Mukkabaaz is Anurag Kashyap at the height of his powers

Mum and I are on our way to watch the new Anurag Kashyap film. She asks me what it’s about. I say it’s about boxing. She hopes that it’s not only about boxing. I say, "No, from what I’ve gathered, there’s also some romance." She wonders: "Perhaps it’s like Chak De India."

As it turns out, the film is about boxing, about the friendly sparring in a romantic relationship, as well as delivering a knock-out punch to a structurally flawed society: "Bahut hua samman," is the flagship song and running theme in the film.

With directors like Kashyap, there is no question of being out of form or returning to form. Like Glen McGrath, he will land the ball in the right place time after time. There will be natural deviations from the line.

Kashyap is always the bowler, peppering the audience – the batsman – with bouncers and questions. He will bring the ball in, make it swing away. At the half-way mark, he will bowl some vicious leg-spin, bring in the forward short leg and the silly point to form a tight circle around the bat, sledging and suffocating the audience.

Whether the film flops or does well, whether one warms to it or not, is immaterial. One goes to watch a Kashyap film out of curiosity. And complete faith in his vision. What balls is he going to throw at me this time? To enjoy Kashyap one needs to be a masochist. There’s pleasure in pain. Learn to enjoy the blows to body and mind.

There’s a consistent and sustained play of opposites in his films. He can be subtle; he can be in-your-face. He can be Bollywood wolf-whistle. He can be art-house grey. The film will constantly change gears.

Each scene is packed tight like a cigarette (in Mukkabaz, he deploys four cinematographers). One cannot let one’s guard down for a second, for fear of having missed an important detail. Wait, did I hear the slogan "Bharat mata ki jai’?" What was that about?

Listening to the audience react to Kashyap’s cinema can become a hobby in itself. Because he is the king of realism, he will connect with a front-row Hindi hinterland audience. It’s their reality that he is portraying with accuracy, unflinching honesty and finesse. He will appeal to a mature film-aware audience for the same reasons: for having captured this reality so well, for the sheer purity of cinematic representation.

It is the audience that is somewhere between the two which is at the risk of being shocked and interrogated. This segment, the bulk of viewership in a theatre, is also the one Kashyap enjoys probing, teasing, torturing. It walks into the multiplex talking loudly, munching on expensive pop corn, talking into oversized phones.  More often than not it leaves the theatre tail between its legs. In Raman Raghav 2.0 it giggled nervously. In Mukkabaaz, the puzzled man in front of me turned to his friend and said: "Ye picture badi... intrusting hai."

Mukkabaz is a film about an angry young man and woman. It’s a film about giving it back. It’s about throwing punches. The anger is not abstract anger against the system but specific — the entrenched politics of caste, corruption in sports and stifling social norms.

Having grown up in Allahabad, I can vouch for the authenticity of local colour. The art direction is so splendid that it makes you see things that one never saw while living there — it was so obvious. It makes the unseeing eye see again. Kashyap, who was born in Gorakhpur, does for East U.P. what Vishal Bhardwaj does for West UP. Together they are the unparalleled bards of North India’s badlands. I prefer Kashyap because he is grittier.

In Mukkabaaz he gets the humour spot-on. East UP wit has its distinctive character and lingo, self-deprecating and briny. It has a touch of the Irish about it. Referring to the child-less Brahmin villain of the piece, Shravan, the main protagonist, quips: "Unki beedi mein tambaku nahin hain."

Vineet Kumar Singh – a favourite of Kashyap’s, having featured in Gangs of Wasseypur, Bombay Talkies and Ugly – plays Shravan. Zoya Hussain is magnetic as the mute love interest with a laptop and a mind of her own, while Jimmy Shergill is effective as the warped Chacha/ local goon with a warped eye, though at times a touch of the Punjabi creeps into his East UP accent.

Kashyap understands the power of cinema and harnesses it to great effect, in ways more meaningful than the assembly-line superhero films of Hollywood. Mukkabaaz is an assault on one’s senses: each frame packed with dense detail — the blob of chewing gum on the wall; a lively soundtrack that veers between sensitive ballads about lizards slithering behind hung pictures and the pounding rap of Divine and Nucleya; and dialogue as sharp as broken glass: "A local boxing match attracts less than forty people in the audience but a movie on boxing will collect forty crores at the box office."

This is global-desi storytelling at its finest. This is king Kashyap at the peak of his powers.