Does anyone remember Mishti, Subhash Ghai’s 2014 discovery in Kaanchi? The film, which clocked 12 years on April 25, and its heroine, fizzled out quicker than a soggy pataka during a damp Diwali. Ghai, who boasted to me that Mishti (God bless her!) would be the next in his line of superstar heroines after Meenakshi Sheshadri, Manisha Koirala, and Madhuri Dixit, didn’t know where to look.
Kaanchi was rejected. But its confident, sidelined hero Kartik Aaryan made his presence felt.
Kaanchi tries to deliver a walloping punch but fails. From the tale of a girl from the hills contesting the city marauders’ rights to usurp her of land and love, to a frenzied saga of revenge in the big bad city where the innocent girl assumes the role of a desi Lara Croft, Ghai tackles the craft and the emotions with a devilish deftness that falls short on every count.
In a script, as intricately woven as a Kashmiri carpet gone off-pattern, Subhash Ghai threads together a jampicked jigsaw. Something or other is always happening in some corner of the script.
Kaanchi is a puzzle of a film. It bustles and brims over with reformatory ideas, anti-corruption zeal, and lunges for an overweeningly ambitious format of storytelling where Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili meets Rakesh Mehra’s Rang De Basanti. Ghai employs every cliché in the book of formulistic storytelling Kaanchi is the story of a girl’s journey from the innocent unspoilt mountains of Uttaranchal to the corrupt and corrupting sinful city of Mumbai….The format is not new to Ghai’s cinema. He tried it earlier in Taal. In Kaanchi, the approach road from the back of beyond to the mainland mayhem is far more upfront, aggressive, and desperate.
The music , so essential to the impact of Ghai’s cinema , here conveys the split personality of a society that is caught in a migratory transition. The film packs in the punches with undiminished enthusiasm from the first frame to last but fails to get our interest. Ghai turns on the tempestuous tap full blast. Though the pace does tend to flag at times—what with the characters assuming more emblematic significance than they are able to handle—the filmmaker makes sure there is an element of underlined expectancy in nearly every episode.
Very often, you feel the narrative should have been allowed to be more spontaneous. But then you realize this is not a film that tries to impress with subtlety. The charm of the protagonist Kaanchi’s journey is not in its quotient of adventurousness but in delivering an exuberance of the expected.
And now the million-dollar question about Ghai’s discovery. Does Mishti live up the high standards set by the filmmaker’s earlier debutant/semi-debutant heroines? In spite of her best efforts, her inability to touch some of the peaks required in the dramatic scenes is perceptible and defeating.
Mishti gets very strong support from her leading man; Kartik Aaryan’s very athletic, ramp-friendly personality is used to play off the heroine’s rustic artlessness. It was clear that Kartik had a very bright future ahead.
Ironically, in this film about youth power, it’s the veteran actors who let the script down. Mithun Chakraborty and Rishi Kapoor, as a pair of trouble-makers, are deliberately lampoonish. Why is Mithun’s mouth stuffed with marbles like Brando on a bad-teeth day? And why does Rishi dance to a song that does no justice to his Karz past? But then Ghai’s villains have always been outrageously self-important. Newcomer Rishab Sinha, as Mithun’s son, has a very important role, which he squanders away in serious apathy and a ludicrous wig.
If Kaanchi is relevant at all, it is to witness the evolution of a star named Kartik Aaryan.
