Kali
and Shankar are two brothers who were separated
in childhood and grow up to belong to opposite
sides of the same fence. Kali, out of a ten-year
term in prison an for having killed Debu’s
lawyer right inside the courtroom because he stopped
the killers from being punished, is back at his
temple home, bent on avenging the murder of his
father, the priest, egged on by an equally avenging
grandfather who now looks after the temple. The
much younger Shankar who lost his memory and developed
a violent streak in a freak accident as a child,
is brought up by a local Muslim. He is the main
henchman of his father’s killers, MLA Debu
Soren and his right-hand man Gittu Hotelwalla.
A maid of Debu Soren’s mistress picks up
Tithi, their little sister, from the streets.
She grows up to be a wayward drunkard who drives
in at any hour of night and is frustrated for
God-Alone-Knows what reason. The story smacks
a great deal of those old lost-and-found Hindi
hits of Manmohan Desai but minus the slick sophistication
and melodious music.
 Oh
yes…The two young men have their love interests
too. One of them dances away to gay abandon at
the local bar while the other simpers and sobs
and simply walks into the temple home of her man
and begins to live there. But their men are keener
on violence than on romance so all they can do
is to cavort around their men and wait for that
rare moment where they can break out into a song-and-dance
number. They finally get the chance to prove their
mettle in the climactic scene where they disguised
as dancers, they dance along with their men in
a scene lifted out of one of the climactic scenes
in Ramesh Sippy’s Shaan. Once the
two brothers recognize each other and the sister
is brought into the temple home, all hell breaks
loose in Debu Soren’s fiefdom and his days,
to repeat a cliché, are numbered. There
is the honest police officer too, who forever
tries to keep Kali away from taking the law in
his own hands and also falls in love with the
wayward sister.
The script is totally focussed on aggressive
violence from beginning to end perhaps justifying
that the temple owned by Kali and Shankar’s
grandfather is a Krishna temple, after the God
who drew the chariot in Mahabharat and
educated Arjuna and his brothers more in the politics
of warfare than on warfare itself. On the other
hand, a temple is purportedly an abode for the
masses who go there in search of peace. Why then,
does the aged grandfather keep egging on his two
grandsons to avenge the death of their father
in precisely the way in which he was killed –
by electric shock? The basic premise on which
the narrative is built is wrong. How can a priest
who virtually presides over a Krishna temple,
supposedly a pious man who ought to believe in
peace, egg his grandsons on to ruthless violence
beyond legal recourse?
Kali-Shankar has every ingredient to
invite those catcalls in mainstream, suburban
and rural theatres – ghosts, magic, item
number, action, romance, music - the works. Yet
it fails to convince. The two main characters
– Prosenjit as Kali and the relatively young
Anubhav as Shankar, put in rather sporadic appearances
in the entire film while it is Bollywood bad man
Ashish Vidyarthy as Debu Soren who dominates the
cinematographic and narrative space of the film.
He messes up not only the character he plays which
had tremendous potential just because of its length,
but the whole film. The real ‘hero’
of Kali-Shankar is Ashish Vidyarthi who
hams his way right through the footage. One cannot
find in him the actor who won the National Award
for his debut as the subtle, in-control terrorist
in Govind Nihalani’s Drohkaal (1994).
Take away Shibu, sorry Debu Soren from the film
and perhaps the film will have some saving grace.
 Rajatabha
Dutta, otherwise an excellent actor who plays
Gittu Hotelwalla, is wasting away his talent in
badly written roles. Prosenjit has done well by
sharing both the credits and the screen space
with a much younger actor who has the body and
the looks to fit in as an action hero because
his sagging jaw are not quite hero-friendly any
more. But what made him sign on an assignment
where Ashish Vidyarthi appropriates maximum space
and instead of doing justice to it, puts in an
act that is difficult to sit through is difficult
to fathom.
It remains for Anubhav to cash in on this famine
in action heroes in Bengali mainstream cinema
where chocolate boy heroes, including Uttam
Kumar, have been calling the shots for a very
long time. Chiranjit was the only action hero
but he has almost retired. The scenario desperately
needs a hero much younger than our 60-year-old
Mithun-da. Prosenjit as Kali keeps throwing dark
and brooding glances backed by fight and action
scenes galore. Not much dialogue there. Anubhav
is macho but needs to work on his acting. Swastika
as Shankar’s bubbly love interest is wasted
in an inane role but sizzles in her item number.
Anu Choudhury as Kali’s girlfriend is a
complete washout as is the girl who plays Tithi.
Jishu Sengupta as the police officer looks good
and acts well in his brief cameo. Victor Banerjee
as the grandfather hams his way right through.
A couple of songs are hummable.
The interesting part of such mainstream films
is that the locale is kept anonymous. One never
knows which part of India the story is set in.
It can practically be a collage of villages and
small towns anywhere in India, from the dreary
desert sands in Rajasthan to a scarcely populated
temple town in Uttar Pradesh. The characters are
dressed accordingly and even dance and sing and
fight sans regional flavour. But if a top Bollywood
blockbuster like Bhool Bhulaiya can pass
off a mansion in Rajasthan as one in Benares,
who can blame a small-time director desperate
to shell out a box office hit?
Post-script: Four weeks later,
Kali-Shankar is a pre-pooja release alongside
the Mithun-starrer Tiger and another very bad
film called Raat Bhor. While the last
one fizzled out within the first week, the former
two are still drawing crowds in Kolkata, which
means that the box office coffers are filling
up in the villages, suburbs and small towns.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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