Ugly (Anurag Kashyap, India, 2014)

If you have seen any of Anurag Kashyap’s earlier films, you’re most probably familiar with his tendency of infusing moments of nail-biting tension with bursts of mordant humour. The brilliant chase sequence from Black Friday immediately comes to mind, where a bunch of Mumbai cops chase one of the key suspects of the 1993 Serial Bomb Blast case, Imtiaz Gawate.
The seemingly endless scene, which takes place in the labyrinthine slums of Mumbai, begins as a thriller piece – that’s what the assumed purpose of a chase sequence is – but soon evolves into black comedy of the most restrained, organic kind. What makes the scene work isn’t just the transmogrification of a supposedly tense scene into a drolly absurd exchange where a cop requests the suspect to stop with an exasperated “Ruk ja yaar!” but the insight it provides into the nooks and crannies of the whole operation. The evolution is effortless, with the humour working its way inwards, taking us into the minds of the characters.

Perhaps the most discussed scene in Kashyap’s new film Ugly is the one where struggling actor Rahul (played by Rahul Bhat), along with his casting-director friend (Vineet Singh), are in a police station to report the disappearance of Rahul’s 10-year old daughter, Kali. The police officer Jadhav (Girish Kulkarni) keeps digressing away from the main point, asking the duo questions about topics ranging from a casting director’s job to actors adopting a separate public name (the real name of the girl’s father is Rahul Varshney, but he likes to call himself Rahul Kapoor) to smartphones’ caller ID display picture feature to moralistic lecturing on divorces.
It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker unafraid to pause and reflect on the little amusing details in a genre piece instead of singleheadedly rushing to take the plot forward. But in this case, it’s only the little, ultimately inconsequential, details that seem to matter to Kashyap. The scene goes on for what seems like forever, with Kashyap borrowing the Tarantino trick of blowing up the balloon to such an extreme that it finally bursts. But the problem is that for all the wisecracks in the dialogue (and a terrific performance by Kulkarni, who delivers every line with a sadistic relish – my favourite being a particular Marathi word he uses to describe supporting actors in films), we get zero information during the scene which actually matters in the larger framework of the narrative, in a thematic or character sense. Instead of humour (or the twists in the story, for that matter) working towards giving us a deeper understanding of the characters’ mindstates, their motivations, their stakes in the whole business; all we can sense is a filmmaker smirkingly patting himself on the back for the sheer brilliance he’s just caused, brilliance which ultimately fails to solidify into anything substantial. Instead of using the minor details in service of the larger narrative, Kashyap seems to have done the reverse – he’s constructed a threadbare story around the little digressions, where it’s only the minor things that are the point, everything around them being a mere backdrop. I had the same issue with Gangs Of Wasseypur as well, but this approach is even more problematic in Ugly which wants to be taken seriously.
But let’s shift our focus from a standalone scene to the bigger picture. The premise is as follows: Shalini (played by Tejaswini Kolhapure,) Rahul’s ex-wife & Kali’s mother, is now married to senior police inspector Bose (Ronit Roy) who hasn’t been on good terms with Rahul since the trio was in college together. It’s after learning that Rahul is an abusive husband that the envious Bose, who had always been secretly pining for Shalini, had rescued and married her. He doesn’t really seem to love her or care for her but instead uses her as a device to put down the insecure Rahul in this game of masculinist one-upmanship. “I got you only in the form of leftovers,” he tells her, referring to Rahul as “[her] first choice.” When Kali disappears, Bose has personal stakes in the case.
Shalini has a younger brother who’s in desperate need of money for some reason; Rahul has a girlfriend whose existence in the film I don’t quite see the point of thanks to convoluted plotting; and there’s Chaitanya, the casting director, who has been lending the broke struggler Rahul financial help, right down to the latter’s apartment rent to phone bills. After the disappearance, all of these three characters make fake phone calls demanding ransom, which are tapped by the police. None of the three are the real kidnapper, but they try to capitalize the situation. While on the case, Bose tries to incriminate Rahul of the girl’s kidnapping, thereby making it about their rivalry where it should really be about the girl. Kali’s own mother Shalini, who gets one of the ransom calls, is no less conniving as she asks her (supposedly rich) father for an amount of 65 lacs when the demanded ransom (by her own brother, no less) is only 50 lacs, thereby becoming a devious opportunist herself, exploiting her daughter’s tragic disappearance for her own financial gain. You get the drill, right? That’s how vile and rotten everyone is in this movie, bluntly (even proudly) titled Ugly. (How come Kashyap doesn’t bring in the ‘vicious stepdad’ angle – especially when the film is so obsessively hell-bent on being as dark and sinister and shocking and disturbing and monstrous and wicked and, well, ugly as possible – is beyond me, but anyway…)
Not that darkness and ugliness is a problem per se, and I’m reminded, off the top of my head, of some of the great movies with severely fucked-up characters at their centre. But we come to know Travis Bickle closely as a human; we’re given reasons for Mark Lewis’ condition (and the horror is generated by directly implicating the viewer for the ostensibly harmless act of watching) and in Daniel Plainview’s case, the layers to this well-rounded character are peeled ever so gradually that his inner rottenness has a cumulative snowball effect that slowly creeps on you. The characters in Ugly are essentially one-note archetypes (or one could even argue that they’re slightly tweaked variations of the same archetype) and through the course of the movie, we learn very little about them except that they’re – here comes that word again – dark. There’s very little historicity, very little specificity to the characters here for me to give a damn about them, and instead of, say, concentrating on specific, fully-formed individuals, Kashyap chooses to pass off general commentary about the Dismal State Of The World We Live In where everyone is equally conniving and sinister. I can almost hear strains of Piyush Mishra’s terrific O Ri Duniya from Kashyap’s Gulaal as I type this, but while that film was deeply steeped in sincere pathos, Ugly has a sensationalist “exposing the dark underbelly” feel to it that comes across as pre-processed and coldly engineered instead of palpably, organically formed.
There’s a scene wherein Bose is accused of not caring for his stepdaughter and he rebukes with something to the effect of “As if you very caring parent for the girl,” and a fleeting flashback that follows is one of the few effective moments in the film, alluding to a certain history being revealed, a memory which gives deeper insight into the characters’ interpersonal dynamics. I also liked the scene at the jewellery store for its mix of concomitant shock and humour; especially in how it, by momentarily cutting away to the awkward angle of the CCTV footage, conveys more by showing us less. I also chuckled at the small touches like the turquoise-studded bracelet which Rahul wears, or a poster on the wall in Chaitanya’s office of a film called “Sasura Taade Marda Ke Aade,” typical Kashyap jabs at mainstream Bollywood and the B-grade-ish Bhojpuri industry – inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things but at least momentarily funny.
Looking at it as genre fare, I actually found myself compelled by Ugly for a considerable portion of its runtime. It takes a major nosedive in the final twenty minutes or so, and whereas great suspense thrillers grow more dense and solid as they progress, Ugly falls apart piece by piece and provides inane explanations for the increasingly bizarre twists that are just hard to accept. But what ultimately bogs it down is what it says as a whole – the interior meaning of it, as Andrew Sarris called it – diluting the effect of a decently mounted thriller to a majorly detrimental effect.