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Anurag Kashyap lives in a part of Mumbai that has rarely been filmed, but hyper-instagrammed. The village of Versova is the northernmost point of the island's city, a bastion of Koli. The Kolis are fishermen who are the first inhabitants of the city; Social media are full of Koli men and women richly represented and dotted with gold. I meet Kashyap at his home in a street packed with greenery and small businesses in equal proportions, a few days before Sacred Games, led by him and Vikramaditya Motwane, aired on Netflix. And 20 years after Kashyap had his break in Hindi cinema as a writer, on Ram Gopal Varma's Satya.
Satya and the Holy Games are Bombay stories par excellence, and both have the bhai or gangster in them. The first, which Kashyap wrote with Saurabh Shukla, speaks of the eponymous hero who is snapped up by an extortion, badbadination and exalted songs. Satya was a breaker of tastes, a new language for gangster dramas. The way it was shot revealed the corners of the city and its micro-attacks without blinking or filtering.
Sacred Games is based on Vikram Chandra's 900-page thriller dating back to 2006, mainly in Mumbai in the 1980s and 1990s, when gangsters and police often encountered gangsters. Kashyap says the co-leadership of Sacred Games has released him to make Mumbai alive in details.
"The writing is such that there is no urgency to show the city, the city unfolds as the narrative builds. That's why filming a series is liberating, "says Kashyap.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a Maharashtrian gangster named Gaitonde. Saif Ali Khan plays his doppelganger and his enemy, police inspector Sartaj Singh
In the first four episodes of Sacred Games, a battle between a Brahmin gangster named Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and a police inspector from Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan) at the top is an antagonism that goes beyond the immediate meaning of the criminal on one side and the cop on the other. Sartaj and Gaitonde are dopplegangers who know each other and the battle between them continues long after Gaitonde's death.
The filmmakers establish the series as a thriller thriller of the first episode; the first fascinating season is composed of eight. The Netflix series, produced by Phantom Films, is no less rewarding than Chandra's rich and daring novel, the most underrated novels on Mumbai. There are modifications in the arcs and a reduction of the architecture for the screen, but the three authors, Varun Grover, Smita Singh and Vasant Nath, retain the artistic center of Chandra's novel.
The city faces the epic battle between the two men. Mumbai eclipses the characters while being rewarding, and works as a stepping stone for humor. Although specific to the decades in which it is set, the Mumbai of Sacred Games has a visual quality that exceeds this time. It reveals a quality that runs through the DNA of all major cities. We see a city in motion and remember that nothing is permanent; the identity of the characters is just as fluid and scalable.
So Sacred Games is a definitive addition to the Mumbai film. It's the city that has inspired stories since the beginnings of Hindi cinema. From Abrar Alvi, Manto, Chetan Anand, Sudhir Mishra, Sai Paranjpye and Ram Gopal Varma to today – with many other writers and directors between the two – Mumbai is the city's most filmed from India. For a long time, two or three landmarks were staples of the screen – the sea at Marine Drive, the gateway to India, the South Mumbai colonial structures, horse buggies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Salaam Bombay of Mira Nair! and Dharavi of Sudhir Mishra has introduced dirt, dirt, impermanence and margins of the city. Satya and Company of Varma gave another dimension to this grain, showing gang battles for survival. The city has been a fantasy for people across the country just because of being so keen on the screen.
"My first big moment of realization that I finally arrived in Bombay was when I took a BEST bus and the driver pulled the rope to ring the bell," says screenwriter Grover. "I had a mini bad somehow because it was a scene that I had seen in so many movies." It was a part of Bombay that I knew intimately and well. Was still there the first time I saw muqammal before my eyes. "
Grover believes that a hot case can often tell you more about a person than marrying them, and what the # 39, we know of a city does not depend on the time spent there but the intensity of its relationship with it. Kashyap says that he is almost married to the city now, and although he has only experienced one part of it, it never stops him from looking at him otherwise.
In Ugly (2011), Kashyap, with his cinematographer Rajeev Ravi, showed a thrilling new urbanism of suburban migrant through languid filming locations in the western suburbs of Andheri.
Every visual detail, up to the small spaces we inhabit, is now chronicled in real time through social media. Each city is over-photographed by insiders and tourists and all these images are instantly consumed. The Web series, more than just movies, has the ability to slowly burn a city in our visual calculation and tell deeper stories. Depending on how it goes beyond the first season, Sacred Games could do it in a whole new way for Mumbai.
But before that, there is the bbad business of shooting. The filmmakers and producers say that Mumbai has become one of the most difficult cities to shoot. "Permits are difficult and expensive, space is limited, and shooting is interrupted all the time," says Kashyap. Due to similar difficulties, Los Angeles has gone from the most filmed American city to be virtually invisible on the Hollywood screen.
We needed a sacred game to resuscitate Mumbai on a screen, as small as it is. Also know, once again, that Danny Boyle's little boy in Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the worst we've seen in Mumbai on the screen – not just literally.
(Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and a critic, write to him at [email protected])
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