(62) Hospitality, Food & Wine, Monthly
Talking Food on Movies
Oberoi), peeved at being summarily
sidelined, detests the girl that his parents
“picked up from the gutter at the behest
of some holy man”. The reason for
the adoption is anything but altruistic.Nikki and his lackeys impulsively place
a bet on Virender Sehwag hitting an
ODI ton. The batsman falls
one short. Trouble erupts
when the bookie
demands his dough.
Given only three days
to find the money, Nikki
loses his bearings. The
consequences are catastrophic.We may have encountered
some of these products of urban
alienation before, but Gurgaon
deviates from norm in many ways.
For one, it definitely isn’t derivative of
the gangster films that emanate from
Mumbai’s independent cinema space.
While it does place itself unmistakably
in a specific place and time, it breaks free
from the geographical location of the
title to subtly articulate an overarching
statement on unsustainable urban growth
and the social fissures that it causes.The screenplay (Shanker Raman,
Sourabh Ratnu and Yogi Singha, with
dialogues by Vipin Bhati) invokesmultiple themes - female
infanticide, predatory
land deals, forest
encroachment
andillegal
cricket
betting - and uses
the various narrative
strands to paint a harrowing
portrait of urban dystopia.Gurgaon also projects the family not
as the kind of benign unit of safety
and well-being that much of popular
Hindi cinema is predicated on, but as
a conflicted, unstable and damaging
entity. It also turns the ‹sacrosanct›
brother-sister bond, another standard
mainstream Bollywood trope, on its head
and pushes it towards a treacherously
and openly adversarial relationship.Dinner time in Kehri’s Singh’s
opulent home isn’t an occasion
for warm conversation. The
very first such sequence
lays bare the simmering
tensions. The magnate’s
feckless younger son
Chintu (Ashish
Verma) fishes
out a flyer for a
gym that Nikki
intends to launch.
Kehri shoots the proposal
down. The property, he declares
dismissively, will house Preet’s office.
Nikki swallows his pride and sulks.It is easy to see why Nikki is such an
empty shell, emotionally drained out
and constantly on a short fuse. With him
around, a minor skirmish on the dance
floor in a watering hole can snowball into
a full-on brawl. Preet steps in to stop him
from raining blows on the object of his
fury. She receives a mouthful in return.Also privy to the dark secrets of this
family is policeman Bhupi Hooda
(Aamir Bashir), Kehri Singh’s brother-
in-law. A hustler, he is summoned
for a firefighting mission when an
unforeseen crisis rattles the family.
Bhupi’s methods are no less brutal
than those that he is on the trail of.