This is one of the few films that dared to capture the fundamentalists on screen and still not take anyone’s side. That’s indeed real life - the characters are never just black or white. There are shades of grey in all of us. And that’s what this film portrayed.
The bombay serial blasts rocked the nation more than a decade ago but the scars are still felt by people livng out there. Some muslims(and even several non muslims) justify it ofcourse by saying, if the blasts hadn’t occurred, the Hindu fundamentalists would never have stopped their dance of death in the city. Maybe that’s true because the carnage stopped completely after the serial blasts. The nation woke up to a systematic reliation of a kind it had never seen. But then, blood for blood is not justified anywhere. Not in the Quran. Not in the Gita. Or the Bible. It’s this message that’s clearly portrayed without being preachy in Black Friday.
The film scores because of Kay Kay Menon who plays the astute police officer investigating the blasts. The film scores, everyone(both known and unknown actors) remained in character throughout the film, be it Pawan Malhotra(who played Tiger Memon, the one who convinced underworld don Dawood Ibrahim to fund and plan the blasts) or Aditya Srivastava(who played Badshah Khan, one of the prime executors of the blasts). Why, even Vijay Maurya(who played Dawood Ibrahim) did a great job even though he was there only briefly. That is the beauty of this film. No matter how small or big your role, each actor fulfilled his role remarkably well.
This could be S Hussain Zaidi’s great ability to capture it all in his story and screenplay. It could be director Anurag Kashyap’s astute direction, but the whole cast and crew come together so well to execute a film that I believe ranks as one of the best films in Indian filmmaking history for documenting real life that matters.
Take the introductory scene of Dawood Ibrahim. It has the makings of a classic. The fear, the aura and the menacing nature of the underworld kingpin comes through without the use of extensives dialogues or a long sequence. It’s short but much more menacing in its intensity. Kudos, Hussain Zaidi for scripting such a film.
Thanks to the producers MiD DAY for continuing to pursue the courts to have it viewed on the Big Screen. Ofcourse, it took them years but when the product did show up, it had none of the elements missing. In fact, the timing seemed to be just right. Many of the perpetrators of the blasts were sentenced to death and imprisonment. Now one needs to see if the perpetrators of the bombay riots are brought to book. The Sri Krishna Commission report that looked into it has been gathering dust as no court or government has the courage to punish the fundamentalists who wrecked havoc on Indian streets.