Release date:
|
March 17, 2017
|
Director:
|
Nicholas
Kharkongor
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Rajat Kapoor,
Kalki Koechlin, Lushin Dubey, Shiv Pandit, Rohan Joshi, Danish Hussain, Yuri
Suri, Adil Hussain
English with some Hindi
|
In an early scene
from Mantra, a little girl at a shop
counter asks for King Chips. All around her there lie only packets of the
upstart brand Kipper, which the shopkeeper is hardselling. She is undeterred.
King Chips is what she wants and King Chips is all she will have. The dukaandaar finally gives in, fetching a
packet from a corner at the back of his establishment where he had stashed it away
from the gaze of customers, not having bargained for this one insistent child.
Her loyalty is rare
in a market where money buys visibility and where consumer choices could be
driven as much by a lack of alternatives as by natural inclinations, Indian
cinema itself being a case in point. What, for instance, might the girl have
done, if she had been told that Kipper was the only brand in stock? Would she
have had the time to scour the market? Would she have given up eating chips
altogether?
Questions,
questions… They come up at every juncture of director Nicholas Kharkongor’s crowd-funded
film set in New Delhi in 2004, when the protagonist Kapil Kapoor’s home-grown business
is on the verge of bankruptcy as his King Chips struggles against the
greater resources of Kipper’s multinational owners.
Rajat Kapoor plays
Kapil a.k.a. KK, whose losing battle with Kipper has destroyed his peace of
mind. His wife Meenakshi (Lushin Dubey) is wilting under the weight of their
loveless marriage. Meanwhile, KK is trying to be an attentive father to their children
who he once neglected. Their 28-year-old son Viraj (Shiv Pandit) does not want
anything to do with his Dad’s company, opting instead to start a restaurant
chain, from the name of which the film derives its title. Daughter Pia (Kalki
Koechlin) is a chef in Mantra Delhi. At 25, she wants a life of greater
independence from her father who she resents. The family of five is rounded off
by their much younger sibling Vir (Rohan Joshi) who, at 16, has discovered love
and sex on the Internet.
The Kapoors’ public
facade of normalcy hides great professional and personal turmoil.
KK is the point at
which the old and new collide, in a world where “mantra” could indicate a cool hangout
to a hip youngster or our vulnerable Bhartiya
sanskriti to an aggressive nationalist. Manmohan Singh and P.V. Narasimha
Rao’s liberalisation policies from the 1990s have altered India forever. Atal
Bihari Vajyapee’s PM-ship is coming to an end, but Hindutvavaadi forces are still
on the rise. In this cauldron of change, family is sometimes a source of
solace, but very often not.
Mantra has several ingredients that work in its favour. Kharkongor’s
script is often observant, and touches upon multiple issues without seeming
self-conscious about its social conscience. The background score is pleasant,
soothing and almost thoughtful. And though this is not a dominant factor, I
enjoyed the artwork on the walls of the Kapoor home.
If the film does not
come together as a whole, it is for clearly identifiable reasons: first, the
cast is a mixed bag; second, the English dialogues do not sit well on several
of them; third, the equation between the five Kapoors is not fully established,
as a result of which I found myself rooting for some of them as individuals but
not for the family as a whole (unlike, say, the equally unhappy Mehras who we
met in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do
in 2015).
Curiously enough, Mantra’s most memorable passages involve
a brief encounter between a Kapoor and an absolute stranger: KK’s comfort level
with a bemused truck driver, Pia trying to knock logic into the heads of
misogynistic policemen, the humour in KK’s drunken night-time revelry with an
unnamed drug user, and – above all – a poignant conversation between Pia and a restaurant
delivery man who responds to her call for help in a life-threatening situation.
These episodes give
us glimpses of Kharkongor’s potential in an otherwise inconsistent film.
Koechlin and Pandit
are the pick of the primary cast. Dubey is awkward throughout. And Rajat Kapoor’s
likeable screen presence cannot camouflage his discomfort with his English lines
though he seems fine while occasionally speaking Hindi in the film.
He is still better off
than Maya Rao and a couple of the other supporting artistes, who sound like
they are spouting English dialogues written for Western characters in a Western
play that has not been adapted to the Indian English idiom. We see too many such
productions on the Delhi stage.
The blame for this unevenness
rests mostly with the writing, though the actors must take some responsibility
too, if you consider that Koechlin and Pandit slip in and out of English and
Hindi without sounding mannered at all while speaking English, as some of their
seniors in the film do.
Which brings me to
an important question: why on earth do we not see more of Shiv Pandit as a hero in films? Or Adil Hussain? Pandit manages to draw something out of his role
despite the limited exploration of his character in the script. And Hussain rules
with an appearance that lasts barely a couple of minutes.
That scene in which
Pia breaks down while confiding in his character, a migrant from Jharkhand, is
the stand-out moment in Mantra. Give
us more where that came from, Mr Kharkongor.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
A
|
Running time:
|
96 minutes 03 seconds
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: imdb.com
