Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai

Director: Milan Luthria

Starring: Ajay Devgn, Emraan Hashmi,Randeep Hooda, Kangna Ranaut, Prachi Desai

Sultan Mirza turns into a bit of a Mirza Ghalib over a few drinks. Or so his girlfriend (Kangna Ranaut) suggests. A woman's deep attraction to powerful men, at its bizarre state, reveals itself in the shape of the ‘gun moll’. The examples are aplenty. The girlfriend here is a ‘70s film actor. Sultan’s the dominant Mafiosi. His life, she tells him, could make for a great film: “You don’t need to act. There’s a new boy Amit. He has eyes just like yours. The scene refers to Amitabh Bachchan of course, and perhaps a story that later became Yash Chopra’s Deewar in ‘75. The actor before you is Ajay Devgn. You tend to agree with the parallel drawn. Few actors in mainstream films manage a self-assured, under-stated swagger, convey so much silently, sometimes just with their glance and droopy eyes. It’s a camera art. Bachchan perfected it as the ‘angry young man’. Devgn, you can tell, is his fine successor.

The film starts off with a disclaimer on his lead character: “He bears absolutely no resemblance to the life of late Mr Haji Mastan.” Another gent in this film (Emraan Hashmi) appears with passion for good things in life, and a moustache that thickly tilts at the edges, hides the smirk within. He’s a young, plumpish, short Shoaib, small-time hustler with a police constable for a father. He runs an electronics shop gifted him by the don Sultan, his father’s acquaintance from work. The neighbourhood seems a crowded Dongri.

Note: “not Haji Mastan”; but no such disclaimer for the secure Dawood Ibrahim. I still don’t know a film that calls attention to its supposed source, with its stated denial alone. It works! A cop who’s just attempted suicide quite lamely narrates for the audience this film’s story: of a dockworker, who migrates at young age to Bombay, and rises rapidly into a world of deceit and infamy. The scenes are but lazily, linearly chapterised.

Laws change. As do definitions. A smuggler of gold, watches or transistors once, would be an importer now. Sultan, the film suggests, became a strange kind of icon among the impatient youth, the sorts of Shoaib. Business leaders, some of them with questionable pasts (or present), are revered similarly these days. Sultan’s position was also unique because he bought peace for the city by dividing its pieces -- Colaba to Tardeo, Bandra to Versova, Dharavi to Dadar… -- among his rivals, Vardhan, Pathan, Vishnu et al: “Why make enemies, when you can make friends out of them.” The law of Omerta was complete. Until the upstart Shoaib shattered the status quo. Sultan himself developed political ambitions.

Ram Gopal Varma’s Company (2002) was supposedly based on the split between Dawood and his second-in-command Chhota Rajan, in the same way this one refers to Haji Mastan and his protégé Dawood’s break-up. Movies, I suspect, bear myth-making qualities beyond literature. The medium is too recent to judge for its place in history. But already, films like Mughal-e-Azam or Sholay appear mythologies to rival epics in public consciousness. So do Mumbai’s underworld dons, though for all you know, their real lives may not be fractionally as exciting as their fictional ones on screen. The subject is immediately exhilarating still. As is this film.

Luthria rightly recreates retro from the ‘70s. And this is not just in the low angles of the shots; strange prints on expensive nylon shirts; or trumpets for a background score. It’s most importantly in the sense of the big screen occasion, and a throwback to smart, terse dialogue. A bit of Salim-Javed then, and a whole lot of early Varma! Both aren't easy to scale. This one's the best effort I’ve seen in long.

Once Upon A Time In Mumbai directed by Milan Luthria is a gangster film starring Ajay Devgan, Emraan Hashmi, Prachi Desai, Kangna Ranaut and Randeep Hooda. The film has been in news for being based on the lives of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and Haji Mastan. The disclaimer - as ordered by the high court - claims otherwise, still the news has created tremendous excitement around the film.

The film is set in Mumbai. It starts off in the 70s with the rise of underworld don Sultan Mirza (Ajay Devgan), with Shoaib (Emraan Hashmi) as his protï. Years later, Sultan decides to leave the crime world and join politics. While on a trip to Delhi for a party ticket, he appoints Shoaib as his successor to the rule the underworld. The ambitious Shoaib takes over and expands his illegal business. Thus begins the conflict between the mentor and his protï. What happens next forms the rest of this genuinely engrossing film.

Once Upon A Time In Mumbai starts of very well. The characters, including those of the two lead gangsters, are very likable. And unlike most other gangster films, the director has included plenty of heart-warming romantic scenes to keep the female section of the audience hooked. Milan Luthria aided big time by Rajat Arora's fabulously written script, delivers inarguably his best work to date. Whether it's the romantic scenes, the action sequences, recreating the retro look of the 70s (along with art director Nitin Desai) or the confrontation between the two lead actors, Milan has handled it all very well. The film also has plenty of mass-appeal, it isn't too serious or depressing nor is there an excess of bloody and gore. The action scenes by Abbas Ali Moghul are expertly choreographed and performed. The background music (Sandeep Shirodhkar) is brilliant. What also take the film to an all new level are those powerful dialogues by Rajat Arora.

The music by Pritam is one of the best so far this year. 'Pee Loon' is a chartbuster and goes well with the film. Ajay Devgan delivers one of his best performances ever. Perfectly cast as Sultan Mirza, Devgan gets everything right. An award deserving performance, undoubtedly. Emraan Hashmi does very well too, sharing great chemistry with the very effective and cute Prachi Desai. Kangana Ranaut is brilliant, yet again. Randeep Hooda is excellent. In fact, every performance is top notch - a pat on Milan's back for extraction fabulous performances from his talented cast.

It's the way he looks at the camera. Almost as if it doesn't exist. Ajay Devgn as Sultan Mirza is NOT Haji Mastan, please note. He's just this Robin Hood in the 1970s who happened to be a smuggler and who at some point in the taut plot, locks horns with a junior recruit who, please note, is NOT Dawood Ibrahim. So who, in the name of immoral crime and haphazard policing, are these two men? So stylishly masculine, so sweaty in their realism and so menacing in their demeanour and complete denial of the existent morality they remind you of the anti-social heroes from Sam Peckinpah's Westerns?

"Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai" takes us back to the beginnings of gangsterism in Mumbai. Milan Luthria excels in creating smouldering combustive stress between two mean menacing men… Remember Devgn (who back then was Devgan, just as Mumbai was Bombay when the film under review unfolds) and Saif Ali Khan in Luthria's "Kachche Dhaage" and on a more satirical note, John Abraham and Nana Patekar in "Taxi No 9211".

In "Once Upon A Time…." the conflict between Devgn (who is NOT Haji Mastan) and Emraan Hashmi (who is NOT Dawood) is placed in a far more complex and challenging scenario. The screenplay (Rajat Arora) takes into view the entire gamut of grime in the canvas of crime that cannot be hidden by the surface glamour and glitter.

The vintage cars, the costumes and that attitude of rebellious abandon comes through in the inner and outer styling of the characters. The people in Luthria's panoramic view of Mumbai in the late 1960s and 70s are steeped in a cinematic realism. Neither a part of that period nor a completely true representation of an era gone-bye-bye the characters hover in a no-man's-land populated by fascinating details of past recreated with a tongue-in-cheek broadness of purpose. There are bouts of suppressed satire in the way the whole era of the genesis of the underworld is represented. For example Emraan Hashmi befriends and sleeps with a woman who looks a lot like a Bollywood actress whom Raj Kapoor had introduced in a film and Dawood had befriended and allegedly impregnated.

Often the characters are an amalgamation of furious folklore and long-forgotten newspaper headlines of the 1970s. Kangna Ranaut plays an actress from the 1970s who gets the hots for the Robin Hood-styled smuggler-hero. Later she is discovered to have a congenital heart disease (a la Madhubala who came two decades before the events of this film are supposed to unfold). But look at the irony! It's her smuggler-hero lover who dies of a wounded heart.Maybe we shouldn't give away the plot. Because the plot never gives itself away. It never betrays a phoney intent of purpose. The narrative unfolds through the first-person narration of a troubled wounded cop, played with remarkably restrained bravado by Randeep Hooda. Indeed this is the most accomplished performance in the film. He's partly a gallant law enforcer and partly a victim of a system that breeds inequality, corruption and finally, self-destruction.

Hooda is wry, cynical, bitter, anguished and yet able to see the humour of a situation that one can ride only by sublimating its gravity. As for Ajay Devgn, he continues to evolve with every performance. As a gangster from the 1970s Devgan brings on the table a clenched self-mocking immorality. He stands outside the character even while internalizing the performance.

Director Milan Luthria imparts a keen eye for details to the storytelling. Some bits in the second-half get shaky, such as the predicable club songs and the repeated use of overlapping editing patterns to convey the rising tension between the mentor and the protégé turned tormenter. But the director's command over the language of outlawry is unquestionable. Emran Hashmi as Devgn's uncontrollable protégée gets the look and body language right. His courtship of Prachi Desai to the accompaniment of romantic hits from the 1970s (e.g Raj Kapoor's "Bobby") is engaging.

Understandably, the two ladies are reduced to pursing their lips and wringing their hands as the story progresses. The film's best, most charming and heartwarming moments come in the early stages of the drama between Devgn and Ranaut. Their growing fondness for one another is recorded in scenes and words written by a poet who can see the humour behind mutual attractions. The real hero of this film is the writing. Rajat Arora's dialogues flow from the storytelling in a smooth flow of poetry and street wisdom. Aseem Mishra's sharply -evocative cinematography gives to this rugged-and-razorsharp look at Mumbai's mythic mating with crime, an urgency that simply can't be ignored.