Guns and Gulaabs (Season 1) ‘Netflix’ Web Series Review: A rooted enough world, distinctive characters, moments of action oscillating between spoof and straight-laced deadpan humour, and sudden bursts of violence, with unique voices and quirks for each character. The story’s tone is primarily black comedy, caused by extenuating circumstances in that rooted world, which suddenly take on a touch of the supernatural as unexplained phenomena tangentially pass through.
Coen Brothers or Raj & DK?
This is not a dig at Guns and Gulabs by any stretch of the imagination. This is the story of Gulabganj and Sherpur, two rival villages responsible for growing tonnes of opium and ruled by rival drug lords. In that world, the death of a dreaded assassin, the evolution of his son searching for a normal life but unable to escape his destiny, the arrival of a new police inspector from Delhi, and the coming of age of three school students as they try to fathom a taste of “city life” and “English medium”, crushes, and first loves; all the while a new deal with a dreaded gang from Calcutta has to be struck, and both the Gulabgunj and Sherpur gangs find themselves in a pickle due to the rise of new players, both within their organisation and outside of it, intent on upending it all.
Raj and DK, at this point in their careers, have mastered the formula of crafting a season-long form of television to a science. Even if some of their shows might lack thematic depth, structurally speaking, Guns and Gulaabs is almost perfect. The opening episode, which introduces all the players, is 53-minutes long; the rest of the episodes are a comfortable 44-minutes long; and the final episode is a whopping 81-minutes long. Perhaps to understand the criticism of a rushed ending, the final episode is even titled Episode 7+8, and it also contains an intermission because of the movie length of the episode.
Guns and Gulaabs takes place in the recent past, where the original cassettes are more preferred to the cover songs of Jhankaar Beats, and where love letters could only be written under the right “environment” of an English song playing from a cassette player and the lyrics are to be utilised in them. Love letters are sprayed with perfume, commissioned by a student proficient in English, if only to tug at the heartstrings of the woman riding the moped, who is also an English teacher at that school.
Matters of the heart also become a problem for the newest harbinger of the law to break bad and become involved in this drug war. But matters of the heart are also accompanied by two men taking over the legacies of their father—one with aplomb at an accident whereby the kingpin falls from a platform because it was built with cheap wood; the other unwittingly because he kills two men with a spanner in a fit of rage—and thus, the legacy of his father brings him respect and even attraction, even though he never loses the bumbling nature and the impostor syndrome.
All these themes are wrapped in a mostly entertaining story that is also highly cinematic in nature and shot gorgeously by Pankaj Kumar. But the editing by Sumeet Kotian sometimes recalls the nostalgic colour coding of the 90s and the editing of the movies of those yesteryears, where hinterland violence and the feelings of those songs are evoked with the utmost sincerity or punctured by a passerby’s interaction.
A still from Guns and Gulaabs (Season 1).But it also sometimes forgets those nostalgic evocations for long stretches as the show becomes plot-heavy. But what sets apart a Raj & DK story are the dialogues, and the dialogues are hilarious in their typical deadpan, lackadaisical style, where frustrations from daily circumstances are mined for comedy, but now heightened due to the world this is set in, a part of our world but not really a world resembling ours.
The conjunction in the tile, joining the two terms guns and gulaabs, evoking two human actions—love and violence—is also emblematic of how disconnected the show sometimes feels when it is exploring the two halves—the “and” barely holding it together in some instances. The plot of the kids at the school and their coming of age is almost completely disconnected from the ensuing gang war involving Tipu (Rajkummar Rao), Inspector Arjun (Dulquer Salmaan), Gaanchi Jr. (Adarsh Gaurav), and all of their subordinates in the vicinity.
The movie-length finale brings out the necessity, but it never completely loses the feelings of two disconnected halves suddenly colliding together in a mesh of missed gunfire and bullets, joy at finally managing to hit a target, and finally taking revenge for the death of a friend while also acknowledging the revenge of the father, providing closure to that running and frankly tiring gag. And lest we forget, the boogeyman in the story, the assassin “Atmaram,” played by Gulshan Devaiaih, has the supernatural quality of dodging bullets, having seven lives, and living in a world where the effectiveness of talismans actually comes into question. It’s a weird addition to a mostly grounded story that honestly comes out of nowhere.
Guns and Gulaabs has a lot of moving parts, held together by some sublime performances (Rajkummar Rao in fine bumbling form, Adarsh Gaurav in fine creepy and whining form), some decent performances (Dulquer Salmaan in a mostly straight-laced role, allowing himself to show complexity in a script that doesn’t give him much room), and some genuine moments of pitch-perfect black comedy. It, however, lack cohesion.
Some plots aren’t as developed as they should have been (Arjun’s infidelity and his past play a much larger role in the finale and thus deserve a bit more fleshing out). It isn’t as thematically rich as one would expect. But in a world where this is the fourth Raj & DK-produced streaming series and the second to come out this year itself, it’s not a bad one to find yourself immersed in, with an entertaining show having episode names after song titles and being the third-best show out of the four shows being produced. That is a pretty good track record.
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Guns & Gulaabs (Season 1) Links: IMDb
Guns & Gulaabs (Season 1) Cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Rajkummar Rao, Adarsh Gourav, Gulshan Devaiah, Shreya Dhanwanthary
Where to watch Guns & Gulaabs
