“Agar duniya ko apne kabze mein karna hai toh mutthi kas lo,” a man, softly whispers into the ears of a child in Disney+Hotstar’s Kaala. It’s a seemingly benevolent exchange that also carries the air of intimidation. It’s framed beautifully, as one those eerie moments that the series will surely return to as a matter of establishing some sort of providence. Ironically, the philosophical grip that the man vouches for doesn’t quite apply to the script of a show that huffs and puffs between timelines, meanders into uninteresting alleys and complicates its own path to salvation. Set 30 years apart, this is a tale of revenge that brings an absent father and his indignant but honourable son together, in the hunt for a fascinating enemy. An enemy that, though provocative, is possibly the only redeemable thing in a plotline that twitches and turns far too much to be able to stick to the mortar of memory.
Avinash Tiwary (in his second big OTT release of the same week) plays Ritwik, a Kolkata-based Investigation Bureau (IB) officer on the tail of illegal Hawala money that is traced back to an influential local businessman. This businessman, it conveniently turns out, has links to Ritwik’s past. Tiwari’s character is typically hot-headed but also eerily self-controlled. Even his introduction paints him as a man of modest faculty for he is rescued, bruised and grieving, in the middle of an operation. The show’s tendency to play around with gender stereotypes gives it a distinctly modern edge. An edge that its ungainly material plotline unceremoniously keels over. Ritwik’s story is also flanked by the timeline of his father’s dishonourable exile from the Indian defence forces. Marked as traitor, he went missing after an incident on the Indo-Bangladesh border. The two timelines congruously manufacture events that don’t so much as lean as bump into each other.
Also read: Bejoy Nambiar on Kaala: 'Music took a backseat for the first time in my life'
Directed by Bejoy Nambiar, a frustratingly promising director of moments, Kaala is as bizarre as it can at times also feel intriguing in a superficial way. Ritwik’s investigation leads him to untapped secrets about his father, through a sequence of events that are bafflingly convenient and odd. There are several flashbacks, aimed at tying the franticness and maybe the confusion of the present with some sort of semblance of coherence in the arms of the past but it is done with the kind of deafening empty style that evokes a groan, unsupported by the depth of sentiment. The show gibbers its way through a plot that is more adept at chewing the scenery. It travels between the city and the hills, between the fibrous nature of dwelling in narrow lanes to the ropier concoction of the mountains and the mist that surrounds it, with ease. And yet it can’t offer anything of value.
Tiwary, to his credit, does well as Ritwik. So do the supporting cast that includes Hiten Tejwani and Rohan Vinod Mehra. It’s Jitin Gulati’s Shakti Arya, however, who steals the show. That antagonists make for far more interesting characters is a rehearsed but maybe a wise deduction because in Kaala, despite a poor script’s best attempts to add some shade and peculiar softness to its protagonists, it’s actually the troubled Arya who comes across as fascinatingly oblique. Bred in military code, Arya’s arc drags him across an ocean of emotion with currents that scrape the rocky shores of gender, loyalty, desire and love. Gulati is ecstatically brilliant and possibly deserved a lot more space in a story that clearly misreads its own promise.
To tell you about the methods applied by the creators of Kaala to push Ritwik to confront a history he has seemingly moved on from, would be to give away far too much about a story that doesn’t exactly resist temptation either. Not that the ruse is impressive or even well-constructed, but it might just be the only moment in the show that makes you sit up, out of curiosity if not for the dumb hastiness of it all. The folksy charms of Kolkata, the lived-in vocabulary of its streets, its food, its accented Hindi endears, as much as a minimalistic cover hides a grubby book’s unfulfilled potential. You’d buy it for what it looks like but to care for it, it’d have to do more. Much more.
Nambiar is an acutely frustrating director. He can easily manipulate landscapes, craft exhilarating sequences that are possibly unmatched for their swirling, at times dizzying beauty and calibre, but he can’t quite apply the filter of emotion to any of them. His characters, at least the ones who lead the show, evoke shades that suggest the making of something far more composed and condensed than the pageantry of stylish visuals and tepid writing we are offered. In a thrilling rooftop chase, benchmarked by a typically snappy soundtrack, we are abruptly cut off after a police officer slips and nearly falls off a roof. Our protagonist, rather than aloofly run away, returns to help him. It’s the sign of something softer, a pastel recovered from the margins of a jungle that is increasingly being ruled by the grunge shades of alpha men. Unfortunately, even an accommodating jungle is no place for men or stories that do not know their way.
Kaala is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar.
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