Kareena is blissfully unaware of her power as an actor. In Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders she plays Jaspreet Bhamra a police detective grieving for her little son who dies in freak shooting.
Not that she is not aware of her own power. Oh no! KKK knows exactly what she is worth in the market. And she charges what she thinks she deserves: not a penny more not a penny less. But Kareena Kapoor Khan values the wrong aspects of her brilliance. It’s like paying attention to the topfloor restaurant in the Eiffel Tower rather than the monument itself, just because it is economically viable.
Kareena’s is not the usual Bollywood-walla sar-patak-patak-ke grieving woman. She is a woman who is numbed by grief. She won’t give the men around her the pleasure to gloat over her misery.
It is a pleasure to watch Kareena exude so much tragedy without resorting to excessive melodrama. She keeps the grief bottled up inside until two male characters, one a supercilious colleague Hardik Patel (Ash Tandon) and the other Daljit Kohli (Ranveer Brar), the father of murdered child , express naked misogyny.
She punches both the men in the nose. Hard! Now the question is, could a beautiful woman punch so hard? Another question is, can grief be expressed with such supreme stoicism?
The answer to both questions is amply provided by KKK in Hansal Mehta’s intriguing murder mystery; intriguing for its rippling writing (by Aseem Arrora, Raghav Raj Kakker Kashyap Kapoor), which brings on one level of unrest, personal and interpersonal, after another not caring for punctuations marks. Commas and fullstops are for the philistines.
At one point in the storytelling communal riots break out in Buckingham where a young teen is murdered, a young Muslim is arrested and the town goes up in flames. Hansal piles on the crisis , including a “forbidden” gay angle towards the end, packing in a universe of suggestions and revelations in less than two hours of playing time.
The songs and the very intrusive background music could have been avoided. They only remind us of how gracefully and quietly KKK whips up seminal emotions without threshing and pounding into her roomy bag of tricks.
The Buckingham Murders is unlike any whodunit we have seen in recent times. A few years ago Vidya Balan had tried to play the sleuth in Neeyat. She failed to bring either layers or luminosity to her character. Kareena gets there without making a song and dance of it.
