Aditya Roy Kapoor resists drinking alcohol in his role as a grieving Hindu husband and anti-Partition activist…until he meets Varun Dhawan.
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Varun Dhawan’s dialogue delivery defies not just the ambiguity of 1946 but the fluidity of 2019 – he isn’t cut out to play period heroes, less so a rebel defying the politics of Jinnah’s Muslim League era. The performances lack any sort of conditioning. But not even a cinematographer can save the self-conscious and ill-conceived imagery of newspapers flying in slow-motion onto the hero’s face or burning in a CGI bonfire during the riots. The production design, garish on the outside and lavish on the inside, is elevated by Binod Pradhan’s old-world cinematography. Some of the music is nice, but the songs exist solely to make the movie look like it was five years in the making. Given Kalank ’s (unintentional) film-critic subtext, it’s only fair that, like any self-respecting and safe Indian reviewer, I mention every department of filmmaking. Roop is introduced with a mandatory kite-flying song to demonstrate her happy-go-lucky nature Zafar with an Eid song named “First-class” the two have a love-at-first-sight scene during Dussherra against the backdrop of a burning Raavan with Ram’s arrows (doubling up as Cupid’s) whizzing past them Sanjay Dutt is Balraaj, a patriarch whose murky past brings to memory the travails of Rajesh Khanna’s Balraaj in Aa Ab Laut Chalein Madhuri Dixit plays a tawaif who so deliberately oozes Begum-heavy lyricism with every glance and arched eyebrow that you might wonder if Chandramukhi was merely reappearing after being accidentally locked in a diamond-studded prison on Bhansali’s Devdas set. In short, the storytelling is just as obsolete as the story being told.
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Some may call it eternal, but Varman’s sense of world-building is bereft of the depth the imagery thinks it merits. 2 States director Abhishek Varman seems to have trained his cameras on bootlegged Partition-themed paintings for most part: Brothels that look like palaces, palaces that look like kingdoms, kingdoms that look like newsrooms, newsrooms that look like South Bombay libraries. It decorates, pauses, gasps, whispers, sighs, romanticizes and ultimately chokes on its own derived sense of (slam) poetry. It truly believes that being beautiful is enough in a world infected with nostalgia. In many ways, Kalank is an arrogant symbol of multiplex Bollywood.
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And I sympathize with anyone who chooses to watch a bitter film-critic origin story disguised as a lavishly mounted historical – and vaguely xenophobic – drama. In the meantime, poor Zafar is accused of being a cynic whose passion is trusted by nobody in the upper echelons of the town even his own mother is wary of him. Needless to mention, her article is rejected.Īlso Read: Anupama Chopra’s Review Of Kalank It’s no wonder Zafar is shown fighting cartoonish bulls in his spare time. Furthermore, Roop is intrigued by Zafar, and even becomes a “journalist” in her husband’s newspaper company so that she can write about Zafar’s exotic world – akin to the cinematic gaze the aforementioned movies employ to accessorize earthy middle-Indian stories in the name of rousing underdog sagas. The family doesn’t mind replacing one empty spectacle with another for the sake of its reputation, its izzat.
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Roop, too, is a compromise: She has married into privilege as part of a “financial” arrangement that promises a bright future to her younger sisters. She is married to a wealthy heir whose first wife – the previous big-budget extravaganza – is dying of cancer. Zafar doesn’t know it, but he is a living, breathing allegory for a Hindi film critic in 2019.Ĭan anyone blame him? Roop is the big-budget, pretty, elegant but soulless mainstream movie that he is trying so hard to like. At one point, Roop ( Alia Bhatt), the married woman he is wooing, asks him, “Tum sab mein buraayi kyun dhoondhte rehte ho?” (Why do you find flaws in everything?), to which a half-serious Zafar replies: “Kyuki mujhe achaayi se darr lagta hai” (Because I fear goodness/quality). In Kalank, Varun Dhawan plays a muscular, and therefore perpetually bare-bodied, Muslim blacksmith named Zafar in pre-Independence Lahore.