Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat

My Rating : 7/10

After 2018's excellent Manmarziyaan Anurag Kashyap takes on a much more wilder take on love with 'Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat'. The usual dark ingredients are all there which we have come to love about him - controversial themes, political awareness, rebellion for mainstream, and to top it off - Amit Trivedi's beautiful soundtrack weaving it altogether in a nice tasty tapestry of a coup d'état of Bollywood and box office.

It is exactly as one would expect it - going over risqué territory without taking itself too seriously. Kashyap knows he's not aiming to make another 'Gangs' or 'Gulaal' - this is a bit more pretentious but on purpose and it works well I reckon.

The theory, history and culture of film is loosely discounted more or less - the viewer isn't expected to look for something transcendental, existential or spiritual for that matter. The script aptly responds to the talent of the newcomers and the style and poetics of the world created by the director. It's taken seven years for this to be taken from three to two-dimensions.

The final crescendo is the director casting off his known ingredients into a modern crucible, and transmutating into perhaps his rendition of Generation Z love - The climax shows the characters preparing for the proverbial kill in all its vulpine forms - a form of power play that the director hopes in a culture of paranoia, nihilism and misogyny can be recovered through that four-letter word in English. No, not that one, the other one.

Distinctively Kashyap!