Five years ago, director Anurag Kashyap tore through the press, public and Bollywood with his mighty sophomore feature, Black Friday, a riveting drama chronicling the Mumbai Bomb Blasts of ’93. Its release was blocked by Indian courts due to the ‘sensitivity’ of its themes, but a lot of international acclaim was generated for the quality filmmaking on display. Kashyap now gives us Gulaal, a movie about the Rajputs and their desire for an independent state. Equally controversial (for Indian courts) and equaling Black Friday’s greatness, Gulaal is another achievement for India’s Independent cinema, one that threatens to be lost in the melee of everyday Bollywood.

The film is set in an unnamed city of Rajasthan, with a deteriorating law and order situation. Dukey Bana (Kay Kay Menon) is an over-zealous Rajput. As the self-styled kingpin of control, he strives for an independent ‘Rajuptana’ state. To achieve that end, he enlists Ransa (Abhimanyu Singh) and his roommate Dileep Singh (Raj Singh Chaudhary, also the co-screenwriter), students from a local college, to contest the student elections and add some political muscle to his fight. As the film digs deeper into issues of student politics, separatism, honor and ego, Gulaal creates a complex reality and then peel away the layers to reveal truths about the chaotic state of regional India.

Kashyap doesn’t take long to establish his players — he tells an engrossing story and gets the characters to inhabit it on their own individual terms. This help to flesh out a strong existence for them, which in turn adds to the requisite depth to the film’s realism. Notably, Kashyap allows the audience to discover the machinations behind the motivation of some key characters, especially in the case of Karan (played with a burning intensity by Aditya Srivastava) and his sister Kiran (a stunning debut by Ayesha Mohan, who also happens to be the Assistant Director). Equally stunning is the scene-stealing performance by Abhimanyu Singh as the foul-mouthed, reckless Ransa. He makes the performance so real, that it would be both surprising and shocking to ever watch the actor out-of-character. All these wonderful performances revolve around a composed yet maniacal portrayal by Kay Kay Menon in what has become his forte. His opening monologue carries so much fervor that it throws the audience into the midst of the chaos that the movie examines.

Putting yet more people from the crew in front of the camera, Kashyap hits a home-run by having lyricist/music director Piyush Mishra play the eccentric elder brother to Kay Kay Menon’s Dukey Bana. Piyush Mishra’s Prithvi Bana, along with his “ardh-nar” mime, becomes the voice of philosophical cynicism commenting on the futility of man’s greed. At one point, Prithvi Bana has an imaginary conversation with George W. Bush demanding all the disappeared oil to light the Diwali lamps. From quoting John Lennon to Jawaharlal Nehru to Sahir Ludhianwi, Piyush Mishra’s presence and input makes the movie a literati’s delight.

With his trademark hard-hitting dialogues and a taut script, Kashyap proves that he is a writer-director worthy of representing Indian independent cinema on the international circuit. The only caveat is that Gulaal does require a basic idea of what state politics and powerplay can be like in regional India. But although it is set in Rajasthan, the movie becomes a metaphor for what transpires all over India, and quite possibly, in third world countries and lawless states globally.

Interweaving fact and supposition, Oliver Stone’s compelling, fascinating W. plays out like the Godfather in reverse. It is at once a biopic, an anti-war film and a time capsule of a tumultuous period. Like he did with his earlier presidential films, Nixon and JFK, Stone fuses historical truth with a subjective, highly opinionated point of view to create a believable, if skewered kaleidoscope of reality. No one knows what really happened during Bush’s presidency in the oval office, but the film turns the major events leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, dramatically edgy.

In selectively choosing both familiar and unfamiliar details about the maligned presidents recent history, Stone does what he does best — gives his audience ample fuel for conspiracy theories. Never content with just the facts, he finds it meaningful to develop reasoning — why for instance, Bush Jr. made the decision to go into politics when he was already a successful baseball team owner. In a film full of numerous imitations of people we’ve seen countless number of times before in the media, Josh Brolin needs to be singled out for his title performance as being not just the most convincing, but also the least distracting. So effortless is the transformation of the gruff, burly Brolin into the public persona of the person we know as President Bush (complete with numerous “Bushisms”), that thirty minutes into the film, I stopped consciously being aware that I was watching a portrayal by an actor.

Writer Stanley Weiser (who previously worked with Stone in the fantastic Wall Street) firmly centers everything on the Bush cabinets decision to invade Iraq, while interspersing it with flashbacks from Bush’s formative post-college years. It is perhaps because of this that the film suffers, not in its choice of selecting the Iraq war as the pivotal moment of failure, but by trying to portray it as this generations Watergate/Vietnam hybrid. The scenes of a president struggling with his inner demons and a strange case of political Oedipus complex aren’t necessarily able to convey the empathy that the writer/director aim for, distracting us from an otherwise competent political narrative. It is commendable though how the team behind this film never resort to any manner of obvious character caricature; they seem convinced that this is how history happened and they serve it to us as facts. This straight faced approach saves the film from being unnecessary or unwelcome.