Image Source: Offical website (kaminey.utvnet.com/)

Go to see “Kaminey” and you are likely to be confronted with the cinema-goer’s existential questions. What is the purpose of cinema? Does it lie in the telling of a tale so riveting that the viewer wishes it would never end? Does it comprise of the film-maker’s vision and his desire to show it to the world? Such as it may be, should he be allowed to indulge himself in creating an oeuvre that few understand and still fewer appreciate?

These questions hit you, left, right and centre, like shrapnel flying in a combat zone, when you elect to see “Kaminey”. The setting of the film is comfortably familiar, so familiar through its countless predecessors inglorious and otherwise. Say “Bombay underworld” and we sink into a comfort zone of chases through old mills, past local trains and the now-famous lanes of India’s most crammed metro. The mood is introspective and the cinematography only enhances this. There is a pastiche of shots that’s pure Art. So pure is it that it belongs to the still rather than the moving world. It moves languidly and nimble by turns…

What sets the tone of “Kaminey”? Quite definitely, the almost surreal lighting. The dramaturgic play of light and shadow tells its own thespian tale, almost as much, if not more than the script does! The hair-trigger pace of the film sometimes detracts from the story-telling. So snappy is it that, in places, it makes the viewers’ head spin, making him lose track of the cast’s antics.

There are times when a film-maker ought to stop to ask himself what does he seek to achieve by making the story rush out of the screen in the manner of a bat out of hell? To my mind, it spoke of an attempt to cover up weak characterisation and a poor narrative. I found the narrative poor not in terms of pace (which, as said above, is hypersonic!), but in terms of a sequence of themes, motives and plot-lines. Early in the film, Charlie begins a story. You begin to develop an interest in his story, only to have this device abandoned after a while. It might have been interesting to have Guddu’s voice tell us his story as a counter-poise. But that does not happen. The interesting philosophy expounded by Charlie is illustrated by and by, but you don’t hear his “voice” so much after a while. The problem is that having given his tale wonderfully identifiable beginnings, the film-maker loses sight of middles and ends! The path of exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement, normally constructed into coherent plot lines is abandoned in favour of a non-linear recital. The problem with such story-telling is that it cannot then take advantage of that most useful of devices – suspense! For sure, you see the film move towards an almost certain ending. But the near-operatic climax is marred by the earlier meanderings of the chronicle.

The main plot contains too many subplots: Guddu, Sweety, the three Bengali brothers, Tashi, the two-timing Sikkimese (Bhutanese?) and the African brothers, Bhope Bhau and his love of Maharashtra, the corrupt cops. There’s simply not enough time in three hours for the director to tell everyone’s story, to make every character believable, even identifiable. The actors are competent. But only just. There is no Pankaj Kapur, no Saif Ali Khan to raise the floundering film to Olympian heights. One feels a bit sorry for the so-earnest Shahid Kapoor. He lacks his father’s raw talent, and he owns not a shred of the menacing magnetism of Saif Ali Khan. Priyanka Chopra is just that. Priyanka Chopra. She mouths a few dialogues in atrocious Marathi, thereby robbing her character of the little respectability it showed in an earlier sequence. The botoxed expression gets in the way of the performance! Amol Gupte is on the brink of an alternative career as an actor. The rest of the ensemble is competent, but essentially forgettable. None will stick in your memory for long.

No complaints about the multi-layered sound, the songs which have most of the country’s young tapping their feet, including the really unique, if slightly absurd choreographic device adopted in Kaminey, or the editing which is slightly psychedelic in places.

My grouse with Bharadwaj stems from a too-high threshold of expectations. The issues, the ideological conflicts and the lesson-learning he promises in the beginning of the film never materialise.