black friday

strangely, in spite of the subject of the film, more intellectually interesting rather than emotionally draining, ‘black friday’ is a strange animal of a film. the story is not yet history and cannot be told yet with the sepia tinted sentiment that most period films regarding a ‘real’ life incident can afford. i guess that is a relief- for i can only imagine what could have been the result if anurag kashyap had learnt from the steven speilberg school of soaring violin crescendo film making. though he does try to wrench some human drama out of the blast sequences; instead he ends up hovering over decapitated limbs and bodies languishing in blood in slow motion. it may be gruesome but in the way a murder is in a thriller.

and that’s what the film is. a well told story about the people and the events that led to the bomb blasts and the eventual arrests regarding. by being as ‘objective’ as possible, the film is as unjudgemental as possible – except vilifying the usual whipping boy of most conspiracy theories – the isi and the secret service across the border. the story moves with a rapid pace sketching out the incidents that led to the blasts and the arrests. it cut from location to location shifting from one character in the complex tale to another. suddenly it spends considerable time with randomly selected characters looking at small incidents regarding their role in the conspiracy. these asides, although they initially make little sense as far as the narrative is concerned seem to add a dimension that lifts the film above the average story telling.

religious fanatics, gangsters, terrorists and policemen seem to be caught up in a vicious cycle of suspicion, corruption and violence that is postulated as the cause of the riots. like the reason lies outside the intentions of ordinary men. like there is a system that can be blamed- abstract and disconnected from the everyday lives of people. perhaps that is true- how many times have we seen bigotry exist at a theoretical level and disintegrate when we see people deal with others on a day to day level? the difficulty is when these abstract relationships being to distort our perceptions of reality; where the everyday appears as a representation of the conceptual heroes and villains within a theoretical framework. but does that remove the culpability of the men who actually plant the bombs, or break the mosque, or rape the women? resistance or critique of a ‘system’ can happen at the level of practice. we need not follow the herd.