A prequel that far outstrips its predecessor (2022's Kantara: A Legend), the somewhat confusingly titled Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1 opens with a breathless gabble of ear- and eyecatching story prompts. Have you heard the one about the celestial wild boar? How about the tale of the baby found in a well, or the blacksmith whose hammer accidentally unleashed a cloud of hornets? It's as though once the original, a solid enough but comparatively self-contained attempt to update the long-running mythological dramas of the Indian stage for 21st century multiplex audiences, went beyond a certain figure at the box office, the floodgates in writer-director-producer-star Rishab Shetty's mind well and truly opened. You want stories?, Shetty now asks. I'll give you stories: about an overreaching king, about a people sold into slavery at the beginnings of the spice trade, about a hunt that goes disastrously wrong after the huntsmen anger the presiding spirit of the forest. The substantial profit the first movie turned has now been reinvested into a bid to tell all of the above stories - and many, many more - in one two-hour, fifty-minute go; it's mythomania writ dazzlingly large. (The indefinite article in the title shortsells it: here, most assuredly, be legends.) Malevolent-slash-protective spirit Panjurli has returned, still ending his every pronouncement with his signature "Woooooah!", much as that Trump guy concludes social-media posts with his own stock phrases. That's one element of reassuring continuity. Yet this time round, I was struck by how completely fucking batshit these stories are, owing as they do more to a free-roaming fantasist like Apichatpong Weerasethakul than they do to the rational beancounting and starry muscle-flexing of the Indian cinema mainstream. Chapter 1 is... out there. And then some.
In his capacity as actor this time round, Shetty's essentially expanding upon a footnote the first film tucked away in dispatches: the burly yet goodhearted Berme, foundling turned tribal leader, striving to guide his fellow forest dwellers through the chaos and carnage of the Kadamba dynasty. It's as a writer-director-producer that he most makes his presence felt, however, not least by ensuring the new film is by any measure substantially bigger than what's come before: huge sets, hundreds if not thousands of extras, a forest backdrop as detailed and inviting as Endor or Pandora. The first Kantara - which may have had to be somewhat guarded, being at once a commercial unknown and one of the first Kannada films to enter production after Covid - was to some degree standard-issue mass cinema: a single-track history with attendant blindspots and biases. The endlessly busy, admirably characterful follow-up adopts more of a compendium approach, throwing its muscular arms wide to embrace both a colossal setpiece involving a runaway chariot (wherever he is now, you sense Cecil B. De Mille looking on with envy, his fingers gripped to the armrests) and a deft editorial note or two from Mani Ratnam's recent Ponniyin Selvan features, although Shetty, being a moviestar of the people, insists his characters be at all points far less nobly inclined than auteur Ratnam's precision-sculpted chesspieces. In another era, the ruling elite Berme finds himself up against might well have inspired their own reality series: a sottish, workshy, arrogant prince (Gulshan Devaiah, inviting your boos), doomed from the moment he declares there can't possibly be spirits in the forest he's hoping to chop up for spices; a minister (Pramod Shetty) who loves the sound of his own voice; the prince's business-minded sister (Rukmini Vasanth) - very much the Kim K. of this operation - who can't help but catch the redblooded Berme's eye. Yet the underlying principle of this screenplay is decidedly Ratnamian: however mad things get, these figures from the distant past will prove every bit as horny, craven, muddle-headed, weak and/or opportunistic as people you and I could name today.
You could argue that, as with the first film, there's not enough Panjurli, now established as this series' resident lord of misrule. The difference is that this time round, Shetty barely needs Panjurli, so robust is his earthly characterisation; indeed, there's something admirable about Chapter 1's rejection of the formula a character like Panjurli represents. The Kantara films could very easily have become the spooky forest franchise the way, say, the Conjuring films have become this era's foremost haunted-house franchise: Shetty leans into this story's supernatural elements in the new film's intermission block, which features electro tribal beats, a vicious attack from a roiling sea of langurs, and one of the recent Indian cinema's better rendered CG tigers. But as well as this ghost story, he's also telling a love story, a social-justice story, a war story (with inspired use of flaming trees as biodegradable projectiles) and an environmental fable, and using this particular backdrop to generate both stirring action setpieces and superior gagwriting. (Heard the one about the two clowns who turn down access to a barrel full of finely aged grog on the basis they can't believe anyone would drink what they dismiss as "out-of-date booze"?) Yes, what these stories ultimately add up to is a structure off of which a grassroots hero can leap, thereby toppling an unjust regime, as so many filmi heroes have before him. Yet as embodied by Shetty's pop-eyed beardo, who spends around 75% of the new film's backend possessed and convulsing, there's a wildness about this particular retelling that keeps long stretches unpredictable and - at its very best - makes for rollicking, gloriously strange, sometimes outright headscrambling popular cinema. The Kantara films are the movies Villeneuve's dullard Dunes really ought to have been. Chapter 1 is what would have happened had Hollywood tapped Jack Black to make his own Dune.
Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1 is now playing in selected cinemas.
No comments:
Post a Comment