This film breaks the police stereotype — neither clown nor demi-god

The police have long played a key role in Indian cinema. And, the movie versions of the police are almost always dramatised to the point, where they come across either as cartoon characters or demi-gods with the poetic licence of the scriptwriter stretched to the maximum.

If films like Singham and Dabangg projected the police as superhuman and a law unto themselves, others like Encounter: The Killing controversially celebrated policemen in extra-judicial killings, while some showed them as bumbling characters in Hindi movies like No Problem.

Rarely has one seen the “reel” police reflect the real ones many have personally seen and interacted with. A recently released film on Netflix, Kuttavum Shikshayum is, in this writer’s view, among the most honest portrayals of the force. And, no prizes for guessing the language it has been made in – Malayalam.

After watching the movie, there is no option for a non-Keralite but to scratch their heads and wonder how the industry in that small state manages to come up with films that are way ahead of their peers in the rest of the country. Is it the fish, or the beef or something in the culture of the state that makes this possible?

Directed by Rajeev Ravi, Kuttavum… delicately straddles the fine line of reality without falling into the trap of stereotypes. There is no scene with unbelievable stunts, super-heroism or the police projected as blundering fools who don’t know the basics of their job.

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The plot is pretty simple. A jewellery heist has occurred in a prominent store in the heart of a Kerala town. A police team sets out to investigate it. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is neither a Sherlock Holmes-type epiphany nor an intriguing Hercule Poirot kind of character to embellish the plot or make the protagonists look attractive. At the same time, the movie does not slack like art films often tend to do. The script, screenplay and direction blend together seamlessly to create a degree of tension right through the film. It is just taut.

If a slight error had been committed at any point during the denouement, there was the danger of the movie simply collapsing. But that never happens. You want to continue watching the film without taking your eyes off.  And, before you realise it, the movie ends “quickly” though it is over two hours long.

And, by the way, there are no songs to break the tension – no unnecessary diversion into slapstick and neither is there a “hero vs villain” fight sequence. Most importantly, there is no romance and hell, no female protagonist even as a token presence, which some consider necessary for the box-office and to break the tedium.

In short, Kuttavum… breaks the traditional formula of the typical Indian film quite successfully. Rajeev and his team don’t seem compelled to conform. The film is what you would expect the police to do as they go about investigating a crime.

The police in real life, incidentally, never give out their trade secrets – how they actually go about tracking the perpetrators of a crime, the many ingenious ways in which they track suspects, the massive backend support of their colleagues well-versed in the latest techniques and finally, how they nab the culprits.

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When the police top brass announces a breakthrough in an investigation, more often than not, the suspects are said to be arrested in a bus stand, railway station or when “they were moving about in a suspicious manner”–whatever that means. The reality is often different. But, the police will never reveal that.

In Kuttavum…, the viewer gets a front-seat view into what actually happens in an investigation – threadbare and without fanfare. At the risk of sounding cliched, the movie is an education for those curious to know how the police go about their job when hunting down suspects. The police in the film are like anyone you would come across in real life – with their own personal anxieties and failings, individuals with families and existential worries etc. In short, they are doing their jobs as anyone else does in their areas of expertise, to earn a living and retire comfortably.

The investigation takes them from Kerala to Rajasthan and again, there you see the nature of cooperation between the police force of the two states. The director, meanwhile, is not tempted to magically grant the Malayalam-speaking police the ability to switch to top-gear Hindi, as many movies do.

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The Kerala police personnel speak barely functional Hindi; one of them cannot understand even the basics of the language. The officers in UP speak functional English, and that is how reality is – there is none of the claims of Hindi as the “national language”. Even the Hindi in the film is a local dialect of the kind spoken in the area the police go to for their investigation.

What is kept out of the narrative is interference by politicians, of the kind we have got accustomed to seeing in most movies. And which, by many accounts, is a reflection of reality. But Kuttavum… avoids this element making it possible for an uncomplicated and linear unrolling of the plot.

Though it may not have been intended by the filmmaker, the absence of political interference gives the viewer an idea how much better life would have been had that been the reality, which sadly, is not the case.

(The story was updated to change Uttar Pradesh to Rajasthan)

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