‘Kuttey’ review: Aasman Bhardwaj’s debut has style, but no perspective
Aasman Bharadwaj’s Kuttey has all the trappings of the first film energy — a condition in which a filmmaker is so excited to have gotten a chance to say something that he chooses to say everything that is on his mind. By that I mean, every frame, every moment of Kuttey is designed to impress, sometimes at the risk of making it overstuffed or indulgent. The film possesses the kind of style that sacrifices substance.
I look at directorial debuts as evidence of a filmmaker’s potential — in that, they should be tempered with the personality of its maker; directorial voices, I believe, can be refined. It’s this exact thing that is missing in Kuttey — a sense of Aasman Bhardwaj’s directorial personality. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have any personality. It’s just that most of it feels borrowed and influenced — from the works of Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Anurag Kashyap, and more urgently, Bhardwaj’s own father, Vishal Bhardwaj, who also serves as the film’s co-writer, music composer, and co-producer. (A lot of that feeling also emanates from the appearances of Vishal Bhardwaj’s regular collaborators: lyricist Gulzar, editor A. Sreekar Prasad, and actors Naseeruddin Shah and Tabu).
The dog-eat-dog universe
In that, Vishal Bhardwaj’s seminal Kaminey (2009) forms a constant shadow over Kuttey’s dog-eat-dog universe. The story about corrupt cops and brash goons outwitting each until they end up being outwitted themselves is too self-conscious and distracted to be unpredictable. Kuttey in the jungles of Maharashtra in 2003: Lakshmi (Konkona Sen Sharma), a Naxalite leading a rag-tag army, has been captured by the police. When the cop at the helm (Kumud Mishra) questions her motives, she narrates a metaphor for loyalty and greed through the fable of a lion, goat, and a dog. To cut things short, cops are the dogs, Naxals are the goats, the lion is the government. When the story jumps 13 years, there’s another (familiar) fable of scorpions and frogs, narrated to imply that it’s impossible to go against one’s nature.
Also read: ‘Thunivu’ review: Ajith owns the character in bank heist story
It’s here that the fable comes to fruition when Mishra’s cop teams up with a junior cop Gopal (Arjun Kapoor), both employed by a drug kingpin (Naseeruddin Shah) to take out one of his rivals. A long-drawn shootout sequence later, they’re both suspended. Their only way out is Pammi (Tabu), another inspector who offers to reverse their suspension for a large sum of cash. Also in the mix is a couple looking for an escape: Bhau’s daughter Lovely (a charismatic Radhika Madan) and his employee Danny (Shardul Bhardwaj), setting in action a series of double-crossing and violent interludes that makes up the 112-minute runtime of Kuttey.
No room for story to breathe
In that sense, Kuttey is a chaotic undertaking from its very first moment. The disconnected first-half is riddled with derivative characterization, which is to say, almost every character in the film behaves like people we’ve encountered in movies before except that nearly all of them feel like a misfit in this particular film. The writing is unimaginative, mistaking uninterrupted cussing for any plot development or excitement. The breathless energy of the film and its comic-book quality would have perhaps been a more satisfying endeavour had the film allowed room for its story to breathe. Instead, we’re treated to bloody set-piece after set-piece that are staged so messily that it feels like a cruel joke.
Also read: ‘Varisu’ review: Vijay anchors moving family drama
As a director, Aasman Bhardwaj falls prey to the standard tactic of withholding information to create a sense of atmosphere and tension. The reason that it falls flat is because of the film’s treatment — a pastiche of mismatched directorial tones. You can sense that he’s not the best at getting performances out of his actors either, and the turns of the ensemble either feel familiar or completely over-the-top. Although, to the director’s credit, Kuttey manages to pick up steam in his second-half that, if anything, offers a glimpse of what the film could have been had it possessed its own perspective.
Sure, it’s fun to see some of the most talented actors of Hindi cinema go at each other’s throats with careless abandon. But I wish it was as entertaining to see them do that, considering the film has everything going for it (including a rehash of “dhan-te-nan”). But Kuttey, strained and laborious, turns out to be far from that.that is on his mind. By that I mean, every frame, every moment of Kuttey is designed to impress, sometimes at the risk of making it overstuffed or indulgent. The film possesses the kind of style that sacrifices substance.
