Kalank movie review

Kalank spoiler-fre…lets face it, no one gives a shit if this is spoiler free or not.

KALANK

CAST- SANJAY DUTT, MADHURI DIXIT, ALIA BHAT, SONAKSHI SINHA, VARUN DHAVAN, KIARA ADVANI, KRITI SANON, KUNAL KHEMU AND SOME OF THE WORST EDITING AND SCREEN-WRITING I HAVE SEEN IN YEARS

Ya well, let me start this in reverse by giving my review in advance.

This movie is a Waste of time.

In my 80+ movie reviews (Ya they got deleted, I managed to restore some of them though) over the last 6 years, this has been my subjectively designed rating system from highest to lowest-

Classic!

Superrific!

Total Timepass

Worth Watching Once

Watch if you have Nothing else to do

Save money watch on TV (and/or on a streaming service)

Waste of Time

Well, call me a generally positive person or misguided cinephile but I usually end up giving even the most forgettable of movies, a “Watch if you have Nothing else to do” or at least a “Save money watch on TV”. As far as I can recall, only 2-3 movies in my film reviewing history have had the lowest “Waste of time” rating. This may also be because I don’t watch all the movies that come out, only the ones which I feel like watching. But sometimes, I just decide to go out of my comfort zone and decide to give a movie which never excited me in the first place a chance. Because I have been wrong before. Tamasha is a prime example of a movie that I didn’t watch in the theatre when it came out and found it to be one of the most fascinating Hindi romantic drama movies ever. I mean EVER.

Having said that, I didn’t go into Kalank expecting a pleasant surprise of that kind. Because my one and only litmus test for particularly Hindi movies is not the marketing or the even the trailers. It’s the storytellers…the directors/producers. So if there is a movie directed by Sriram Raghavan or Anurag Kashyap or Raju Hirani or Vishal Bharadwaj…I know what kind of movie to expect and whether I should give it a shot or not. As much as I have love-hate relationship with Sanjay Leela Bhansali, I do know when he has written/directed a movie- it is going to be well crafted. Sometimes it’s also about the production house. I mean I know it’s going to be a different movie if Anurag Kashyap or Vishal Bharadwaj or Vidhu Vinod Chopra or Excel productions (Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar) are producing it. If it’s a Dharma productions movie (Karan Johar) it strictly meant candy floss entertainment and a strict no-no from me a few years ago. But since last few years I think Dharma productions started diversifying and producing/distributing fascinating content like Brothers, Bahubali, Raazi, Kesari etc. So when I saw Karan Johar’s name attached to a film…I was intrigued but I didnt know the director or the writer so I wasnt. Then I saw that it starred Madhuri and Alia and I was intrigued but then I saw Varun Dhawan and I…wasn’t. Then I saw Sanjay Dutt and I was intrigued and then I saw it was some multi-starrer family period drama and I wasn’t.

And that exactly what the movie is. Up and down. A confusing mess. Kalank starts with a very stylish title sequence showing only glimpses of the main star cast doing certain things and then flashes back to 2 years earlier to follow the story. While this kind of structure is a favourite structure of mine, the movie just messes it up completely. Suddenly you have Alia Bhat 10 years later narrating this story to a writer. But then the movie shows parts which she couldn’t have known. Even though that can be forgiven as a minor oversight, the movie sometimes includes her voice-over narration and sometimes doesn’t. It doesn’t stick to a tone.

The story is set in Husnabad a suburb or maybe a city close to Lahore (the movie doesn’t make it clear) in pre-partition India. There is no point in me recalling the plot here but it involves Alia Bhatt being forced to marry Aditya Roy Kapur a rich Choudhary news paper owner, whose first wife who is dying from cancer (Sonakshi) arranged that marriage, Sanjay Dutt is his stern father and Madhuri is an aging tawaif / Dancer (Because of course she is) and Varun Dhawan is her illegitimate child she had with some powerful guy in the city. There is a love triangle which between Alia, Aditya and Varun which is a major part of the story and there is a hidden secret which the movie tries to play around with but am sure even reading my plot summary you must have guessed what it is. There are also things like partition related communal riots, artisans losing their jobs because of industrialization, newspapers shaping social opinions, bull-fights in the Hindu Kush mountains  (yes CGI bull fights with a bull who can do only one move), classical music and kathak dancing, elaborate Dussehra festivals in pre-partition muslim dominated areas with performances so spectacular that their budget that would rival modern day movies and of course item numbers. (Kriti Sanon is hot. I don’t care)

The movie at 3 hours is way too long. And although it tries really hard to be a Shakespeare-esque family drama in the line of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet with family secrets and politics forming the background of a love/revenge story. But a movie like this requires either the raw,dark energy of Vishal Bharadwaj to make it work or the aesthetic grand scale of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Director Abhishek Varman (2 states) tries desperately hard but fails at it. Only appearing to be a gareebon ka Bhansali with elaborate sets that don’t make sense and aren’t captured as well cinematically. He also lacks the venom and intensity Bharadwaj or even Kashyap could bring to such a drama. The dialogue lacks the flair to be anything interesting. The music by Pritam is passable and even they eventually give Madhuri a chance to dance (I mean let’s face it, they only cast her in that role for her dancing skills. I mean am not complaining. Dedh Ishqiya did it a million times better by giving her a great character too) they have a utterly forgettable song which filmed the dullest possible way you could film a goddess like Madhuri in her element as a dancer.

Not to say that there arent interesting elements in there. As I said, it has Shakespeare-esque potential and with a tighter script could have worked fairly well. There is a good movie in there, but I don’t think the writer (I don’t know this person. But I can bet he/she is the producer’s cousin, maasi etc.) The film has a very old-school feel to it and I don’t mean it in a good way. It tries desperately to be this long, musical family drama/love story like Waqt or K3G but doesn’t quite have the intensity or the charm to hold my interest. I read that Yash Chopra had conceptualised this movie 15 years ago and it shows. Maybe he or hell even Karan Johar could’ve made it a more fun experience. The movie languishes at a pace which is not keeping with the times and nor with its own story. It has like multiple endings with almost every character narrating a voice over ending when only Alia had started telling the story in the first place. There is a journalist cum writer who is writing this story, as well as modern day Aditya Roy Kapur is also telling this story…also, Varun Dhawan says something when he dies (I already said this is a spoiler review) as well as all the main characters are in heaven like version of Husnabad in white clothes also there is Alia in the end talking to us.  It’s like the writers had 3-4 different endings in mind and they just decided to film all of them. Then they forget to tell the editor which one to keep and the movie got released with ALL of them.

This movie except for one or two scenes was a completely forgettable experience. And a boring one. Very surprising that Alia would choose a movie like this after being in Raazi and Gully Boy. She has become my favourite actress working currently after Deepika and although she is the highlight of the performances, she can’t do much with a movie that doesn’t flow well. The rest of the cast actually have some good performances, some scenes are good but again it’s the overall movie that’s a let-down. I usually respect movies so much that I don’t even go peeing for longer so that I don’t miss anything. I didn’t respect this movie at all. Skip it. Watch Tashkent files instead. Am watching that today. Review coming soon.

PS- Avengers Endgame hype is on!!!