Here is the lecture content:

"Hi everyone. We are basically at the finish line today. This is
our last week and we are going to talk about a fantastic film and we're
going to kind of take, do a review of everything we have done this term
which is a tall order. It's a lot of stuff one does during a term but we'll give
it a try like we always try to do. So the film for today came out in 2019. The
film is called Gully Boy. And you have this is a really good week in that you
have a very short reading like a you know, I wouldn't even say it's 2 pages.
It's a really short reading and and you have this very very good film. It's
two hours and 34 minutes and it as far as I'm concerned it goes quickly. So
the thing I'm gonna tell you guys before I, before I jump into the film and
and talk about it in some detail is of course Gully boy is a really good film.
But Gully boy is not one of those films that I watch a lot. So usually like the
kind of film we have seen for this class is is film that I can watch like 30
times. Because it's just so bad and it's so easy for me to watch really bad
film. Gully boy, on the other hand, is a good film. So I don't, I don't, I don't
watch it that much. In fact, as I was preparing for this lecture, it was only
the second time I've seen this film. So the film that that we're going to talk
about, I'm going to start by saying that there is a texture to this film and.
Let's go back to like the reading from week two where where Philip
Lutgendorf tells us about about how there are ways of looking at Indian
cinema that are really unique. And I'm not sure if it's even a good
comparison to kind of look at Gully boy from the perspective of what
Lutgendorf taught us. But when I say in a texture of the film Gully boy is
gritty. When I when I'm watching Gully boy, there is a there is a darkness
to it. There's an emotional rawness to it, which we have not seen in a lot of
other films. We've seen a lot of melodrama, and that's, of course, very, very
Bollywood. But we have not seen the grittiness, the kind of abrasiveness in
dialogue, in feelings, in love, in anything like that, that we see in Gully boy.
So it's unique in that sense. It's the only other film I could even a little bit
compare. Gully Boy 2 is Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, although Mr. and Mrs. Iyer is also
not abrasive like like Gully boy is. Gully boy, just as different in that sense.
So it's a good good film to be closing our our class with. Let's get into it.
Zoya Akhtar directed and produced Gully Boy. Zoya Akhtar is the only
female director and producer we are watching. Well, there are other
female producers but usually not female directors in the class that we have
seen so far. Well, not so far in the class we've seen. The so far statement
ends today, right. So Zoya Akhtar has directed one more film that you have
watched this this class and that film is, is Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, our
film for Week 14. And she also directed and produced Dil Dhadakne Do,
which was not a required film for us. It's a film that was optional film for
you. So I wonder if some of you watched it, if you didn't. Well you didn't.
There's summer or winter break, whatever, whenever you want to watch
it. Anyway, so Zoya Akhtar is the the thing. The thing I wanted to show
you in in these two pictures is everyone in the 1st frame here is from a
Bollywood family. So Zoya Akhtar and Farhan Akhtar, her brother. My
hand is moving in weird ways again her brother. They have collaborated
on several projects. They are both, their father is a script writer and he
used to write a lot of scripts for Amitabh Bachchan, so not him but him as
part of a two person team. So they're definitely from a Bollywood family.
Hrithik Roshan in this film in this photo again from a Bollywood family and
Abhay Deol also from a Bollywood family. We have a Alia Bhatt here who
is from a Bollywood family. Zoya Akhtar again, and Ranveer Singh.
Ranveer Singh is not from a Bollywood family, he's like somebody who just
came on the screen and just like came on the scene; Bollywood scene and
just made a huge name for himself. So these, these pictures are basically a
comment on something we learned in week one, that there's a lot of
people from within the film community that keep on doing the film thing. In
interesting ways, right? Zoya Akhtar is directing films. We don't see a lot of
female directors in Bollywood, so that's that's great. And we've dedicated
2 weeks to her films almost. So there's that. But anyway, so Zoya Akhtar is
our director and producer for today and Gully Boy is the film. Let's get into
it. So what I wanna do in this lecture is I want to actually look at Gully Boy
really closely. I really want to see almost, not scene by scene, but almost
scene by scene what the film does. A very quick recap of the film is we see
this guy, he is the character of Murad, our hero for today, Ranveer Singh
and he lives in Dharavi. Dharavi is a Mumbai slum, one of the more
prominent slums, I could actually probably say in India, not just in Mumbai.
So it has, it has a way of life and that way of life is presented to us a little
bit through this film. So Ranveer Singh has a really complicated life. His
father is an abusive man. He marries a second time. He brings his second
wife to live in this very small home with his first wife, two children, almost
one of whom is an adult, his mother and a younger son. So there is a lot of
conflict and a lot of emotional trauma as far as that family is concerned.
And we start seeing this guy has a lot of interest, who is from a different
social class. She's studying to become a doctor and her own life has some
interesting things going on. Basically expectations that her parents have of
her don't meet her own expectations of her life. So this this couple is kind
of trying to figure out how they'll do life together. They're trying to become
independent so they can actually live together and do their own life. We
have the character goes to goes to college, he's a college going person.
He's in his final year of graduation and this is his journey from being a guy
from the slums to becoming educated such that he can do an office job as
opposed to the kind of service job his father is doing, which is which is
being a driver, a chauffeur, one could say, for a wealthy Mumbai family.
And he kind of has the capacity to become an office worker. A white collar
worker of some sort. And then as this process is unfolding, as his life's
traumas are unfolding, we learn that he becomes interested in rap music,
and he finds an outlet for his expression, for his trauma that takes him
somewhere. So the film is about taking him there. But beyond that, the film
is about a lot of other things that happen and in this lecture I want to kind
of talk about all of those other things that happen. So I want to start with
how language is presented in the film. So we see at one point, there's a
collaboration between language and music in the film, right? So we see
that any anytime he has things plugged in his head that we actually hear,
what he can hear is, is music playing in English, right? He's of course
speaking in a Mumbai variety of Hindi. Now, again, Hindi has 400 million
speakers. If you think about American English, you can really think about
Boston English, New York English, South American English, whatever that
means. English spoken in southern states, in America, California accent.
You can think about South many accents and if you're not thinking about
them, you should. Because all languages have accents. So anyway, he
speaks in a very Mumbai accent. We see that he is writing poetry. In one
scene towards the early, early part of the film, we see that he's writing
poetry in his diary while a conflict is going on in his home. And writing
poetry and then like spoken word as the film says rap is a combination of
rhythm and word and language. He is writing but he's not writing in the
Hindi script, in the Devnagri script or the Arabic script, which would be the
script that he could also write in. But he's actually writing in English. He's
writing in the Roman script. He's writing Hindi words in the Roman script,
which actually, which is a comment. I don't want to say what that
comment is. I do not know why Zoya Akhtar chose to do it that way, but
she chose to do it that way. And I, being a forever language nerd, found
that interesting. It's just something that he's not writing in the script of the
language that he he talks in, right? It says something about the
pervasiveness of the Roman script in India. It also says something about
our characters, perhaps mobility, perhaps lack of knowing Hindi. We don't
know. Lack of knowing Hindi writing, that is, we really don't know. And he
of course listens to music in English, but he sings in Hindi, he sings in again
a very Mumbai, a very street variety of Hindi. MC Sher, his friend who we
will talk a little bit more in in a few minutes. His family speaks Marathi,
right? And I know this because the one time or we know this because the
one time our hero Murad goes to goes to MC Sher's home, his family is
speaking in Marathi, right? So because this film is in Mumbai, we are
talking in Mumbai, we see an English speaking crowd. That is the high
class crowd that we get acquainted with a little bit with the character of
Sky and the and the people that this guy drives for, becomes a chauffeur
for. And we see the language that's being spoken on the street, what
everyone, all of our characters are speaking. We see Marathi being spoken
in a particular context because MC Sher is, his real name is a Hindu name.
So that's being spoken in what I can assume is a Hindu household. And we
have Murad talking in this other dialect of Hindi. So here I am really just
pointing out things that stand out in the film that add to its grittiness as
well as it's reality in some way. This is one of the more real films that we
have seen. And when I say real, I mean of course I will go, I will say all of
Bollywood is real because. But Bollywood has its own way of doing
cinema and this film is not that, right? This film is not done in the way let's
say Hum Aapke Hain Hai Kaun is done or Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham is
done or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is done. This is a very, like, I am, we are
going to show you how people feel, type of film right? So in that sense we
kind of I want to point all of these things as things that I think so Akhtar
wants us to see and also things that I see, which obviously is a reading of
the film, but an informed reading of the film. OK. So we see again early on
in the film, we know that these characters are in Dharavi. Dharavi is a slum.
And then we see what is called slum tourism or poverty tourism, where
people will, and this is a real thing, I, you know, I did not Google this before
I prepared this lecture. But at one point, several years ago, I Googled
whether I could take a tour of Dharavi, and it turned out that I could. I could
pay money to take a tour of Dharavi. And taking a tour of Dharavi is
basically taking a tour of the lives of extremely poor people. It's voyeuristic,
right? It's voyeuristic to go in somebody's home and take photos and kind
of see how they live and kind of see how many toilets they have. And I
mean would we, would we allow people in our homes to do that? Like
would you? Can one imagine having people come in our homes to take
kind of take a tour? That's a really, that's a really weird thing to do, to offer
and to want to engage in. Yeah. So it's a reality, but it shows in our film
that that is something that you can do and that that is the level of poverty
our hero is living in, right? He's sitting in a corner, he's eating this little
sandwich type thing. He's not wearing a shirt at that time. It's his home,
right? Like we present in our homes in various different ways and that's
how he's chilling out. That's what people do in their homes. And he's just
doing that. And at one point this guy who's wearing A T-shirt, our hero
says nice T-shirt. And he's like, yeah, he starts kind of explaining what the
T-shirt is and the guy, our hero kind of tells him the lyrics of the person
whose face this guy is wearing, right. So this is a very if that is not
globalization in this film, I don't know what is right? We see this person
from a different country visiting our hero in his really poor slum household
and our hero knows who this, you know, wealthy person is wearing. Yeah,
whose face this wealthy person is wearing. So it says something, it says
something about poverty tourism. It says something about globalization
and how music is moving and how celebrity faces are moving, how they're
recognizable, how we connect with each other, but also we really don't
connect with each other in the sense that if you are paying to watch a poor
person's home, you're really not connecting with that poor person. You're
just wearing a T-shirt that the poor person also knows, is aware that that
person makes music, right? So there is there are comments here about
about mobility, about globalization, about music, about about poverty, and
about how we look at the other, right? How we look at poor people who
are poorer than us, how we look at people who are foreign in other ways.
Another scene that stands out in this film is when Murad, our hero, is
forced to- so Murad knows in his head that he's going to have to do an
office job. But at one point his violent, kind of terrible father gets injured
and Murad is asked to fill in for the father. The filling in would have to be as
a chauffeur. And it is in this moment in the film that we kind of have-it's
this moment actually that I could say is one of my more favorite part of the
film- more favorite is a thing, I guess? I've made it one now. So what
happens is Murad is kind of filling in as a chauffeur, and he is driving
around the members of this wealthy family. And as he's doing it, he's
standing outside these clubs where people pay thousands of rupees to get
in. So these are Telling you how exciting my life is, I have, I do not know
this, but I've heard from people that you can pay to go to clubs or clubs
charge you to be included for the evening. And that charge could be a lot
of money. Like some clubs in New Delhi, I'm told, charge like $300 to just
get into the club, to spend more money. Anyway, so our context is that
kind of really like upper class, upper strata of society hanging out together
in these clubs. And it's outside that that our hero finds himself with the
wealthy family. And at one point we see that he's listening to some music.
He's like, he's talking to these guys who are also doing these jobs and he's
not looking down upon them. He's, he's just like he's he is. As far as I can
tell. He's part of the gang, he's part of those people. But these people are
talking about making food and he's not interested in that. He hears some
music and he goes and stands closer to the club door and we see the
security guard there, the club manager or the security guard, whatever you
want to call and he starts saying leave, you go and he's not doing it
violently, he's not doing it with words, he's just doing it with gesture. Right.
We see that the body of this person, this, this obviously poorer person is
not even allowed to be in the space that is occupied with the far wealthier
people, right? He's not even, not only is his presence not acceptable, his
distance from the club has to be enough that he can't even hear. Right. So
he goes back in his car and he sits down and he starts jamming to his own
tunes and he starts singing. Yeah. And doing his own thing. But we see,
like, there is this hierarchy in the film. We obviously see these extremely
wealthy people. We see at one point that one of the members of this
family, that that Murad, our hero is driving for, she's sad. She comes out of
the club and she's crying, but Murad is not allowed to talk to her. He
cannot say, hey, what is going on, like none of it, right? He's not allowed to
speak to her. Think about that in terms of how Bollywood has so far
presented film to us. We have seen film where people who are- we have
seen a lot, and we have talked about this actually in a lecture. We have
seen what the word in India that's still used for for people who help around
the household is servants, right? We have seen people in those roles in so
many films, so many films. We have seen them in K3G, we have seen them
as background people, we have seen them in Hum Aapke hain Kaun. We
have seen them, right? But we have never seen their perspective. This film,
our hero, our hero's father, our hero's stepmother kind of give us that
perspective. We kind of see that their presence is allowed in very restricted
areas, right? Their presence is allowed in the kitchen, it's allowed in the
driver's seat. Right. It's allowed to open the door, but it's not obviously
allowed to sit in the back, or it's not allowed to occupy any space that
those wealthy people can occupy. It is not allowed to speak in most
circumstances, right? So we, but we see that in Murad. We see that in
Ranveer Singh's face as he's playing this character. We see that he is-the
insult, the indignity is so alive in this character and we kind of see that in
the specific scenes where he is in this role. But as the girl who's crying sits
in the car, there is like a background thing playing in his head. He's like,
we're occupying the same space but we are really so far apart and that's
what his poetry is saying. But within the film we see a hierarchy of
resources right. We see of course the ultra wealthy. But we also see Safina
the heroine, the female protagonist in the film. Her father is a doctor so
she's a middle class. she's a middle class woman but she has more
resources than MC Sher and Murad. So the two kind of rappers in our film,
the two main, well the main lead is Murad of course, but his very good
friend. His kind of the person who pushes him to succeed, his mentor of
sorts. So we see they have different resources. We see also the character
of Moeen, who we will talk about in a second here, but we also see the
street kids. We see Sky, who's studying in the United States. She's going
to a music college, which is Berkeley and she is learning music. And Murad,
when he learns that he's like, whoa, you can go to school. to learn music?!
right. So these are very like class defining, class specific instances in the
film. And there's this again hierarchy of resources, who has what and how
much of it. We see the ultra wealthy and then we see the street kids who
are orphans who have literally nothing and and Moeen is basically abusing
them in exchange for food. Another scene that really stands out to me in
terms of Indiana terms of the things that we have talked about so far in
class, or talked about in class, is when Sky and her friends and Murad, our
main lead, go out making art or graffiti around the city. And of course we
see them making, making multiple things. All of them really socially
conscious and and we see that a girl in that group paints a fair and lovely
commercial that you know about from week 14 and she calls it, and she
says Brown and Beautiful instead of Fair and lovely. Right. So kind of
speaking to some of the themes that we have, we have covered in class.
But this film is, is really loaded and it speaks to a lot of different themes
and we're just kind of covering these themes. But I wanted to talk about
about this guy. Yeah, Moeen. So one of the characters from the slums. This
is one of the earlier scenes in the film where they're all sitting around
talking, chatting. We know that Moeen is kind of a shady guy. Right. We
know that he is up to something complicated. The film starts with him
stealing cars. Yeah. And he does that for money. He's, a thief and and his
relationship with with our hero is kind of one of the critical points in the
story of the film as far as I'm concerned. But let's continue to talk about this
and we'll talk about Moeen a little bit more. Things that stand out again in
the film. At one point Murad goes to Sky's home and he's basically, I mean I
find this scene so lovely and so speaking of class boundaries and class-
based ideas of how one lives. As he's in the bathroom, this is Mumbai. This
is one of the most expensive real estates on the planet and real estate
markets on the planet. So Murad, of course, the hero lives in a slum. He
has, we kind of seethe home, right? We see that the home is that you
enter, there's a very small area where people sit in the very back, there is a
is a kitchen. Murad's bedroom is just a little bunker on top, and under the
bunker is his parents, his father, and the new wife's bedroom, yeah, that's
it. That's the house. And that's not like -millions of people live in that type
of a setting. So this is not an imagined setting. It's a really, it's a very real
one. But Murad, when he's in Skye's house, in her bathroom, he is
measuring steps and trying to figure out how big is this bathroom, right. It
really says something. The best scene in the film, well, I shouldn't say best,
but one of my favorite scenes in the film relates to Safina and Safina is, you
know, she's the one who is, she's a disruptor. And she's presented as
somebody to marry in front of a boy who is, you know, whatever. And his,
the boy's parents and the boy's mother asks, so Safina, do you know how
to cook? And she says no. But if everything goes well, in a few years I'll be
able to transplant your liver. So she's really like, she has this edge, she has
this amazingness about her. She's a great student and she is so madly in
love with Murad. And she's extremely jealous and foolish as we see in the
film, but she's all of those. She's also a complex character. We see conflict
in the film. We see violence in the film. At one point the grandmother is is
yelling at her daughter-in-law and saying you didn't teach your son, that is
Murad, anything? And as Murad and the mother decide to leave the house,
the older woman, the grandmother's like what will happen to me? And
Murad responds, actually, this is one of the very few times we see him
talking to somebody in his family, right? He's presented as a really quiet,
non rebellious character. He is not exploding. Safina is the one who
explodes. She's the angry one. Murad is just this quiet suffering the
indignities and transferring his trauma into into poetry kind of guy. Yeah.
So we see him respond to his grandmother in one sentence and that we
kind of see him coming back to her at the very end of the movie, of the film.
We see child labor in the film. We see We don't just see child labor. We
see Moeen, the character whose photo we just saw here, this guy. We see
that he is employing very young children, very, very young children to work
in what I think is a tobacco situation. But I'm not 100% sure if that is
tobacco or if that's something much worse than tobacco. I cannot tell but I
know that he is. But we know in the film that he is up to kind of terrible
things, right? So he is stealing, he is working in this very like in this garage
situation. But the garage is probably doing something with stolen cars and
then he has these four or five orphan children working for him in his
operation, which could be a drug operation or a tobacco operation. I really
couldn't tell. Although, you know, now that I think about it, it's probably
some type of drug operation, not a tobacco operation. So we see that
there's these kids there. And Murad is really uncomfortable with the idea of
these small children, like the Under 10 year old children are working in the
setup. And at one point Murad really confronts Moeen about this thing,
about the child labor thing. And Moeen is like, you shut up. You don't talk
to me, you don't tell me what to do. And if I was not employing these
children, they would be on the street, they would be hungry. People have
left them in garbage boxes and I have taken them in and they're doing
something there, they're making a living for themselves. And we see
towards the end that Moeen is about to get arrested. Moeen gets arrested
for either stealing cars or running a drug operation, and he gets beaten up
by the police and Murad, who at that time is working for Moeen because
he has nothing left, he has no money. He has to support his mother who
has been, you know, kicked out and beaten by the father. He has to
support her somehow. He starts working for Moeen and he is not arrested.
And he tries to help Moeen and Moeen says, no, you don't get into all of
this. You go do your music, you go figure out how to do rap. And then once
you're out of there, once you can help me get bail, get out of jail and come
back and help me then. So. So we see kind of like, we see a certain type of
sacrifice happens in Moeen, right? He sacrifices. And in that moment he
says, hey, make sure my kids are fed, right? Those little children that he's
running that drug, drug enterprise with, make sure they're fed. Yeah. So
we see a little bit of redemption in Moeed's character as well. And wesee
that Murad, of course is true to his word and he feeds the kids and he
treats them well, whatever the definition of well is in the context. So
there's all of these characters that come in and out of the film and do
interesting things that I actually, I really do believe are connected to the
context of the film, right? And the context of the film is Dharavi. We are
talking about, we are talking about a slum where conditions of life are
extremely, extremely difficult, right? So within these conditions we have all
of these people who are operating in different ways. We have Murad's
father, who is a violent man, but he also suffers indignities. We have his
mother who is confronted with a second wife of her husband living in a
very small space together with her. Having to clean her dishes. But she
also has to constantly suffer indignities but make her voice known
somehow. We have these young men who are trying to figure life out. We
have Safina trying to figure out patriarchy, trying to figure out going to
school, trying to figure out love. And then we have Murad's uncle who was
supposedly, who was supposed to give Murad a job. He's also an upper
upper class man, not like the ultra rich who Murad drives for, but but rich
enough. And the uncle at one point kind of kills Murad's dreams and says
hey, no singing for you, no need to kind of pursue this, this rap dream, and
this 'I will sing' dream. You are a servant's son. You will become a servant,
right? So like again we have insult upon insult on Murad and we have, we
obviously have redemption. We see that it is rap, it is hip hop that gets
Murad out of this situation, out of his terrible context and into kind of a
better situation for himself. So the film is, so the the reading that you did
today was a review of the film. And it was a review of the film that I don't
completely agree with but it's a decent review. Bollywood films obviously
get reviewed a lot in India but this is a review by a non-Indian person. So in
that sense it's interesting. It's tone I find a little bit interesting and I will not
give too much away but you tell me how you feel about the tone. And I
think what the biggest thing that the reviewer misses is the context of
Dharavi, right? When the reviewer is doing this review, he forgets that
there's a particular way in which a local slum life functions. And that slum
life is represented and can be critiqued in so many ways. Like you know, it
is, a slum is almost stateless in the sense that the state almost seems to
have forgotten about these people, right? But it is very there. It's very
present. I do believe that our our review or our reading for today forgets
that. Last thing I will say about Gully Boy is we see that most of the
characters in our film are Muslim. Murad is Muslim, Murad's family is a
Muslim family and this is the protagonist family. Safina is also also Muslim.
The interesting thing about the film is, I think if I am not mistaken, and I
don't, well let me see. This is more or less the only film that we have
watched for the semester where the Muslim family is the protagonist
family. The only other instance we could say is Amar Akbar Anthony
where Akbar's family is Muslim. But that's not an entire film about Akbar.
So this is a film about Muslim family, but it is not a comment on Islam in
India. It has zero comment on Islam in India as far as I can see. It has a
comment on life in India for a certain class of people and the interactions
between different classes of people. As I said earlier, this is a, the film
presents a very, very poignant take on the hierarchy of resources, right?
You have the upper crust, and then you have Safina, and then you have MC
Sher and you have Murad and then you have the street kids and you have
Moeen who is trying to make a living out of like stealing and and whatever
else he's up to so so the. So the film is a very interesting take on those
things. At no point in the film does it speak to the life of a human being
who is Muslim in India, it just speaks to life of human beings in India. That
is also a very, the credit goes to Akhtar for that specific take in the film.
Because it is not belabor the point that life for Indian Muslims is different.
Different than life for Indian Hindus in India. It shows that life is just
difficult. In any interactions that happen with religion, for example, MC
Sher is Hindu and Murad is is Muslim, it is not a belabored take. It does not
in any way talk about unity and diversity. Because those films are kind of
those films try to make a point that is much harder to make in India now.
This film doesn't even make the point that just as like this, this is and and
I'm going to present it as that. So I'm going to end here. A really really
good film and one that I hope you watch not once, but at least a few times."

Using only the lecture content, answer all questions in under 250 words:
1. What was Murad's most redeeming quality for you?
2. How does Ali Bhatt's character (Safina) challenge norms of behavior in the film?
3. How does representation of religion in Gully Boy differ from representation of religion in other films such as Jai Santoshi Maa or Sooryavanshi?