'Kavaludaari' review: Rishi’s film all the way

Stars: 3.5

Cast: Anant Nag, Rishi, Achyuth Kumar, Roshni Prakash

Director: Hemanth M Rao

After months of anticipation, Hemanth Rao’s second Kannada film, Kavaludaari released today. PRK Productions’ debut venture, Kavaludaari, (produced by Ashwini Puneeth Rajkumar) is a whodunnit noir thriller by the director of Godhi Banna Sadharana Mykattu. The story revolves around a young traffic cop, Shyam (played ably by Rishi) who discovers skeletons in Bengaluru and becomes obsessed with solving the case.

The opening scene is told entirely through sound and visuals, setting the tone and context for the story to follow. A murder has been committed, and we hear and then see a man fleeing the scene in a coat with a bloodstained arm. Cut to forty years later, and we meet Shyam, a man in near constant personal and professional conflict. Upon discovering the bones, he disobeys a superior’s orders and begins to investigate the case independently. He manages to find a yesteryear cop, Mutthanna, who first investigated the case forty years ago (played by Anant Nag). Mutthanna is a retired cop who is now an alcoholic and is reluctant to return to the case. How their lives intersect as they partner to solve a cold case forms the rest of the story.

Rishi plays the rakish, brooding, do-gooder cop with remarkable restraint, and carries the film on his square shoulders. One scene, where he faces off with Anant Nag, is where he comes into his own. There is this shift in his body language in that scene that is a delight to watch. And the winsome visage and square jaw don’t hurt, either. Anant Nag, who plays a pivotal role, in a way reprises the platitude-spouting father from GBSM, in a slightly more unkempt avatar. But then again, he is someone who can sit in a corner, do nothing, and turn it into a performance that feels like it should win every award out there. Aren’t we lucky to have him, to call him our own? Achyuth Kumar manages to entertain in another character role as a wayward, down-on-his-luck reporter beholden to loan sharks and repo men. Roshni Prakash is effective in a small role as the daughter who tries to steer her reporter father back to the straight and narrow.

Hemanth Rao is a visual director. Here is someone who has the writerly capacity to condense a whodunnit with multiple characters into a script, and then expand those words into a landscape that is teeming with imagery, colour, and abundance. His metier includes three tropes that were visible in GBSM as well: aerial shots that somehow expand the concept of Bengaluru, broken but rounded characters seeking that one shot at redemption, and a non-judgmental look all the shades of grey that people exhibit, sometimes unwittingly.

Where Hemanth particularly excels are little artistic flourishes that he infuses the movie with, that capture the extraordinary in the ordinariness of middle-class lives (realism is truly magical when seen through the lens of someone like Hemanth). Speckled bronze trophies in disarray in a showcase that speak of the celebrated yesterdays of an alcoholic widower, colloquialisms in conversation that captures the milieu and culture of a place, levity in moments of conflict and tension, friendship between man and beast: all this and more. There is also a housefly with a story to tell.

This could be contentious to say, but I would say Hemanth Rao is our modern-day Thoreau or John Muir in love with the concrete jungle that is our city. This is another salutatory paean to the city Hemanth Rao loves. As a crime thriller, Kavaludaari works in places. The background score by Charan Raj is atmospheric, and young Aditi Sagar's Samshaya echoes long after the closing credits roll. The director chooses a non-linear style to keep the audience engaged with the story, but this isn’t as noir and edge-of-the-seat as I was expecting. It is also a tentative social/political statement that somewhat falls flat. Perhaps Hemanth’s one flaw is that he focuses too much on the greys in the characters he writes.

Having said that, this is a movie to watch for Hemanth’s style of filmmaking, and Rishi’s marvellously understated performance. Even though the actual plot has a slow beginning, and the movie plods along for the first two-thirds of the movie, it picks up pace after a major reveal in the final third. And yes, there is a huge payoff at the end. And then there is the grandeur of the cinematography by Advaitha Gurumurthy! The transition of Bengaluru from a pensioner’s paradise to this economic behemoth it has become over the years sometimes gets missed in our daily travails of traffic and lack of civic sense. We need reminders of how maximum our city is, and movies like Kavaludaari take us there, with a hint of nostalgia and a sense of open-eyed wonder. For the sheer larger-than-life, expansive look at the city we inhabit and call home, watch it on the big screen. Kavaludaari deserves no less.