#Scurf184: Go Goa Gone, 11 years on
The main meat of the wild humour and transgressive freedom of the film is Kunal Kemmu's laugh-out-loud funny dialogues and salty zingers
Writing this on a rained in Bangalore evening from my cousin’s desk as we settle in on a night of mid-week movie bingeing. We’ve been spending the last ten days wrapping up one movie or the other at the end of our work days. After watching a clutch that we’d never seen before, for this evening we decided on a Kunal Kemmu double bill: Go Goa Gone; Madagaon Express. Both films are upgrades of the existing friendship roadtrip Hindi movies like Dil Chahta Hai and ZNMD, the needless philosophising replaced by crackling one-upmanship between the friends making the sunny-sweet films critical darlings.
Go Goa Gone plays in the background as I type this on my laptop. The three friends zipping along in a red Volkswagen Polo to Goa to get away from breakups, job crunches and general sense of restlessness in their big city kind lives. It is about two twenty-somethings smart losers, and their earnest friend. Hardik and Luv force themselves on their Bunny’s forced office trip to Goa. There they decide to visit a remote, unknown island for a rave party, just before Bunny’s important office meeting. Luv and Hardik just want to score, drink and have a relaxing time during the trip. Hardik says, “Mera toh janam hi iss sab ke liye hua tha (I was born for all this).”
The 128-minute caper falls clearly in the category of horror-comedies. One of the first good ones to come out of the otherwise mostly dead in an unfunny way Hindi filmscape.
Raj and DK proved their mettle over and over again in the later years as an insanely gifted pair of filmmakers, and Go Goa Gone is the best film they’ve ever made. To watch each of their films in order of release 99 (2009), Shor In The City (2011), Go Goa Gone (2013), Happy Ending (2014) and A Gentleman (2017) is to witness the growth story of a master filmmaker duo who would later go on to fulfil their destinies as the frontrunners of Bollywood. With web series like The Family Man, Farzi and Guns & Gulaabs they have now become part of the mainstream, creating quality series with deliciously woven narratives that truly deliver on the tradition of the true masters of the masala Hindi movie form.
All of their films are off-kilter, hat-tips of the comedies of the bygone era. They have a slightly morbid core around which the jokes tend to revolve and fulfil the true promise of masala Hindi movie experience, a promise we as audience so desperately miss — as much as now as in 2013. These movies are warm, humanist, and funny and tell great stories speaking to the current generation of searching adults who are looking to find their own lives represented on the big screen. Aside from the laughs, the films also touch on suicide, depression and deep existential issues.
While the story of Go Goa Gone is wild and promising, it is the dialogues written by Kunal Kemmu that are, in every way, the true fulfilment of this promise. Essentially a top-up on the classic “buddies on a road trip” genre, in keeping with the tradition of other Hindi movies that came before it: Dil Chahta Hai, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Now anyone who has seen these films knows that these are massive metaphorical shoes to fill; actor, story and overall investment wise each. The milieu of Go Goa Gone is a warm, comfortably known space that works as a strange cocoon in the otherwise cold climates of the story.
What do we know? What have we learnt? chirps Bunny after the first couple of interactions with zombies. And we chortle with him. The dialogues of Go Goa Gone are the animating centre of the movie, warming us up to an otherwise alien and by then too well-trodden path of the zombie movie. The desi references, sidenotes, inside jokes and overall commentary on the D2RF rave party drug are what we continue to remember it for.
Dilli se hoon BC (I’m from Delhi mfer!) is a cult throwaway sentence that has become all too ubiquitous by now.
As the inadvertent boys’ weekend unfolds onscreen, so too does a capable, authentic, mature for its time portrait of male friendship and a zombie-flavoured tour into the uncaring, searching, adventurous worlds of these urban metropolitan Indian men. Had it been made in 2024 (written by an AI tool) they’d not have gone anywhere because office travel wouldn’t be happening and even if they had the money to, they’d have preferred to go get the most recent and equally pathetic vada pav available in Mumbai. But we’re glad this was made in 2013 and so there were humans and zombies and real locations (well, for most part of it).
Frittered through the film is an unmissable desi sensibility, that brings a certain kind of dignity to it while also allowing it to transcendent its limitations. The limited VFX doesn’t work, there’s only so much you can do with visuals of zombies and shooting them with massive guns. And yet the movie is an exquisite, universally recognizable representation of adult friendships replete with a soulful set of songs and a recurring zombie (Marriana) with whom Hardik develops a strange connection.
There is a moment towards the close of the film that is transcendent, and it is one of those moments when a director and his actors when working at the same wavelength, creating something that feels like true magic. Bunny is alive and rings Hardik on his phone just as they were able to leave the island. In the hands of any other director, the lens would blur, speech would be slurred, some drugs shot off in the near distance. Instead we get a blood-filled, slightly wry and immensely affecting montage of the boys reuniting and finding their way to each other through a sea of remnant zombies as Boris (an oh-so sexy Saif Ali Khan) shoots at the deadfolk. Hugging, crying, muddy, bloody and dirty, the boys crape their way back to one another, as all of it is underscored by the melancholy of having nearly lost Bunny. The montage feels like a note perfect memory of a terrorising, unforgettable, kind of life-altering road trip anyone’s ever been on.
And with that, we get the song of the decade:
Writing these substacks over the last few years has unexpectedly brought me closer to other readers, writers and walkers. If reading this dredges up resonant memories or stirs up a wonderful pot of emotions within you, I’d love if you left a comment, or shared this with a reader friend!
Anandi is a writer based in Delhi.
Reading list:
Below are three letters from Rilke to Modersohn-Becker, written late in the year 1900, excerpted in The Paris Review—Three Letters from Rilke
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‘If there’s nowhere else to go, this is where they come’: how Britain’s libraries provide much more than books—The Guardian Long Read from a couple weeks ago about how “in 2024, libraries are unofficial creches, homeless shelters, language schools and asylum support providers – filling the gaps left by a state that has reneged on its responsibilities”.