People don’t care about opium – Weekend
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Trunks and Roses, an Indian crime comedy about how two village gangs feud over opium, but do not use themselves, was released on the Netflix platform.
Two neighboring villages must certainly be at enmity, otherwise it cannot be – half the plot of the crime comedy in Hindi by the author duo Raja & D.K. is built on this maxim. (Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K.). In the reserved 1990s, a gang of the Ganchi family was found in the village of Gulabganji, and Nabid, who had strayed from her, was found in neighboring Sherpur. He made his own organized crime group when the elder Ganchi had his own son and the adopted Nabid ceased to be a favorite: what tenderness with such ferocity! Both gangs are trying to negotiate with a group from Calcutta for a giant supply of raw opium, but the local granary does not produce such a crop. More precisely, it does, but here the established way of life comes into force: farmers grow opium with the permission of the state and for its needs – raw materials are processed at state factories for medical purposes. But licensed opium is only 10% of the crop, and where does the rest go? The rest is bought up by the Ganchi gang, giving the peasant 10 thousand per kilo against the state 600 rupees. But now Calcutta wants so much that only the gross harvest can satisfy the gangster demand. This means that the village mafiosi will have to get into the stocks of the state and squeeze out those miserable 2 tons that farmers hand over for processing.
But that’s not all: on the eve of the deal, a new drug enforcement officer Arjun Varma (Dulkar Salman) arrives in Gulabganji from Delhi, who was demoted and exiled to the provinces for excessive agility. And he also shows an unhealthy interest in raw materials, not coming to the police warehouses confiscated. The only question is why all interested parties are trying to push the harvest somewhere on the side – but where are the local drug addicts? In Gulabganji they are absent as a class – probably all live in Calcutta. Because what we have before us is not a movie of moral anxiety, but a movie of merry villainy, the very one that Hitchcock said: “A film is not a piece of life, but a piece of cake.” The bloody icing on this cake is the canonical villain, hitman Atmaram Four Strikes (Gulshan Devayah), which immediately brings to mind the joke about the fork: “Two strikes, eight holes.” With a crushing blow, he will first cut the opponent’s throat so that life force flows out of him, then he will slash obliquely and, finally, he will take out the soul with a final blow to the stomach. As, again, in a joke about a killer who says goodbye to his wife with a kiss and a joke “Control – on the forehead.” All these stupid jokes come to mind solely because the terrible Atmaram (he is also charmed, he has seven lives) is actually very funny: Bollywood does not want to win or scare anyone, only to entertain.
For the same reason, the core of the series, the fantasy poppy economy “based on real events”, is not immediately discernible behind the Bollywood enthusiasm. There are a lot of simple storylines around, which are based on simple feelings: the son of the gang leader wants to prove his toughness to his father (the leader, by the way, is in a coma, and they encroach on him in the hospital, like in The Godfather); the poor mechanic loves the proud teacher; An honest cop gets caught up in the mafia’s net because of an affair with a bogus beauty. I would like these heartfelt stories, as it should be in Bollywood, in addition to frame songs-dances-drums, but Raja & D.K. other specialization: fights and skirmishes. No wonder the mechanic Tipu (Rajkumar Rao) watches the legendary Hong Kong action movie “The 36 Steps of Shaolin” (1978) in the cinema – this masterpiece of martial arts reaches the mountain village of Gulabganji only in the 1990s (in the same 1990s it was also shown in the USSR – cut into fragments in the “Cinema Travel Club”).
To the inexperienced viewer, which, in relation to Bollywood, is apparently the majority of Netflix subscribers, Trunks and Roses, with its retro style and ability to bring together a bunch of storylines (the best episode is the final one!), Is a Tarantino-like spectacle. But that’s not entirely true: it’s just that Trunks and Roses is made on the same principle of nostalgic adoration for simple and peppy action films from past decades. Everyone who participated in the creation of the series, including the actors, are children of the 1990s. Perhaps that is why the most touching line in it is bosom schoolchildren who write a love letter for the semi-literate Tipu to his passion, an English teacher. They do not compose anything themselves, but simply rewrite the texts of the English-language hits of those years by Foreigner and Bryan Adams. But Bollywood cinema, with its invincible simplicity, brilliance and rich tradition, does not rewrite other people’s words – Tarantino here is more like a blood brother than a role model.
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