Black Friday

Black Friday, a blow by blow account of the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 makes it to the screen.

The timing is just right--- the blast accused have been convicted / released as the case may be.

Based on S Hussain Zaidi’s book, Anurag Kashyap makes a thorough and very long film on the planning and implementation of the blasts and then the cops steady unraveling of the conspiracy. The people are real Dawood Ibrahim (Vijay Maurya stark resemblance), Tiger Memon (Pawan Malhotra), Badshah Khan (Aditya Shrivastava), cop Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) and the dozens of others on both sides of the law, whom Kashyap chases down in meticulous detail.

But what is interesting in a book, need not be so in a film Black Friday is a fabulously crafted and superbly enacted film, but not stark enough to be documentary and not fictional enough to be a feature.

His grip on Mumbai’s lifestyle and language is remarkable, but the director Kashyap makes the film with a detached air this is what happened, this is how it happened, now step back and watch without intervention. A story like that, told in such a clinical manner, without taking a humanistic stand is unsettling. It almost seems to justify Memon’s theory that unless the Muslims took revenge for the post-Babri Masjid riots, they would never be able to look the Hindu majority in the eye. Typically, in the media coverage of the blast cases as well the film, the sensational aspect of the event is so strong that the victims are almost forgotten.

But this movie is a hit and has earned at the box office