Abhishek Kapoor’s finest film to date, Kai Po Che is about spirits soaring skywards, as the characters–each one so vividly etched into the compact narrative that you come away with people whom you will probably carry with you for keeps—let their spirits roam wild and free in the atmosphere soaking in the sunlight of desire longing aspiring stumbling and getting back on the feet.
Set in Gujarat during times of peace and unimaginable stress Kai Po Che takes Chetan Bhagat’s engaging novel about friendship among three dissimilar young people struggling to find their voices in Gujarat in and around the year 2000 and converts the written word into an enrapturing entity far beyond just a story well told. The three protagonists, joined by a fourth, a girl who happens to be the sister of one of the heroes secretly involved with the hero’s best friend, bring to life a world where the accidents of existence collide gently but powerfully with man-made and natural calamities that shake the very existence of an Indian middle class that lives on the edge where toppling over the abyss is a real possibility.
Sure enough, by the end of the film, one of the heroes Omi (Amit Sadh) does, fall into the abyss of religious bigotry. Though he is finally given a chance to redeem himself, it’s too late. A dream has already died, though another one is re-born.
Kai Po Che is about the shared aspirations of three friends: the reckless and devil-may-care cricketer Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput, a remarkable film debut), his cautious shy friend Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) and their somewhat confused friend Omi, the son of a liberal temple priest who tilts towards Hindu radicalism more out of an economic necessity than an ideological imperativeness.
Into these lives, screenplay writers Abhishek Kapoor, Chetan Bhagat, Pubali Chaudhuri, and Supratik Sen introduce a socio-political perspective that is rare in mainstream Hindi cinema. There are many reasons why Kai Po Che is one of the most compelling products of the post-renaissance era in Indian cinema. To my mind, its greatest achievement is its fusion of ‘cinema’ and ‘history’, a synthesis that filmmakers today consider unpalatable for viewers.
Hence, they serve up the junk food equivalent of cinema. Quickly ingested and easily forgotten. Not this time!
In Kai Po Che, the characters and situations created to bring out the personality conflicts emerge from the two crisis points in Gujarat’s history, the earthquake in 2001 and the post-Godhra carnage in 2002. The sustained palpable tension of the riots towards the concluding lap of this riveting tale is the stuff that great cinema is made of.
Greatness sits lightly on this film. The virtues of the film are many: songs (Amit Trivedi) and background music (Hitesh Sonik) that seem to echo the protagonists’ inner world without making a song and dance, cinematography by Anay Goswami and editing by Deepa Bhatia that say it all without a single shot being redundant, and most of all, a terrific gallery of actors who make the brotherly bonding look so real you feel other celebrated films about male bonding(including Abhishek Kapoor’s Rock On) were mere teasers.
And yet, to describe Kai Po Che as a film on male bonding would be akin to treating Dr Zhivago as a film on the medical profession. Taking the core idea from Chettan Bhagat’s novel Abhishek Kapoor, weaves together a tapestry of thoughts, characters, and lives that embrace an entire ethos and culture without sacrificing their individuality.
Fearless and almost flawless Kai Po Che bubbles over with the warmth of lived-in experiences and with central performances that are so unstudied you suspect the actors were born to play these parts.
Among the trio of protagonists, Amit Sadh, as the fence-sitter turned Hindu radical, gets into the skin of his character and remains there till the end, and not for the first time. He was also admirable as a narrator-journalist in Kabeer Kaushik’s Maximum. Here’s an actor who deserves a lot more.
Rajkummar Rao (back then, he called himself Raj Kumar Yadav), as the voice of reason among the trio of friends, yet again displays his amazing ability to grasp the body language, speech, and inner world of the people he plays. I’ve not seen any actor deliver his lines so naturally without artificial punctuation in recent memory. Rajkummar’s triumph is the triumph of refined acting in Hindi cinema.
And let’s not forget the spontaneous Amrita Puri as Ishaan’s sister. She is at the periphery of the pivotal axis and yet makes her presence felt with such an endearing lack of vanity.
As for Sushant Singh Rajput, the script favours his character. And he repays the compliment right back, with a bonus. With his compelling screen presence and an ability to render restless energy in a restrained pattern, Sushant immediately establishes himself as one of the most articulate actors of the post-Ranbir Kapoor generation. We can say about Sushant that a star is born without the risk of having to eat back our words later on. His relationship with the cricketing prodigy Ali(Digvijay Deshmukh) is, in many ways, the core issue of the multifarious plot. You cheer for Ishaan’s streetwise heroism in a way you haven’t cheered in a long while.
Kai Po Che takes the theme of friendship to another level. Yeh dost hum nahin todenge, indeed. Sometimes, the best of friendships get swept away in politics and history. It takes a master storyteller to remind us that cinema is finally a mirror of forces which have a bearing on life.
Kai Po Che just tempts me to tell the escapist merchants of Bollywood to go fly a kite.
When Rock On!! director Abhishek Kapoor decided to do a celluloid take on Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller, he was sure he wanted newcomers. He ended up with three of the oldest newcomers in the entertainment industry. Sushant Singh Rajput, Amit Sadh and Raj Kumar Yadav were acting on television and in films for some years now. The film made a huge difference to their careers, especially Sushant. His performance as a cricketing coach in Kai Po Che modelled his character and his performance on his sister Mitu Singh, a state-level cricket player.
After the film’s release, Sushant told me, “I haven’t told this to anyone. But it was my sister who inspired my character. I’ve played a male version of Mitu Didi. She was a state-level cricketer and as hot-headed and impulsive as my character Ishaan.”
The minute Sushant read the script he knew it was his sister he would model his character on.
Says the actor, “I couldn’t dream of playing any other character. I could immediately identify with Ishaan’s passion for cricket, his constant struggle to make himself understood by family, friends, and society, and his struggle to understand himself. It was my sister Mitu I was looking at in the script.”
Sushant kept the reference/source for his character a secret from the entire team.“The first person I wanted to know about my role model was my sister. I told her to spot herself in the film. And she did. When Didi told me, ‘Arrey, tune toh mujhe daal diya apne kirdaar mein(Hey, you put me in your character),’ it was my moment of greatest victory.” says Sushant emotionally.
The other compliment that Sushant cherished the most for his performance in Kai Po Che came from his soulmate Ankita Lokhande. “Ankita, who is my biggest critic, told me that for two years she knew me as Maanav, the character I played with her in the serial Pavitra Rishta. But now she sees me as Ishaan from Kai Po Che. I want her to feel the same way when my next film releases.”
Kai Po Che opened to a huge ovation. Sailing on Cloud 9 on the wings of the rave reviews, Sushant said, “I am no stranger to attention. I had a certain following on television. But what I am experiencing now is entirely different.”
Being hailed as the new star on the block, Sushant moves very cautiously. “I don’t want to make any wrong move. The reviews have all been very kind. But it doesn’t take long for actors to turn into one-film wonders. I’ve to make sure I keep surprising myself before I surprise the audience.”
Sushant Singh Rajput was at the receiving end of flak for offending various influential sources, including Abhishek Kapoor, whose film Kai Po Che launched Sushant’s career in films.
“Isn’t that typical?” laughed Sushant. “First, they build you up as a potential star, and then they try to dismantle your dreams piece by piece. Let me tell you the truth about Abhishek’s film Fitoor. I had kept aside an entire large chunk of this year for it. I haven’t shot for any film during the last four months. This is the fifth month of no-shooting for me. Abhishek and I had kept aside five months of my time for Fitoor. It was supposed to be shot this year. Then it got postponed to the next year. Is that my fault?”
