Good, Bad & Lengthy!!

Good, Bad & Lengthy: My quick take on “Guns & Gulab” (Netflix)

Director/Writer duo Raj and DK after a good run after “Family Man” and “Farzi” have hit a home run with this dark comedy “G&G”, in fact, it should be called G&G&G (Guns & Gulab & Galiya) as the language used is simply the profanity at it's best 😀. Not sure if the Hindi hinterland is accustomed to such foul language or the in period of 90’s (the plot is set in this period) such language was in vogue. If one ignores this profanity aspect, dark comedy / black comedy has many entertaining moments.

Best part of the series is the way each character is etched out irrespective of it's length in the series, it could be a 2-3 scene long character of a मदारी, or a bunch of teenagers or a non-English ‘knowing’ garagewala टीपू पाना or a luna wali English teacher or cold blooded assassin चार कट आत्माराम who is like the proverbial आत्मा, which neither dies nor can be killed. Raj n DK have developed this style of introducing hordes of characters and then work on their details and develop each character and then somehow make each character cross paths by climax of the series. Because of this (character detailing/development ) the pace of series dampens. Hence I could not binge-watch this series.

Second best thing about the series is it's cast, Rajkumar Rao, Dulqar Salman, Aadrash Gaurav, late Satish Kaushik, Vipin Sharma make you feel that the roles were written only for these actors, in fact each and every character is hand picked and they have given their best respectively. The dialogs are damn witty, location and cinematography is exemplary, treating each episode as a chapter of book with a distinct name (eg. क़सम पैदा करने वाले की , रात बाक़ी..) was indeed a masterstoke, i also admire the efforts taken by production designer who had painstakingly recreated the 90’s era with Luna, Yezdi, contessa, PCO phone booths, even then Mithun/baba’s hairdo is meticulously copied.

This genre of dark comedy always invites binary reactions, either you like it or you just hate it. I was not a big fan of this genre, last good Dark comedy movie i enjoyed a little bit was Darlings, but after watching G&G I have developed a liking for this genre. I only wish the length of the series was trimmed a bit, sharp edit would have removed the slack, and of course the language could have been more civil.

Overall it's a watchable series (though not exactly a binge- watchable product ) because of it's twists and out-of-box turns.