (Pratik Gandhi), an IPS officer, asks for water in a village inhabited by Adivasis. That cop, a few minutes earlier, even tells Aditya to take a different route because of black magic. Maharaj might be oppressing people in the area with his threats and weapons, but Dhulia also suggests that the community has been weakened from within by casteism and superstition.
Dhulia, in other words, enters Chitrakoot and brings it alive on the screen. It's a pity, then, that he doesn't do much with the characters and aesthetics he so carefully establishes. By mostly setting Ghamasaan in the forests of Chitrakoot, Dhulia invokes a Ramayana-like mythic experience, but without the richness of that myth. Sure, Maharaj is the upper-caste Ravana who has wide connections and a big army, and he prays every morning. And Aditya is the Ram who fights against a man like Maharaj, who, with the help of his many networks, manages to stay one step ahead of his enemies. What's more, there is even a Sita-kidnapping scene when Aparna (Ishita Dutta), Aditya's wife, is abducted from her home—only to be released after a while. But these allusions to the epic become the film's primary source of substance, and that substance isn't developed or expanded fruitfully.
With Ghamasaan, Dhulia attempts to talk about elections, gunda raaj, and democracy (Aditya's job is to ensure that voting occurs smoothly), though what he fails to do is infuse these ideas with weight, with meaning. There is no time spent developing relationships between the characters or resolving their inner conflicts. One of Aditya's colleagues scoffs at him when everyone is ordered to renovate an abandoned, dilapidated house and convert it into a booth office. The same colleague complains when Aditya, like a hero, leaves his team behind to chase Angad (Jatin Goswami), Maharaj's special guy. Dhulia, alas, never resolves this tension. The complaints simply pop up and disappear without a trace instantly. Dhulia doesn't follow through with his own suggestions and setups. He chooses to sketch every relationship generically. Aditya and the other officers are merely bound by their profession and current objective, while Maharaj and his men, including Angad, are similarly bound. The force that drives everybody is basic and just sufficient to move the story forward.
This is why, when someone—or rather, anyone—dies, we feel neither shock nor surprise. Nothing moves you; nothing even comes across as sensationalized. A man is burned alive, and heads are placed on spikes, but Dhulia depicts the violence plainly. You don't even feel the horror of watching innocent men being tortured and killed. That's mainly because Dhulia never establishes his characters properly. He sees them as victims to be sacrificed or heroes to be cherished. The filmmaker is caught in bland binaries, so when RDX explodes during the climax and gives way to a bloodbath between two different types of armies, you simply watch a competently executed action block, not a nerve-wracking, heart-pounding confrontation in which things hang perilously in the balance.
It's understandable, then, that Dhulia has to exert himself to generate melodrama, which he does through songs that are played as punchlines to scenes. Case in point: when Aditya asks a kid who is often physically assaulted by his father whether he drinks alcohol, the kid replies that he does because it helps him cope with the pain a bit, and the soundscape cries, "Bhor jo aaye, jag muskaaye. Ankhiyan mori, neer bahaaye." Dhulia himself doesn't trust the scene to convey the feelings of agony. Instead of lingering on profound silence, he fills the moment with musical cries.
Maybe some part of him is aware of his own deficiencies, which is why he uses a song to explicitly convey why he chose this story. The song in question basically states that the real king—or maharaja—is someone who protects people rather than abusing or murdering them. In other words, a man like Aditya is the real king. While the thought itself is mighty fine, it comes across as a placard slogan, thanks to the thin characters and their fragile ties.
Ghamasaan ultimately is the sort of movie that seems exciting as an idea, as a theory. What prevents it from fulfilling its true potential is a "minimalism" that becomes a shorthand for creative bankruptcy. Dhulia sticks crucial topics like caste, fair elections, and police corruption onto the screen like cool stickers that, more than anything else, simply mark their attendance in the movie. Despite Dhulia's skills, ambitions, and good intentions, Ghamasaan merely looks like a concept for a political drama-cum-crime thriller that's still searching for its characters and its story.
And yet, it's impossible to completely write off this director because of his distinct touches, such as the "photographic closure" he gives to a man like Kalika (Rajpal Naurang Yadav), or the resoluteness with which Aparna, after her brief abduction, tells Aditya to either kill every gangster, including Maharaj, or do nothing. She doesn't complain or cry. She is courageous, all right, though it would have been much better had Dhulia bothered to discover whether she has any career ambitions or friends with whom she talks in her free time. What does she do in her free time? Aparna is more like a symbol of a tough woman—an idealized image of the wife that every brave policeman deserves in his life.
Dhulia is so caught up in his subtexts and symbols that his text is left stunted and trimmed. Nonetheless, what he displays is admirable dignity, which stops him from following the current commercial trend of depicting goons and gangsters as idols deserving to be glorified. Dhulia's intentions are honorable; he holds on to the lesson about the good guys triumphing over the bad guys quite determinedly. It's unfortunate that his intentions don't translate into a thriller worth lauding enthusiastically.
Ghamasaan is forgettable and has a few minor merits. It's not the kind of intense experience that its title promises it to be. In the end, you might just feel like patting Dhulia on the back and saying, "Better luck next time."
Final Score - [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times