Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy which for all practical purposes, remains shelved, is curiously, available on YouTube. It is a very strange but not uninteresting film about a ruthless hitman Uday who once used to be a rogue cap, played brilliantly by Rahul Bhat.
Uday can’t sleep. Understandable… considering he kills anyone and everyone whom he is asked to by a corrupt police official Rashid Khan (a not too convincing Mohit Takalkar), and sometimes even when not asked to.
Uday’s democratic amorality in his crime beat, is fascinating in the way, say, watching a butcher disembodying a goat would be if you are a glutton for mutton.
There is this whole elaborately written sequence, a film within a film if you will, where Uday barges into an honest politician’s cramped traditional home and snuffs out the entire family.Uday gets unexpected assistance from the wayward son of the politician. A frying pan plays a prominent part in this carnage episode.
Gabbar at least had a grudge. This is just for the boss’ sake. Rahul Bhat plays the insomniac maniac without judging the character’s anarchic action. Is Uday normal? Obviously not! Is he demented by grief and isolation? Possible.
Sylvester Fonseca’s camera slithers restlessly almost aimlessly through the mayhem, looking for something that it won’t find: rationale.
The numbing nihilism is punctuated by bouts of dark, very dark, humour. Sunny Leone’s Charlie, a foreigner who is forever frozen in a giggly drunkenness, is apparently the comic relief. The unintended joke is that Leone can’t act.
But Rahul Bhat can. And he never lets us know he can act.The craft here is not in-your-face, though everything else seems to be.
Another cruel comical conceit is the character of Chandan (Abhilash Thapliyal) who is the ghost of one of Uday’s murder victims, now lodged permanently in Uday’s life. Chandan is like a Shakespearean ghost who has caught the wrong flight to Wasseypur. He doesn’t LOOK like a ghost nor a very concise manifestation of Uday’s guilt. Chandan looks like a prop.
The art of concealing more than revealing is alien to Anurag Kashyap. He likes to spell out the innerworld of all his characters, blood-soaked grimy and unrefined. Kennedy could have been a haunting exploration of homicidal guilt.It chooses to be much less than that.
