Asshole
A review isn’t really necessary for Asshole, a new film (as I believe it’s be labelled) by Kaushik Mukherjee. A description will probably do the job.

A review isn’t really necessary for Asshole, a new film (as I believe it’s be labelled) by Kaushik Mukherjee. A description will probably do the job.

• Music videos of Gandu, (the lead character, an aspiring rap star and avid Lotto player—odds are better on the latter) every several minutes that look like homemade Youtube clips made by people in their bedrooms (mainly because they take place, most of them, in a bedroom).

• Wide-angle shots of a character named Ricksha, who drives a rickshaw, busting the Kung Fu moves into a fish-eye lens.

• Lot of violent head-bobbing to rap music, like angry chickens on meth

• A lurid color scene in an otherwise black and white film, featuring a tumescent Gandu having hard core porno sex with a woman in a orange clown wig and ‘wacky’ sunglasses who keeps saying ‘Meow.’

• Dialogue featuring such tooled craft as ‘Why you fucking farting? Go have a dump, man.’

• A song about jerking off

• Gandu crawling around on all fours stealing money out of the trousers of his mother’s lover (a man who is always wears sunglasses, because, I gather, it’s his character quirk) who is humping her on the bed—and taking the time and risk to rise up for a peek.  This scenario, like pretty much all the others, is repeated. Later, when the sex is, I suppose, kinky, the lover is wearing a blindfold, but still has his sunglasses on over the blindfold in what, I suspect, the filmmakers thought was ‘comedy gold.’

• Repeated mantras of, for instance, ‘Everything’s fucked,’ ‘An asshole life is an asshole life, man,’ or ‘Your head is fully ass-fucked,’ etc.

• A scene where Gandu is told that a director (who ‘makes films and smokes a lot of hash’) is making a film on him, called ‘Gandu’ (slang for ‘asshole’), and, surprisingly, there’s suddenly a camera there.

• A title sequence in the middle of the film, pretty much repeating the title sequence at the start of the film.

• A gratuitous dream sequence (aren’t they all?) where Gandu is the arms of his male friend, only wake up sweating in homosexual panic

• A song that is basically a homophobic rant

Is it, maybe, the watershed of India punk, an explosion of nihilism that will change a generation, like Jarman’s The Last of England or Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization?  It doesn’t really confront or challenge stylistic clichés like those exuberant in-your-face films, but instead adopts them, as though this is an audition piece in order to get signed by a label.  And although these kids have justification for being pissed off, this feels less authentically anarchic that it does just plain opportunistic.