Kathal – Best left on the Cutting Room Floor

The legendary Hindi satirist Harishankar Parsai wrote a story titled “Ramkatha Kshepak”. The story goes like this. Hanuman ji, on his way back from Himalay with Sanjeevani Booti was arrested at the Ayodhya Naka for smuggling. When Bharat and Shatrughn found out the medicine was essential to Lakshman’s survival, they opine that if any illegal act benefits someone’s family, it automatically becomes legal and moral. They let Hanuman go and all records of the arrest are erased. Same is the case with the protagonist of Yashowardhan Mishra’s “Kathal”, Inspector Mahima Bisor. An idealist inspector, works by the book, shows leadership and initiative and doesn’t hesitate to chastise her own fiancé when she finds him abusing his power as a constable. Yet at the end, is more than happy to accept an unearned promotion for him even though his incompetence as a police officer is second only to Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther films.

I was very excited for Kathal because the trailer looked interesting and I felt there was so much potential for telling a remarkable satire on the Indian political system and police machinery. And the movie delivers on the brilliant premise in the first ten minutes of the movie. Vijay Raaz is incredible as a self-important small time politician. Brijendra Kalra depicts a bumbling forensics specialist with aplomb. Rajpal Yadav is brilliant as always. The first ten minutes of the movie had me waiting expectantly for a brilliant story waiting to unfold. And then the movie just, stops.

What follows is a bland s-tale of moralizing that all of us have seen a million times. The movie plays a perverted game of tag with many issues, women in the workforce, caste hierarchies, police brutality but never does anything with any of those. Just touches them and runs away to an insipid plot I frankly could not see anyone caring about. I will not give you spoilers, but only as a professional courtesy. Not watching this movie will not make your life poorer in any way. The script lets down a brilliant premise so thoroughly that the movie leaves a bad taste in your mouth once you are done with it, just like the eponymous jackfruit that is not allowed to ripen.

Here, in a show of unusual solidarity, I don’t assign any blame to the writer of the movie, Ashok Mishra. I can almost see him struggling against his binds as his script is chopped up and boiled in saltless water by a studio committee. Ashok Mishra wrote the brilliant 1998 Shyam Benegal film “Samar”, for which he won the National Award. I don’t think that somehow his skill of telling good engaging stories has atrophied over the last 25 years. The first ten minutes are testament to that. However, once the story veers into the comfortable territory of lecturing the audience about the social issue of the reel is where the film becomes insufferable.

This is also representative of the pattern I have observed with many Netflix original movies. In their quest to make movies which are socially relevant and impart a message, they often forget to make a movie. Writing girl boss characters, like Sanya Malhotra’s Mahima Bisor (played adequately, if not memorably) is so overdone that at no point in the movie does she seem to struggle with any challenge the World throws at her. Everyone else that surrounds her pales in her bright light and turns automatically into bumbling buffoons that couldn’t catch a fly with a pot of honey even if their life depended on it.

I get the feeling that this a marketing tactic that Netflix seems to building their library on. Make movies with a “social message” so even if the movies are terrible, they will not be criticized and simply be forgotten. Any criticism directed at the movie can be thrown back into the face of the critic, accusing her of ignoring the plight that the movies strives to bring attention to. But all I see in the face of this enterprise is a wastage of perfectly good premises that would have made great movies in the hands of a less meddling studio.

I must also address the finale of the movie, an utterly and incredibly childish set piece that obliterates all stakes the movie had limped towards for its hour and half long runtime so far. In what universe is a food fight involving raw vegetables posing any danger to anyone is beyond me, but then that’s the direction the makers inexplicably decided to take. The film suffers greatly for it, but then the makers didn’t care enough and neither should you.

Coming to the positives, the songs are ok I guess. The movie is reasonably well shot, even if the style is primarily unimaginative. Where we could have got a movie rivalling “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro”, we got this thing that was put to camera and unleashed into the wild. The first ten minutes had me excited, expecting a Shreelal Shukl’s “Raag Darbari”-esque satire on the Indian way of life in the hinterlands. That excitement magnified my disappointment at how the rest of the movie panned out, utterly inane and irritatingly aware of its own attempts to fix everything wrong with the world in a span of 2 hours.

It’s too late for me but you can still save yourself. Don’t bother with this. Just rewatch Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.