X: Past is Present is the journey of a voyeuristic filmmaker who reminisces his life one night, after he meets a young lady. Through vignettes of his experiences with the women in his life, one gets a peek into the psyche of Kishen, who prefers to be called K.
The film as a sum total K’s stories supposedly speaks of his faith, belief and who he really is, yet does not unravel the mystique of his persona. The idea is interesting, but is not executed too well as the screenplay seems fraught with confusion. Furthermore, the narration is divided into 11 chapters, with each chapter directed by a different filmmaker. This gives it an unsteady tonal quality to the entire film as each director obviously has his own style.Oscillating between past and present, the film, most of the times moves ahead with the help of voiceovers which do not correlate with the visuals.
The voice quality used for K’s character is weak and not Rajat Kapoor’s voice, thus affecting the credibility and quality of the narration.”I do not know where the story is heading,” in the film, is quite the predicament of the viewer in the first half. However, the final act wraps up the narration well enough. A verbose film, the exposition is done through the characters constantly speaking, including narrating poetry. The film relies heavily on forced symbolism.Rajat Kapoor as K, is natural and effortlessly essays the character of the complex and confused film maker “who does not believe in God but science.” He offers nothing exceptional by way of performance as the character is one-dimensional.The women characters are mere pawns to further the story of K’s life and none of them is individually dwelt upon. The focus in all, being their explicit sexual bonding. Radhika Apte, Huma Qureshi, Swara Bhaskar, are among the recognisable faces, who do justice to their characters, by way of performance. Given the complex and scattered narration, the film is crisply edited.The censor board surprisingly seems to have been generous for not bleeping the ‘F’ word, used abundantly in the film.