Kantara aka The Forest [dir. Rishabh Shetty]

Thankfully, after the initial wave of generic spectacle 'pan-India' films from the South Indian film industries, we are seeing the distribution of more culturally rooted narratives. Maniratnam, one of the first southern film-makers to hit mainstream national fame way back in the 90's, recently unleashed the first installment of his pet project, a lavish and sprawling two-part adaptation of the Tamil historical fantasy adventure novel Ponniyin Selvan. But the other film making waves across the country in its multiple dubbed avatars is on a wholly different end of the scale in terms of magnitude and budget: Kantara aka The Forest from Kannada movie-maker Rishabh Shetty.

Unlike Ponniyin Selvan's 10th century milieu, Kantara is majorly set in the present (or as contemporary as it gets in the narrative's remote rural settling), but it begins from a centuries old tradition where religion and myth are inextricably intertwined. The 'Bhoota Kola' (Spirit Dance) is a ritual in which a chosen one acts as conduit for the deity or guardian spirits and speaks for them. In olden times, the proclamations of the Bhoota would be taken as divine judgement. But as modernity and the ensuing corruption seep through society, even divine judgements start to be questioned. Thus, when the village's Bhoota conduit reminds the descendants of the erstwhile ruler that their forefather had given away the forestland under his jurisdiction to the original settlers, they respond with scorn and threats of legal action. Then there is the conflict between the age-old tribal way of life, in which they take resources from the forests for their needs, and federal-government mediated  measures that deny them access to those very forests in the name of conservation.

By couching its Chosen One story against this engrossing backdrop, Kantara aims to rise above the common herd of 'mass' movies. Of course, it takes a while to fulfill that potential. The protagonist Shiva (Shetty, who also writes and directs) is painted in HERO shades right from his dramatic introduction as the champion of the Kambala, the traditional buffalo race. In the grand tradition of mass heroes, he is charismatic, generous, hot-headed, flirtatious...the works. In that same tradition, he has an entourage of comic relief sidekicks and a mother constantly frustrated by his pranks. But Shiva is also the defender of the locals and their traditions against external forces even though, to the mother's vexation, he has refused to act as conduit for the Kola ritual. 

The first challenge to Shiva's people comes from the forest department led by the rule-bound stubborn Murali (Kishore). Shiva responds to this in the manner he knows, by carrying out guerilla raids into the forest and frustrating Murali's attempts to enforce his dictates. But then, an old and insidious enemy rears his head, threatening to disgorge the villagers from the land they have occupied for centuries. This is when Shiva transforms into the role the film has till then hinted as his destiny, a transformation that superbly infuses the hero trope with a mythical flavor and pushes it into a remarkable niche for the genre.

This transformation is for me the center-piece of the film, one that raised it above all my previous reservations. Till then Kantara was a reasonably strong mass entertainer. But after an astounding opening and the legend created around the Bhoota conduit, the film seemed to have cast aside its ambitions in that regard. Too much time was spent in giving Shiva the standard mass hero treatment. The film's humor started to repeat itself, sometimes in very ill-placed situations. Also, the manner in which some major characters shifted direction were done in an abrupt and unconvincing manner, suggesting either weaknesses in the original writing or material left on the editing table. 

But by God, once that transformation begins, when Shiva takes on the role of spirit conduit and delivers divine retribution to the oppressors of his people, all those nits were simply swept away. In the depiction of that sequence, the astounding visuals of a dust and violence streaked night, the guitar riff-driven strains of the Varaha Roopam song, Shetty's body language and facial contortions, we get a demented and incredibly visceral piece of heavy metal performance art. Watching at the cinema I was left breathless and shaking in my seat, goosebumps forming over my goosebumps. In that transcending moment, Kantara for me rose from mass movie to class entertainment.

KGF: Chapter 2 [dir. Prashanth Neel]

For my views on the first chapter of KGF, please click HERE.

KGF-2 is a continuation of the old-school swagger from the first installment, but taken a few notches higher. Rocky (Yash) is still the uber-badass, dealing out sneering one-liners and sledgehammer fists in equal measure. He now controls the titular gold fields, but in his "More gold! MORE GOLD!" attitude seems to opt for a far less smart plan than the original owners had - I would imagine that part of the perceived value of gold is the fact that it's hard to mine and is made available to the market in limited quantities. Rocky's business sense resembles the guy that slit the belly of the goose laying the (ha!) golden eggs.

But this is not a movie one criticizes for its lack of business sense, or for that matter any other sense. This is a movie where our gangsta hero can:

• Barge in unannounced into the Prime Minister's working chambers and swag at her, while she hisses ineffectively like Lalita Pawar in Ek Din Bahu Ka.
• Have a blooming helicopter hovering above his lawn for a spot of breeze on a warm day.
• Single-handedly assault a police station - no wait, that's a branch office of the CBI - with a tripod-mounted belt-fed large caliber machine gun to recover a single gold biscuit because dammit, that's HIS property.

The large supporting cast is (dur!) cast in that same mold of exaggerated sentiment. Someone actually says with a straight face that the character Sanjay Dutt plays was inspired by Viking culture, and he turns up in the soul-sapping heat draped in chain-mail and leather, and a braid that must take some serious grooming. And beards, beards still rule. Raveena Tandon's PM character would have probably posed a bigger challenge if she sported one. Everyone speaks their lines like theater actors anxious to ensure that their voices carried to the last row.

This is again not a criticism, it is inherent to the film's design. The canvas feels genuinely big, and while the brush strokes are broad, they are also unabashedly virile, with some epic visual moments. You can see that writer-director Prashant Neel wants to pay a Tarantino-like homage to the glory days of Macho Indian Cinema, and when it works, it works really well. On the whole I liked this a good deal more than the sum total of Bahubali.

What I would criticize is the déjà vu occurring over the course of this two-part narrative (with the imminent warning of a third installment). The danger of painting in broad strokes is always that there's not sufficient layer or detailing for the characters. While individual scenes are calculated to raise whoops and whistles (I'm sure this would have been a riot in the cinema hall), there is choppy flow and a lack of connective tissue between scenes - A lengthy symphony cannot be composed solely of overtures, you need to also think of the quieter moments.

KGF: Chapter 1 [dir. Prashanth Neel]

Thankfully this un-kvlt blog was never designed to be a trend capturer, or there would be the question of why a 4-year old movie that created a certain splash on release is only being reviewed now. Of course the immediate reason is that I was prompted to finally see it by the glowing reviews of the "bigger, badder" second installment that has made its way to the cinemas now. (See Un-kvlt's impressions of the sequel HERE)

The buzzword in the film industry these days is Pan-India, a product that will work over the entire country, across multiple languages and movie-goer demographics. It first gained traction with S. Rajamouli's ostentatiously mounted 2-parter Bahubali. The 500 crore + India grosses for a film that featured no prominent Bollywood acting talent showed a massive nationwide appetite for its mixture of simplistic old-fashioned narrative and gaudy spectacle, as though the population as a whole was saying that these Fahadh Faasil and Ayushmann Khurana middle-of-the-road ventures are okay to consume as OTT fodder, but when it comes to actually putting money down at the cinemas, give us the archetype larger-than-life movie centered around the HERO that worships his mother, romances the pretty girl and takes on a legion of bad guys while everyone around dutifully drops their jaws in awe.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that sentiment. Some of India's most beloved and enduring films were forged in the smithy of HERO cinema, and movie icons like Amitabh Bachchan, Rajinikant, Subhash Ghai built their careers upon this shrine. More recent entries like the first Dabangg (2010) or 2019's whimsical Avane Srimannarayana pay homage to the formula even as they cannily poke fun at it.  Sincerity of spirit and consistency of tone is what separates the creative gems from the derivative dross.

At least in its first installment, KGF (Kolar Gold Fields) falls somewhere in the middle. What it wants to be is an epic-scope saga of a warrior hero fulfilling his destiny. Born on the same day as the discovery of gold ore in the Kolar region sometime in the 60's, Raja Krishnappa Bairya is orphaned young after the death of a destitute mother who implores him to become a big man at least by his death so he can afford a proper funeral. Like every other Indian movie hero faced with a similar proposition he takes to a life of crime and becomes a high-profile hit-man called Rocky (Yash, already hailed in the credits as 'Rocking Star'). Stealth and subtlety are not the strong points of this assassin who could give Daniel Craig in Casino Royale a complex for sheer swagger. As the supporting characters in the film repeatedly proclaim (this film believes in 'show AND tell'), Rocky can veni-vidi-vici his way through all opposition. Lucky for him then that even the opposition lacks all stealth and subtlety. What he and them have in plenty is beards, such thick bushy affairs that it's hard to believe they are not compensating for something.

By linking its hero to the titular location, KGF provides tangible context to his fate, and Yash's deep-seeing stare suggests a formidable implacability of purpose. A focused narrative that went from his introduction to his being set on the path of his destiny would have made for a solid machismo-worshiping adrenaline rush. But like Gangs of Wasseypur's first installment, KGF-1 decides to temporarily abandon the quest to make time for a romance detour. Until then Yash had impressed as a stoic juggernaut capable of overcoming huge odds with a flick of his slick locks (he seems to be dependent on quick edits and multiple camera angles for his action scenes). But with the entry of the whatsername girl who borrows her fashion sense from Rati Agnihotri in Star, Rocky is reduced to a pedestrian eve-teaser with such genius exchanges as: "How dare you?" "How fair you!" Around a third of the film is wasted on this no-sizzle-all-fizzle-wet-dog-luurrv-angle which has no relevance to the story other than that blockbuster cinema is required to have a romance. There is also the immensely clumsy device of the tale being told by a journalist (Anant Nag slumming it) to a sneering TV anchor after having supposedly written a bare-all book that is being banned by a scared government. 

Things get better when KGF finally moves to its main location of the much-heralded gold fields, run with an iron hand by the villains. Rocky infiltrates the setting as a captured worker (Of course, none of the henchmen notice this beefy bouncer type walking tall among the rows of reedy cowed-down slaves). During this period of laying low he observes the exploitation of the workers in the illegal mine. The setting reminds me of the bandit stronghold in Avane Srimannarayana and the secret gold mine in The Mask of Zorro. Like all criminal protagonists in mainstream Indian cinema, Rocky's steely exterior hides a heart of gold and in carrying out his mission of assassinating the current master of the gold fields, he is also facilitating their release. Chapter 1 concludes at a pivotal point, foreshadowing the arrival of fresh adversaries and challenges that await our hero.

Going by the reviews I've read, I am hoping that KGF-2 has more of the good stuff and less of the awkward rubbish that hobbles the first part. My overall recommendation will depend on how that turns out.

Samskara aka Funeral Rites [dir. Pattabhirama Reddy]

It was probably a couple decades ago that I came across writer and academic UR Ananthamurthy's 1965 short novel Samskara, a searing indictment of the the hypocrisy in ritualistic Brahmin society. UR was a perennial iconoclast (in the years before his demise, he got into trouble with the establishment for suggesting that the Mahabharata has references to the consumption of flesh, including beef, by Brahmins) and a passionate fighter for his secular beliefs. In Samskara, by engineering a moral question that leads to the disintegration of a Brahmin colony he prods the hollowness of orthodox society, suggesting that in its quest for self-denying austerity and ritual, it has lost essential humanity. The 1970 film version, which I am seeing only now, is a faithful adaptation of these themes.

Fittingly, Samskara begins with a death. The victim is one Narayanappa, who during his lifetime was notorious for deliberately offending the Brahmin orthodoxy in which he was born, by abstaining from the prescribed rituals, indulging in meat and liquor, and - horror of horrors - consorting with the low-born woman Chandri. His lifeless corpse embodies the dilemma facing the community - should one whose life was dedicated to mocking Brahmin traditions be accorded the ritual funeral reserved for the high-born? And if so, who among them should undertake to perform the rites, since he then cannot be touched by anyone other than a Brahmin. The situation is compounded when a grieving Chandri offers all her gold jewelry to ensure a proper sendoff for her beloved Narayanappa. Trapped between their fear of ostracism and greed for the reward (and general necessity, as they are forbidden to even partake of food until the dead man has been taken care of), the Brahmin locals place the matter in the hands of Praneshacharya, the deemed leader of their community.

Praneshacharya is a study in contrast to Narayanappa. Known for his deep knowledge of scripture, he is single-minded in adherence to their prescribed norms and austerity. His marriage to an invalid woman he assiduously tends to by himself makes his home life also a model of self-sacrificing devotion and celibacy. Even his critics like Narayanappa admit that unlike the others he is at least a sincere Brahmin. In Sanskrit the name Pranesha roughly means "Lord of One's Life" and can be used as the term for a spouse. While not a caricature prig, Praneshacharya appears to have designed his entire life to focus on climbing the spiritual plane hierarchy. In fact one of the reasons why Narayanappa had not already been ostracized from the Brahmin community despite his provocative behavior is that Praneshacharya held back on this step, hoping that he could, by personal example and counseling, reform the wayward prodigal. This again can be interpreted as selfless benevolence or a calculated piety-garnering exercise.

Anyhow, with the matter placed in his hands, Praneshacharya feverishly pores over his texts but finds no answer. He then prays for divine intervention from the god Maruti / Hanuman (also a representative of celibacy and unswerving devotion in the Ramayana), relying on the device of placing a flower on the idol and waiting to see which way it falls. Here too, Praneshacharya's prayers fail him. In a daze from disappointment, exhaustion and hunger, he comes upon Chandri; at that moment, his self-control fails him and they give in to their physical urges.

His lifelong commitment to the austerities of spiritual life breached, followed immediately by the death of his wife (a reflection of the death of his self-imposed celibacy?), Praneshacharya wanders out of the village barely conscious of himself. In the meanwhile, Narayanappa's body continues to rot, and dead rats and hovering vultures show up as omens of blight. A plague is spreading through the community and nearby villages. As Chandri desperately tries to get her man cremated by any means, Praneshacharya's aimless tramping brings him in contact with the garrulous hedonistic Puttu, who takes the guru under his wing to show him the "sights of the world" (or at least the neighboring temple fair). In partaking of these pleasures (and eating at the temple feast without undertaking any purification rituals), Praneshacharya 'pollutes' the entire temple community. He begins to regard himself a bigger sinner than Narayanappa, who was at least open and honest about his transgressions.

I normally do not like to dissect plots in so much detail, but in Samskara, the course of the narrative and the questions it raises is what powers both book and film, and without bringing out these themes, there is no discussion. It questions the rigidity of strictures that force individuals to shirk basic human decency or be so conscious about denying oneself any gratification that the merest tremor can bring down the arduously built tower of virtue. Ananthamurthy's book was the subject of much debate when it was released, and the film version in turn had to fight the imposition of a ban by the censors.

Made on a low-budget with location shoots and a wholly naturalistic style, Samskara is a milestone in Kannada film. The crew, assembled as a true collaboration of creatives coming together to work on a meaningful project, included a foreign DoP (Tom Cowan) and editor (Steven Cartaw), possibly because the makers felt that local technicians at the time were not sufficiently conditioned for cinema verité. Acclaimed writer and stage personality Girish Karnad in his first screen role brings a lot of humanity to his portrayal of Praneshacharya, drawing our empathy for his dilemmas even as we realize that he (and the community he represents) has engineered his own fall from grace. The film adaptation of Samskara is undoubtedly a precursor to the social justice focused cinema of Shyam Benegal (Ankur, Nishant, Anugraham) and an engaging experience in itself.

Kavaludaari [dir. Hemanth M Rao]

Last night, on a friend's recommendation, I tried the recent Kannada flick Kavaludaari (Crossroads) on Amazon Prime.

In the story, a frustrated traffic cop (Rishi) wants to be a crime-solver and after a road excavation reveals decades old bones, obsessively aims to solve a long-closed case on his own. In his quest he meets with a scoop hungry journalist (Achyut Kumar) and later the cop who did the original investigation, now a disheveled drunk (the legendary Anant Nag). Whether they manage to solve the crime and bring justice forms the rest of the film.

Kavaludaari has a fantastic first half, in which we see Rishi's cop single-mindedly digging into the case. I appreciate that Rishi is shown as a novice detective finding his way with a mixture of amiability and doggedness, than the obnoxious sociopathic know-it-all favored by modern crime shows. Director Hemanth Rao essays a terrific visual showcase of past events as seen through Rishi's perspective, even incorporating them as part of a song that pushes the story forward. Rishi in this role has a very approachable presence and one empathizes with his character's desire to rise above his job. The entry of Anant Nag at a pivotal point adds another color. In his initial appearance as the rundown loner ex-cop Nag is so very convincing with his slovenly appearance, unsteady gait and trembling lips, it is almost disturbing. To the script's credit it doesn't immediately bow down to the bigger star - Nag's senior cop is a strong support to Rishi's investigation but does not supplant him.

So far so amazing. Alas, once the main baddie is revealed, which is a good while before the end, it succumbs to convention with muhahaha type "let me explain my masterful scheme" villainy, eye-rolling masala revenge, casual disregard of previously revealed details and leaps of logic that sully the precise and methodical way the film was built up till that point. There are still interesting visual metaphors and the actors are sincere, but it certainly falls short of the tense mystery-noir thriller it could have been. Still, damn it that first half certainly made it worth the while.