The Gentlemen
The delights of a Guy Ritchie creation
The Gentlemen is pure opera.
Beyond being a Guy Ritchie creation - with all its quiddities and particularities of black English humour, boxing capers, slippery villains and heroes who keep slipping - it is a big canvas story told on the small screen. Because what we get from the maestro of trippy cinema - with his complex tapestries of coincidences, confusions and confounding chases - is a series of episodic orgasms.
And I say this with no sense of hyperbole, as the length of eight episodes gives Ritchie a freedom to create a saga, which has a breakneck sense of closures even as it almost languorously brings the flavour of real-time conversations and happenstances.
His use of conversation is Tarantinoesque, overlayed with the dual gorgeousness of British garrulousness and understatement. And he fills the cinematic canvas with the most fascinating madcaps possible, each one of them adding juicily to the proceedings in hand, before getting question marks reconciled or answers disposed off.
But the delight of the caper is also in the world creation he does, towards the emergence of a reluctant godfather. In the best traditions of criminal legacies, the one who inherits an empire is the one most reluctant to take over. The proposition is, of course, made sexier with the introduction of a partner who is a stakeholder, a guide, a partner and an opponent. And in the multiplicity of these roles, the two actors completely hit it out of the park, as they initially sniff each other out as suspicious dogs, and then build trust over a pile of bodies, one bloody encounter after another.
And trust Ritchie to surround these two with a delightful array of characters, who flit in and out, coming in with their back stories and departing with their backs bloodied!
But here’s the kick - even as the entire canvas is filled with the criminal kind, this is an erudite film. The language is just the starting point - though one of the more satisfying elements. The story becomes a study of cause-&-effect conjoined to a tale of finding one’s true destiny.
As the two reluctant partners play chess with each other’s choices, navigate mistrust, wallow in misunderstandings, reluctantly give in to each other's interests, the series grows bigger than its story - it becomes a eight-part season of opera, couched in realisations, riddled with hijinks.
As the final bullet is fired, there is an intense sense of reconciliations, of knowing that the bad have won, but the worst have got their brains left behind in splendid splatter somewhere in a neighbourhood jungle.
One can only hope Guy Ritchie is only starting to get his serial mojo going.
I have written on other favourite movies of mine.
Merry Christmas, Three of Us, Past Lives.
Delve!
Oh. yes, indeed. I'm at epsiode 6, so two more to go. But it is spectacular, indeed.