Kaagaz Movie Review: Pankaj Tripathi’s Emotive Range is Laudable in This Social Commentary

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Kaagaz

Director: Satish Kaushik

Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Monal Gajjar, Mita Vashisht, Amar Upadhyay, Satish Kaushik

What I really liked about Kaagaz, now streaming on ZEE5, was Pankaj Tripathi’s performance. Honestly, I had been a tad bored with his style that had remained much the same in film after film: his soft dialogue delivery, his unassuming mannerisms and even his looks. Whether he played a villain or a parent, his tone and volume were uniformly the same. But in Kaagaz – helmed by Satish Kaushik (who also portrays a lawyer in the movie) – Tripathi’s Bharat Lal unleashes a wide gamut of emotions which range from the subtle and soft to the fiery. As a father of two children and husband (wife essayed by Monal Gajjar), he is sweet, but later on, when he stands cheated and helpless, he transforms into a man of steel with a never-say-die attitude; his dialogue delivery and demeanour matching this transformation.

Kaagaz is a satire narrated with sincerity and passion, and takes on the bureaucracy by its horns, so to say. The film is a movingly powerful reflection of how India’s poor continue to be treated even today – almost 74 years after the country won its independence from decades of foreign dominance, first by the Mughals and then British. In a way, India’s poor, most of whom live away from urban conglomerations, remain as poor as they were and still face the brunt of a largely unfeeling and corrupt administration.

Bharat Lal’s problems begin when he gets egged on by friends and wife to expand his small band outfit. The group plays different instruments at marriages and even funerals. So, Lal decides that he must add to his little shop, and goes to a bank seeking a loan. The bank is fine with granting him one, but he must produce some security. Lal remembers that he has a small piece of land adjoining his uncle’s at a distant village. But when he reaches his uncle’s place, he is shooed away and told that he has been declared long dead. On paper.!

This has been one of the biggest banes in India; people “bumping off” their relatives by getting a declaration from the local administrative office. A piece of paper (Kaagaz) that literally turns a man into a corpse!

And then begins, Lal’s tryst with his unbelievably shocking destiny. He bangs many doors, gets the media to write about his plight, even meets a politician (Mita Vashisht) and in the end forms a political party. All this while, and it takes years, his band gets disbanded, his income and savings hit rock bottom and his family suffers in silence.

Kaagaz looks at the way justice is meted out in this country, and how the poor and those without any political influence are relegated to a life of hurt and humiliation.

The movie does well in bringing this out, but where it falters is in the manner it seeks to narrate the story. It is so exaggerated that it begins to look silly. A greater control over the script may have made Kaagaz into something more authentic. It goes beyond the realm of parody, and a tighter leash on characterisations and scene conceptualisations could have gone a long way in turning Kaagaz into a more worthwhile watch.

Rating: 2.5/5

(Gautaman Bhaskaran is a movie critic and author of a biography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan)

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Criminal Justice Behind Closed Doors Review: Pankaj Tripathi Fails to Lift Slow Paced Drama

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Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors

Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Anupriya Goenka, Kirti Kulhari, Khushboo Atre

Directors: Rohan Sippy and Arjun Mukerjee

Criminal Justice season 2 arrives with the promise of doubling up on the drama quotient from the first installment. However, it fails to measure up to its first outing in every way imaginable.

To say that the plot does not offer characters enough to play around with would be wrong as season one did pretty well with a straight forward set-up that is milked dry for pathos. This time around, the pace goes doubly slow with no real enjoyment stored for the latter half.

Filmmakers Rohan Sippy and Arjun Mukerjee are at the helm of affairs here. They are tasked with putting the viewers’ heads around faith in the justice system when Anuradha Chandra (Kirti Kulhari) stabs her husband (Jisshu Sengupta) while he tries to force himself onto her in bed one night. That he has been controlling her for quite sometime is evident though some initial inserts and her attempt to injure him for her safety is foreshadowed. What follows is her lawyer Madhav Mishra’s (Pankaj Tripathi) quest to unravel the circumstances that led her to this point.

Anuradha tends to bear the weight of the story for the first half but Kirti’s one-tone performance, where she displays her isolation and fragility at each moment by bursting into tears, gets too repetitive and dull after a point. Kirti is unable to evoke empathy for a victim of domestic abuse and what could have been the role of a lifetime for her becomes a burden that she has to shoulder throughout.

Meanwhile, Pankaj as Madhav tries to balance out the serious nature of the show with his street-smart ways and poker-face humour. But his performance does not measure up to what we have come to expect of the actor. Here, a feel good factor is introduced as Madhav’s wife Ratna Mishra (Khushboo Atre) comes to Mumbai to live with him. And honestly, her chirpy performance, even though it is a side track to the main story, keeps some interest alive. Otherwise, the series seems robbed off of emotion and real tension.

Seems like Criminal Justice franchise is not interested in sustaining itself beyond this season.

Rating: 1.5/5

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