Kartavya
Starring Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Mishra, Manish Chowdhary, Rasika Dugal, Zakir Hussain, Yudhvir Ahlawat
Written & Directed by Pulkit Samrat
Caste, as they say, is a bummer. In writer-director Pulkit’s hard-hitting, visceral, and shocking Kartavya (sadly streaming on Netflix when it should be on the big screen, where this week we are subjected to a comedy that is abysmally short of laughs), Saif Ali Khan, in the most riveting performance of his career, plays an angry cop, Pawan Malik who has just turned 40.
Pawan’s father is a rabid casteist, and his immediate boss (Manish Choudhary, unerringly flawless) and Pawan are desperately trying to stem the tide of bigotry that runs in his blood and which now threatens to infect Pawan’s young son.
In one of the several punch-in-the-belly sequences, Pawan’s little son mouths the toxicity he hears from his grandfather (Zakir Hussain, conveying a controlled simmering discontent).
And I thought: do impressionable minds really absorb the filth they hear as much as we think they do? Another child in this semi-rural hateland pulls the trigger on an activist-journalist without gauging the enormity of his action. The boy, played with astute synergy by Yudhvir Ahlawat (who is said to be 16 but looks 13), is as central to the cascading conflicts as Saif’s cop character grappling—on his 40th birthday—with corruption at work and toxicity at home.
Pawan is eventually unable to cope with the pressure. But as he says at the end, at least he tried.
Kartavya is a pressure-cooker of a film, hissing and straining to blow up in our face. Writer-director Pulkit is an astounding monk in the mayhem, exercising a tight control over the smouldering tripping characters, as adeptly as Aditya Dhar in Dhurandhar; come to think of it, Pulkit does a better job of internalizing the simmering violence than Dhar.
The characters are at the boiling point, except maybe Varsha (Rasika Duggal), Pawan’s calm wife, who remains shadowy in the most positive sense. Pawan’s assistant, a bald, conflicted cop, Ashok (Sanjay Mishra, his best in years), who has seen too much of condoned crime to cry over spilled blood, is the most problematic character. His compromised conscience can be seen coming from miles away.
What gets you in this fat-free, sinewy storytelling with its austere violence is the implosive mood. Every minute I felt something was going to explode, someone is going to do something which he will regret deeply.
Kartavya has no room for regret. It is a parable on perversity and purification, done in a tone that precludes niceties without letting the prevalent crudity and amorality overpower the inner and outer aesthetics.
Speaking of which, the editing by Zubin Sheikh is razor sharp whittling down the narrative to under two hours of extreme tension. Anil Mehta’s camera misses nothing. The commanding sweep of the lenses is appreciable only on the large screen: what is this crime classic doing on the digital platform?
More to the point, what is Pawan Malik (the surname is covertly shortened to ‘M’) doing in the casteist muck, trying to make a difference when he knows he can’t?
Saif’s and Pawan’s growl of protest will stay with you, as will the child shooter Harpal’s moan of terror. The villain, played by Saurabh Dwivedi, strikes a false Amrish Puri note in a film where the ominous mood is more Shyam Benegal in Nishant than Aditya Dhar in Dhurandhar.
