Kuttey
Director: Aasmaan Bhardwaj
Year: 2023
Duration: 110 minutes
Music: Vishal Bhardwaj
Rating: 6.5
Trans:
Dogs
Aasmaan Bhardwaj, the director and script
writer of this Bollywood film clearly went to the school of Quentin Tarantino.
The film is awash in his influences - in particular his early films, Pulp
Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. There is even a story that someone tells of looking
for a man and not finding him till they heard sounds from the bathroom where
the person was on the toilet and three slugs later, he was dead. Right out
of Pulp Fiction. This is edgy and violent. Karma comes full circle in it.
Another tale told is of the scorpion and the frog - the scorpion stings the
frog as it carries it across the river and the frog says why, you will die
too. Because that is who I am. Everyone in the film is either a frog
or a scorpion. Bollywood has moved light years just since I started watching
them twenty-years ago where romance was at the center of most films - there
were big musical numbers, there wasn't even a kiss allowed, there was always
a hero and a heroine and the violence was toned down. This is a different
world. Extremely violent, full of profanity, sexual encounters and there
is no hero or heroine. There are a few songs but they don't intrude on the
story. Everyone is rotten to the core. Everyone is corrupt in a world where
you grab what you can. From the top to the bottom. Within the law and outside
it. It is hard to think of a film offhand in which you have no one to root
for.
It is told in disparate chapters with various
characters that all come together at the end - with guns pointed at each
other. It makes for a very intriguing if too slick and forced narrative.
It begins with a chapter titled Prologue that takes place 20-years before
the rest of the film. The police have captured a female Naxalite - a Communist
insurgency that has been going on since 1967 and still is - and have tortured
and raped her. One of the policemen tries to get the other police to stop
and gets beaten up for it. This saves him though when the rebels come to
free her and kill all the cops - beheading one of them. His head lying there
mournfully on the ground. Laxmi (Konkona Sen Sharma) spares the man she calls
Sardar (position of high rank) and leaves him a grenade for when he has had
enough of the hierarchy. This scene doesn't come into play till the end of
the film. Though it is perhaps a step too far even for karma.
Gopal (Arjun Kapoor) is inside a hovel of
a short time room and a ratty mattress having sex with a prostitute. His
friend Paaji (Kumud Mishra) is outside the door keeping watch but there is
little he can do when one of the bigger Don's comes down with his retinue
in a wheelchair. Khobre (Naseeruddin Shah) has business to conduct with the
two of them. The two of them have been doing business on the side with another
Don and his Nigerian drug contacts. If you want to live, you have to kill
him. Both nod their heads in relief. In a comical assassination, they first
get pushed into the water by giggling girls at a pool party, almost drowned,
saved and then start killing everyone. Starting with the gigglers. But they
get caught by the police and suspended. We realize they are cops too. Dirty
to the bone. But survivors. One of them is the Sardar from 20-years ago.
And he still has that grenade.
They are told by another cop that their
only way out is to meet with a female Inspector, Pammi, played by the great
Tabu. They do - she tells them the story of the man on the toilet between
fuck this and fuck that. It is told comically but with a lesson inside of
it. Don't even think of screwing with me. Sure, she will help them. A crore
each. 10 million rupees. Not having this money, Gopal does the next
best thing - plans to rob an armored car that has enough money to pay Pammi.
In one of those Tarantino twists, others are planning the same thing and
it gets very bloody and then bloodier. It is hard mentally watching a film
where everyone is a killer and backstabber - and yet I found my allegiances
shifting around from character to character as they get deeper and deeper
into the shit that is all their doing. You wonder who if anyone will survive
this night. This was a debut film for the director and it is well shot,
has distinct characters and it gives no relief to the viewer. It comes in
at a modest 110-minutes. The film was a huge bomb, so perhaps the Indian
audience wasn't quite ready for this style of film.