Everyone loves an underdog story. In a country that runs more on emotion and less on logic, making a movie about an underdog has mostly been successful. Even the ones that didn’t make money at the box office – like ‘Maalamaal’ – have achieved a cult following over the years. In such a scenario comes Zoya Akhtar with her film ‘Gully Boy’, a film about the underground music scene in India.
I can safely say that most mainstream audiences got their first full blown taste of underground music with the ‘Sacred Games’ anthem ‘Kaam 25’. A few months down the line, comes ‘Gully Boy’, a film where Ranveer Singh plays the titular character; it is the story of how he becomes what he does from being Murad from Dharavi.
For a film that’s based in Dharavi, Zoya does a great job. It’s a great relief to see that the director doesn’t want to make a poverty porn film – we have had that a couple of times in this decade and in the previous one. ‘Salaam Bombay’ was criticised for being too violent, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was criticised for being poverty porn, and then there are so many other films accused of being that. However, Zoya captures a civilization that’s happy with what it has, and will fight hammer and tongs if someone tries to take it away from them.
She happily captures her protagonists dancing in the streets (full hat tip to her for not having Ranveer and Siddhant on the same X in the choreography) and doesn’t tell the audience about the dirt, the grime, the fragility of their lives. In fact, she takes a potshot at the concept of poverty porn early on in the film. If this film were Ranveer Singh’s debut, he’d be an instant classic. In this film, we see the Ranveer Singh of his audition days.
But for someone who has spent his lifetime in a locality that’s a kilometre away from another hutment area like Dharavi, ‘Gully Boy’ is a bit of a letdown. To really understand what goes in these hutments, I’d recommend watching the criminally underrated ‘Striker’, starring Siddharth and Aditya Panscholi (that guy gives a performance of a lifetime). Crime, death and violence is a reality that hutment dwellers face every day. That all this makes just a romanticised appearance in ‘Gully Boy’ is a matter of concern.
The film also suffers from the ‘sab theek ho jayega’ complex. Some characters seem too good to be true. Some relationships seem confusing, but the one thing that’s missing is the real struggle that Ranveer’s character would have gone through – that of money. Money is tight for any class in India, and more so for the ones living in hutments. The fact that money doesn’t get any reference in a film about underdogs is telling. Either the filmmaker knows something that government surveys don’t show, or they just thought of brushing it away.