Vaastav: The Reality (India 1999)

 

Here at Nameless Gangsters it's not going to be just about the usual old triad and yakuza movies. I'm going to be using it as a tool to explore other asian nation's hard boiled cinema. One that it a large blank spot for me is India. Cranking up the imdb listings for best Indian gangster films, I found this, sourced it and slapped it on.

Made at the turn of the millennium and starring burly actor Sanjay Dutt this takes the usual Godfather and Scarface riffs and ploughs them through some Bombay spiced cinema. It avoids the usual rags to riches tale and switches instead to a tale of rags and money bags, leading to addiction, murder, corruption and madness. Dutt plays a big doofus called Ragha who would rather just hang around with his pals on rooftops than study hard to get a white collar job. He ends up convincing his father to lend him money for a snack van which he and his cronies start running. After tussling with some local mobsters, Ragha and his best pal Shorty, find themselves neck deep in trouble. 

For a movie made in 1999, it sometimes feels like something from 1979 , like Chinatown Kid minus the martial arts, or else it's just my ignorance of Indian movies. The film begins very broadly and is almost soap opera levels in its set up of family shenanigans and Ragha bumbling about. There is a couple of dance and song routines early on but after the forty minute mark, the gangster shit kicks in and the earlier carnival atmosphere gets tossed to the wind. It is here that the real movie begins, Ragha running a life of crime whilst trying to keep links with his family as his crime career spirals out of control. 

Ragha becomes a cocaine crazed, whisky guzzling, pistol packing crazy motherfucker. There is few people all of a sudden, he won't pull a gun on, even his own mother. He also shoots lots of people, usually men with moustaches in loud shirts. Eyes bulging, hair swept back and wearing garish traditional clothing, Ragha swaggers about and makes this movie work, a ticking time bomb like eating a really out of date boiled egg, you know it's going to fucking blow up in your face, big style. 

Apart from a pointless late trip to Switzerland, Vaastav keeps speeding along, taking in corrupt politics, religious strife and gangster assassinations along the way. The violent highlights are many including death by giant rock, a disco brawl and a motorway assassination via ambulance ambush. I dug thus but I'd sway newcomers to Satya from 1998 before  this as it has less traditional Indian cinema baggage to its credit.