Cast: Kay Kay, Raja Singh Chaudhary, Abhimanyu Singh, Aditya Srivastava, Piyush Mishra, Deepak Dobriyal, Ayesha Mohan, Jesse Randhawa, Mahie Gill

Director: Anurag Kashyap

The leitmotif that runs through Anurag Kashyap’s latest film is red—the colour of revolution, and passion; of love and bloody betrayal. ‘Gulal’ tells the story of an India struggling to come to terms with its contemporary identity and complicated histories. And Kashyap nearly pulls it off.

It comes from a director who main-lines anger and this is his angriest film. It’s also his most ambitious film, and the combination is potent enough to give us a film which spills over with compelling characters (some of whom you’ve never met in Hindi cinema), superb set-pieces, stirring lyrics, and terrific acting. But somewhere along the way, the director gets into montage mode, juggling with too many issues and too many people. If only Kashyap had managed to connect all his dots, this would have been a truly magnificent film.

Dukey Bana (Kay Kay) is an amoral zamindar readying a personal army to further the cause of Rajput pride. He lives in the feudal past, with a wife on the sidelines, a mistress in the middle, and a bunch of fierce loyalists around him. His enemies are both within and without: a strange-acting Rajput lad (Abhimanyu Singh) who doesn’t want any part of his princely legacy, a rival potentate (Aditya Srivastava) who wants to usurp Dukey’s place in the Bana hierarchy, and a naïve, wet-behind-the-years ‘senior student’ (Raja Singh Chaudhary) who comes into a sleepy, fictional Rajasthan town, and becomes the unwilling catalyst for everything that happens.

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