Gully Boy, a biopic on Mumbai’s slum resident turned MC megastar, Naezy, stumped me because it shouldn’t have worked. A blockbuster masala film that’s set in despondent Dharavi and whose two lead characters are practicing Muslims – a bold move in this BJP world we live in- is a catastrophe of gargantuan proportions waiting to happen. But lo and behold, it is anything but. Gully Boy, Bollywood’s first full throttle foray into hip-hop, is an emotional sucker punch of a film that’ll leave you balling, laughing hysterically, applauding and just profoundly riveted.
What’s even more shocking is that the film was directed by Zoya Akhtar, who although irrefutably brilliant as a filmmaker, has been accused many a time of only making films about bougie Indians. She proves her detractors dead-wrong here. Not only is her understanding of this very particular milieu, that is understandably alien to her, deeply astute but she also manages to animate it with both pathos and plenty of side-splitting humor. We get real characters here with real emotions and she makes sure that even the most morally ambiguous of them, show a sliver of humanity so we could feel closer to them. It’s telling of her filmmaking talent that – even when we’re being distracted by Ranveer Singh’s haunting vulnerability, a hijabi Alia Bhatt in yet another showstopping performance, Kalki Koechlin playing a hussy with a heart and all the other screeching white noise – the one scene that’ll hit you the most is when Ranveer Singh’s mother (an incandescent Amruta Subhash) breaks down completely on her son’s shoulders. The scene, as short it is, is raw, emotionally bare and it will make you feel totally uncomfortable.
As true art should.
The problem Ranveer Singh’s mother faces, that being uncontested polygamy, is among a litany of socioeconomic problems in India the film takes an unflinching look at. The others being economic disparity among the classes, female agency and the high unemployment rate and housing problem Muslim Mumbaikaars are still struggling with. Then there’s the White Man Lens where we see hordes of white tourists ogling and exoticizing the deplorable conditions slumdwellers live in. This is an unfortunate daily occurrence in Colaba where buses of well-to-do, culturally insensitive white people are being shuttled to Dharavi to look at the poor brown people as though they were animals in a national park reserve.
Hip-hop fits seamlessly into this bleak environment as its always been the music of the world’s disenfranchised minorities whether they’re Africans living isolated lives in France’s banlieues, ostracized Palestinians living in Israel, or America’s inner-cities’ black and Latin populations from where the hip-hop movement was birthed. It is the voice for the voiceless, their foghorn. But so is the medium of film, so when the two are fused, the results are almost always powerful as is the case with other inspiring, rags-to-riches hip-hop films like Hustle & Flow, 8 Mile and Straight Outta Compton. Gully Boy has now joined this pantheon and hopefully, like those films, will both inspire and inform.
