Mirzapur’s massive fan following is also because of its easy
narrative. Not so good guys pitted against bad guys, with frequent burst of
abuses and bullets. There isn’t much to ponder about intentions, motives and
outcomes. Just go with the flow and enjoy violence of many kinds.
It’s been two years since Mirzapur 1 released, After
murdering Sweety Gupta and Bablu Panditin front of their respective partners
Guddu and Golu, the heir-inapparent of Mirzapur, Munna, recovers from his
bullet wounds. He goes back to craving the Mirzapur throne and disappointing
hisdon father, Kaleen Bhaiya who is the great Pankaj Tripathi, who in turn has
his eyes set on bigger goals, which is the Uttar Pradesh cabinet. Meanwhile,
survivors Guddu and Golu, who are heartbroken and angry, recover in the
wilderness while planning eternal vengeance on the Tripathi family.
Technically, that’s all there is to ten episodes of Season
2: it's a nightmare of modern succession,
and a story of old-school revenge. It’s also the only direction Mirzapur 2
could have taken. Perhaps that’s a problem inherent to writing sequels of
popular dramas. It’s no more about the “what”, so most creators tend to
overcompensate with the “how”: multiple new arcs, multiple new characters,
shock-value deaths, heartland expletives, macro ambitions. Mirzapur 2 has it
all, it's certainly guilty of every one of these crimes, but I like that it
remains faithful to its ecosystem. Anything else – like bringing back the dead
or drowning in flashbacks – might have felt like a desperate reaction to the
popularity of the first season. There may be too much going on, but none of it
defies the deep-rooted oppression of its characters. The series doesn’t go out of its way to
reflect a critical urban gaze of 2020, for instance, its secondary Muslim
representation in a war of upper-caste Hinduism. The Tripathi's and the
Shukla's and the Yadav's remain in the spotlight, but the Maqbool's and the
Lala's and the Shabnam's and the Zarina's don’t hijack their mess for the sake
of diversity. They remain quietly consequential, restoring the moral balance of
Mirzapur, when their counterparts spiral beyond redemption. Unlike Raat Akeli
Hai and Gulabo Sitabo, the series tangibly hints at a theme of slow-burning
feminism too. The game can be seen here. It’s no gimmick though. The males of
Mirzapur are so obsessed with power and deceit and bloodshed and politics, that
it’s only natural for the women to emerge out of the shadows, both discreetly
and emphatically.
Tripathi’s scheming wife, Beena whose played by a terrific
Rasika Duggal , is arguably this
season’s most resounding character. On being reduced to a sex toy by her
depraved father-in-law, whose played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda, she starts to
weaponize the misogyny of the household by exploiting their egos. A grieving
Golu, too, has a very refined arc. She is unwavering and haunted in her pursuit
of vengeance. Her possessiveness for Guddu is purely primal, she resents him
for “forgetting” her late sister, when a new girl enters the fray. While it’s
natural to wonder how Season 2 might have looked if the Massey and Pilgaonkar
characters had survived that massacre, there’s a distinct kind of cinematic
tension about the two less interesting and ill-equipped siblings being forced
to become people they’re not. A bookish introvert and a brawny thug are sounds familiar
to the concept of tragedy, that everything becomes an exam to earn those tears.
But then again, there’s the traffic on this highway. The list of people who
have an axe to grindwith the Tripathi’s keeps growing. Consequently, it’s
difficult to keep track of the emotional continuity of the main characters.
Each time we see Guddu and Golu hiding out in the mansion of a Muslim leader,
we have to think hard to recall what their last scene was, and where exactly
they stand in their flowchart for revenge. Perhaps that’s where the
performances come in. Most of them are functional and smart; because they’re
essentially roles within roles, everyone seems to be putting on an act to serve
their own agenda. But the advantage of a loose canon like Munna Tripathi –who
is again excellently performed by Divyendu Sharma – is that his sheer
unpredictability, frees him from the shackles of continuity. It doesn’t matter
where he was in the previous scene an episode ago, because his rage and
resentment allows Munna to revel in lateral movement. Pankaj Tripathi, as his
father Kaleen Bhaiya, doesn’t have the same freedom, but he still manages to
overcome the burden of being trapped by a very elaborate plot.
At its core, Mirzapur is easy entertainment under the ruse
of a long-form Gangs of Wasseypur experience – it is driven by the physical, by
the action, the dialect and the unsubtle twists and morbid humor. But the
screenplay isn’t all style. There’s a lot of substance in the way the writing
reveals the thematic dualities of simultaneous threads. The script is carefully
concepted to deflate the randomness of its offshoots. When the palette is so
busy and colourful, these little details run the risk of escaping our
attention. But they are also the reason Mirzapur holds such a specific allure –
it’s why the series continues to occupy a space that’s one rung higher than
mass, but one rung lower than class. Evidently, this balance is a sweet spot
for Indian television shows. Fortunately, Mirzapur 2 finds peace in its
patterns.
Verdict : Full
Unjoy..!
