Kai Po Che! - all reviews here(Taran Adarsh-page6) - Page 6

After Rock On!! Abhishek (Gattu) Kapoor has made a lovely little film with three young men – Sushant Singh Rajput, Amit Sadh and Raj Kumar Yadav – cricket and politics

Remember a small movie with a big soul called Rock On!!? It starred a very hairy bunch of young men – Farhan Akhtar, Arjun Rampal, Luke Kenny and Purab Kohli – who make music that has the whole nation rocking to their strums. This happy bunch, angst and all, made their director very happy with box office success. So obviously that director had many sets of eyes…err…directed on him when he announced his next film, another movie that seemed small, with actors not hugely well known in Hindi cinema.

Abhishek Kapoor brings together Sushant Singh Rajput, demi-God of the small screen, Amit Sadh, TV star and player of minor roles in films, and Raj Kumar Yadav of Love, Sex Aur Dhokha fame in Kai Po Che! – and what a team this one is! It is a bromance with a dash of hatke attitude, no luxury cars, no designer clothes and no wonderfully happy ending. And yet, it is full of joy, full of light, easy to digest and capable of making you cheer, "Kai po che!" as you would when you fly a kite successfully.

Kai Po Che! tells the tale of three friends who grow up in the small town atmosphere of Ahmedabad in the early 2000s. The film traces contemporary history in the area, recalling the terror of the destructive Gujarat earthquake of 2001, religious celebration darkened by intolerance, political seesaw-swings and manipulation and much more. All this works to create rifts in the togetherness of the three young men, pushing their grand plan of building a sports academy off the rails.

Ishaan Bhatt (Ish, played by Sushant) is a superb cricketer who cannot take his passion for the sport to a lucrative professional level, Omkar Shastri (Omi, played by Amit Sadh), the son of a priest who lives his lives by the rules his father sets, and Govind (Govind Patel, played by Raj Kumar Yadav), who is as shrewd a businessman as ever lived, battle the odds to make their dream come true, all with very little money and plenty of hope. Omi's uncle helps out, his canny politician mind calculating the potential of the situation and of his nephew and scheming to manipulate both to suit his purpose. And when Ishaan starts coaching a talented young Muslim boy to play cricket, you just know how things are going to go – at which point you need to bring out the hankies!

Then the earthquake happens, followed a year later by the Gujarat riots. There is blood colouring the communal divide and you hold your breath waiting for tragedy…and you get it. The riots of 2002 burst on to the screen with terrifying realism as you watch the shattering of a city, a nation, a world and three bonded hearts. Each image is captured beautifully and the crisp editing keeps it moving along without losing any of the momentum needed for a film of this sort. The love story between Govind and Omi's sister Vidya (Amrita Puri) is hardly necessary; the closeness between the three lads is enough emotional bonding for this story.

Many may dislike Chetan Bhagat's writing, reviling it as trite and amateurish. But his book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, as it has been adapted to make Kai Po Che!, is a perfect story for a film like this one. The actors bring each character to life so delicately, deliberately, delightfully, that they are them, no acting required. Of course, there is fabulous music by Amit Trivedi, fabulous cinematography by Anay Goswami, fabulous characterisation, but all that has come about because of the fabulous direction. Abhishek Kapoor, please make your next film soon!

KAI PO CHE IS HEARTWARMING

Director Abhishek Kapoor's third feature, Kai Po Che!, tells the story—mostly in flashback—of three friends in the Indian city of Ahmedabad who, at the beginning of an economic boom in the early 2000s, set out to open a sports academy. The cricket-mad Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput), practical-minded schoolteacher Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav), and passive politician's nephew Omi (Amit Sadh) find their friendship tested by a variety of factors beyond their control, from politics, to romance, to natural disasters. It's quite the story, and while not the most adventurous piece of cinema on record, it's extraordinarily well-acted and has moments of great emotional power.

Based on the best-selling novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life by Chetan Bhagat, Kai Po Che!'s greatest strength is in the depth of its character relationships. Kapoor sacrifices narrative momentum to savor the connections between people, and while this leads to the occasional slow patch in the film it also lends even more richness to the moments of action and drama that do occur. Additionally, the alternating tempo and tone makes events like a catastrophic earthquake, or the escalation of a conflict at once political and religious, even more shocking.

What Kapoor is able to accomplish tonally is aided in large part by a truly wonderful cast. The standout is Sushant Singh Rajput as Ishaan; the role is the movie's flashiest and is given the most attention, but Rajput inhabits the passionate former local cricket star with verve. A great deal of his story deals with his relationship with a young cricket prodigy, whom he nurtures and develops a particular bond with. A great deal of the movie as a whole hinges on this relationship, which is in turns compelling, frustrating, and touching,Kai Po Che! in miniature. The characters of Govind and Omi are a bit thinner, but Yadav and Sadh (respectively) play them with great skill. The friend cohort as a whole is as strong as any one is likely to encounter in film: the purpose of the leisurely build in Kai Po Che!only really becomes apparent in the second half, when suddenly the events of the film are all the more emotionally powerful for the meticulous construction of the protagonists as fully realized human beings.

This, more than anything else, is something rare and notable in Kai Po Che!. The restriction of telling a complete story in two hours often leads to either character moments being elided or a need to streamline a narrative down to its bare bones. But what Kapoor and his protagonists (among whom is the key supporting role of Ishaan's sister Vidya, played charmingly by Amrita Puri) present is as strong a sense of shared history between audience and story as the characters share with each other, and a depth that feels more akin to the rhythms of life than it does with customary cinematic artifice. That this takes place in a film whose most prominent subplot is the manifestly artificial "unheralded sports genius triumphs over adversity" story formula is truly remarkable.

The main debit in Kai Po Che! is in those occasional lapses into soapy familiarity. The main villain of the piece, Omi's gangsterish politician uncle, is a bit of a cartoon character, seemingly bad because someone has to be. And there's a bit of business toward the end where—as foreshadowed in the Chekhovian tradition as it may have been—someone is suddenly running around with a gun in a fashion that again, seems less organically motivated than it is simply that this is the point in the movie where someone is running around with a gun. To be clear, these are not major issues. Neither entirely disrupts the film. They more exist in sharp contrast with the human, organic things the film does right.

Kai Po Che! falls a narrow degree short of greatness. Kapoor's visual sense is occasionally a bit flat, if consistently competent, and, as above, some of the melodrama is a little awkward. But these problems are outweighed by the immense force of the performances.Kai Po Che! is a fine example of that elusive and sought-after entity, the crowd-pleaser. It becomes that thing not by the kind of cynical manipulations one normally associates with the pejorative sense of the term, but by being sincere, pure of heart, and frankly emotional. Abhishek Kapoor and his actors have done a fine job in Kai Po Che!, a film for fans of all stripes.

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