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Release
date:
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June 21,
2019
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Director:
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Sandeep Reddy
Vanga
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Cast:
Language:
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Shahid Kapoor,
Kiara Advani, Kamini Kaushal, Suresh Oberoi, Arjan Bajwa, Adil Hussain,
Nikita Dutta, Soham Majumdar, Kunal Thakur
Hindi and English
with (unsubtitled) Punjabi
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It takes almost 50
minutes for the heroine of Kabir Singh to utter her first sentence. “Kabir,
what do you like in me?” says this fragile-looking child-woman who was a mute
puppet in his hands until then. “I like the way you breathe,” he replies. Ooh, keh diya na dil ko touch kar jaane waali
baat!
Okay, my apologies
for the flippant tone, but please excuse it as a defence mechanism against one
of the most horrific, harrowing, horrendous odes to misogyny and patriarchy
ever created by Indian cinema in any language – humourised and romanticised for
our viewing pleasure.
Kabir Singh is the Bollywood remake of the 2017 Tollywood
blockbuster Arjun Reddy starring
Vijay Sai Deverakonda and Shalini Pandey in the roles played in this Hindi
version by Shahid Kapoor and Kiara Advani. To call both problematic is an
understatement. As I watched Kabir Singh,
I could already hear in my head the tired clichés that are rolled out as
rebuttals to criticism of such films and are likely to be regurgitated for this
one.
“C’mon ya, men like
that do exist.”
“Are you saying
films should not depict reality?”
“If negative
characters could influence people to become bad then how come positive
characters do not immediately reform society?”
Or, as Kapoor
himself pre-emptively said earlier this week in a newspaper interview: “If we
start judging characters, we can’t make movies that are real.”
Oh brother, stop.
Please stop. This is exhausting, but for the zillionth time: it is not the
depiction of reality that is objectionable here, it is precisely because
violent, destructive misogynists do exist and women for centuries have suffered
at their hands that it is deeply troubling when a film portrays such a person
as cool, funny, and, as Kapoor puts it, a man with “a good heart” who “loves
purely” and “wears his emotions on his sleeve”.
Again brother,
stop. Stop with the euphemisms, please. Call the Kabir Singhs of the world what
they are and show them up for what they are: obnoxious, ugly sociopaths.
Kapoor plays Kabir
Rajdhir Singh, an ill-tempered, aggressive albeit academically brilliant
medical college student who one day sees a pretty girl on campus and decides
she is his. Her name is Preeti Sikka (Kiara Advani) but he does not know that
then. They have yet to even have a conversation, but like a dog urinating to
mark his territory, Kabir goes to an all-men junior class, announces to the students
that they can have their pick of the other women in the college but this one is
his woman, and demands that they spread the word on his behalf.
Mind you, all this
and everything that comes thereafter (he is a chain-smoking alcoholic and drug taker who descends further into a
spiral of substance abuse and sex addiction when he is forcefully separated
from Preeti) is depicted in a comical tone and projected as intensity, passion
and profound emotion. Every one of the despicable Kabir’s actions is portrayed
as the handiwork of a loveable, mad genius. Besides, the heroine who seems
initially intimidated by him soon falls in love with him, he treats another
woman like meat and she too promptly tells him she loves him, his friends –
male and female – adore him, he is popular with the nurses in his hospital on
whom he threatens to vent his horniness... I mean, c’mon ya, if so many people
are smitten by him he must be having “a good heart”, no?
Judge for yourself
the heart so good that Kabir kisses Preeti for the first time while she stands
statue-like, having not expressed any interest in him till then, he physically
imposes himself on her subsequently too, he orders her around like one might a
pet animal that one is fond of, after they have sex for the first time he
instructs her in a proprietorial manner to cover up in public, after she falls
for him he roughs her up, treats her like shit, repeatedly hits her
and tells her she was a nobody in college whose identity rested entirely on her
being known as his girl, and worse.
As if none of this
was enough, a song titled Tera Ban Jaunga
has lyrics that go thus:
Meri raahein tere tak hain
Tujhpe hi
toh mera haq hai
(Translation: my path, every path I take, leads to you / I have a
right over just you.)
The point about a “right”
over a lover is re-asserted in the song Tujhe Kitna Chahne Lage, in which the
words go, “Tere ishq pe haan haq mera hi
toh hai” (I alone have a right over your love).
From the 1990s,
Hindi cinema gradually bade goodbye to the portrayal of violence, molestation
and stalking as legitimate forms of courtship. It never went away entirely, but
for the most part, if a leading man was a stalker, he was categorically slotted
as the villain of the piece as he was in Yash Chopra’s Darr. The romanticisation of stalking and the mistreatment of
women while wooing them has made a big comeback this decade, epitomised by Raanjhanaa (2013) and various Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar starrers. Kabir Singh
is in the same league: dangerous to the core because it is such a slick
production.
For one, it is well
acted, especially by Kapoor, Advani (known so far for M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Lust
Stories, Bharat Ane Nenu), Arjan
Bajwa playing Kabir’s brother and Soham Majumdar in the role of the hero’s best
buddy Shiva. Kapoor, in fact, is so good here that it is heart-breaking to see
him use his gift thus, to see the spectacular star of Vishal Bhardwaj’s
spectacular Haider (2014) descend to
this cinematic abomination.
The cast is one of Kabir Singh’s many pluses. The
cinematography by Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran is plush, the editing by Aarif
Sheikh and Vanga himself is truly slick, and the songs are attractive. That
said, those numbers are ruined by the manner in which they are used in the
narrative along with the overbearing, ear-splitting background score. The songs
are pleasant when heard separately, but they are slammed
into the film’s soundscape like whiplashes akin to the screechy effects used in
bad Bollywood thrillers to startle the audience.
Most insidious is
the writing of Kabir Singh, which
uses humour to lull us into an acceptance of its terrible, terrifying hero’s
obnoxiousness. As offensive as his patriarchal, misogynistic attitude towards
the heroine and other women is the fact that towards the end
writer-director-editor Sandeep Vanga seems to be trying to evoke sympathy for
him by getting him to tearfully confess that he is an alcoholic. Clearly with
this goal in mind, a few bars from the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are also woven into the background
score – in a silly and tacky fashion, it must be said – when Kabir is dealing
with the death of a loved one.
Towards the end,
Vanga even seems to be attempting a statement about the limits that supposed
democracy places on us when a lawyer says of Kabir that such free-spiritedness
in a democracy is not okay. Ah, so being a creep is “free-spiritedness”. Got
it.
That line is one of
many dialogues in Kabir Singh that are written to sound deep and intellectual,
but mean little to nothing especially considering the context in which they are
spoken.
The naming of the hero in Vanga’s
Hindi remake seems to be a bow to the poet-saint
Kabir, and to underline the point, in a voiceover in the opening scene
the fellow’s grandmother (Kamini Kaushal) recites one of Kabir’s
dohas. I do not know whether to laugh or cry at this desecration of the great
man’s writing. Kabir Singh and its
Telugu forebear Arjun Reddy must rank
among the most disturbing examples of the obsessive stalker hero being
glamourised by Indian cinema.
Rating (out
of five stars): *
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CBFC Rating (India):
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A
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Running time:
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175 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
I find it a bit unfair that you're judging this film to a standard that the film was never intended for, and I say this because it sounds like you have seen Arjun Reddy. To me, this review is the equivalent of a food critic who doesn't like Aloo, doesn't like Gobi, goes to a restaurant and orders Aloo Gobi and then trashes it for having aloo and gobi in it, instead of judging it in the context of is it a well made aloo gobi or not. If you trashed it for length, bad performances, underdeveloped love story that you couldn't buy into, etc., that would be fair because those are all the boxes the film is trying to tick. Another analogy is you owned a car that wasn't fuel efficient, then you decided to buy the same make and model again and trash it for not being fuel efficient. Really, what did yo expect? Another analogy is me reading your review trashing your review for taking the film so seriously and responding, "It's JUST a film Anna", I've read enough of your reviews to know you don't view films as just films so I know it's silly of me to try to make that argument. I think critics should just film to the appropriate yardstick.
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