I choose the word Flash very carefully because Paanch at the end of the day is just a flash of Anurag Kashyap’s nascent brilliance. In fact, there are a slew of those flashes throughout the movie, but somehow they remain disjointed and don’t add up to form anything awesome. Though the film is restlessly volatile throughout, it doesn’t quite deliver that final punch in the gut, and instead chooses to deliver intelligent filmy thrills.
Paanch starts of as a crime tale told in interrogation flashbacks. The underground mood is setup very deftly in the flashbacks, which introduces us to the Paanch. They are a bunch of weed-smoking binge-drinking college going guys whom every one of us has met at some point of time in the college years; the guys with a care-a-damn exterior and with a fuck you attitude all over their body language. And such a group is always incomplete without a butt-of-the-jokes guy. Someone has to endure all the ridicule and is also expected to take it all in the right spirit. The fuck you guys need him to feed their already expanded egos. They exercise their power, their attitudes relentlessly on the guy. The problem with the fuck you guys is they are so used to putting up the I’m fearless and ruthless image that whenever that image is breached their defense mechanism sets in motion and hell breaks loose.Continue reading “Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch Movie Review: Flash of Brilliance”
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