Film: Kasaba Director: Nithin Renji Panicker Cast: Mammootty, Varalakshmy Sarathkumar, Sampath Kumar, Alencier, Jagadish Language: Malayalam |
Rajan Zachariah (Mammootty) walks with a swagger. Or rather, that’s what the filmmakers seem to have intended. He is unattached, cocky (“You know I will only do what I feel,” to his senior), and obnoxiously lecherous. He walks over to a female cop, pulls at her belt, and demands sex (“You won’t walk around for a week”). When she swears at him with a four-letter word, he retorts with: “Yes, if you want.”
His eyes reflect unrestrained lust whenever they rake over a woman. It’s not that Mammootty hasn’t uttered profanities on screen before —in Avanazhi (1986) and Inspector Balram (1991), he delivered them at an even pace. But what he does in Kasaba catches you completely off guard. It’s not just the cuss words, but the overtones of sexism and obscenity that offend. And all of it comes from Rajan Zachariah.
Among a lot of other things, Kasaba is a feminist’s nightmare. Nithin Renji Panicker is evidently and markedly influenced by his verbose scriptwriter-director-actor dad Renji Panicker — the blunt sexism, politics, fights, alpha-male hero, prevailing antagonist, and a bunch of side characters that hardly matter. Only, instead of lengthy monologues, he uses short, artless one-liners. It is also evidently inspired by Dabangg. Zachariah, at least from where we see it, has heavy shades of Chulbul Pandey.
The plot is wafer thin — CI Rajan Zachariah gets himself transferred to Kaliyapuram, a small town on the Kerala-Karnataka border, to unravel the mystery behind his superior’s son and his fiancée’s murder. There he clashes with a local politician, Parameshwaran Nambiar (a competent Sampath Kumar) and his paramour Kamala (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar), who runs a brothel.
Bafflingly, all the women in Kasaba are either sex workers or lascivous in nature. They are either solicited, denigrated, or beaten up by men. The only two “noble” women are apparently Nambiar’s compliant wives.
Kamala is the madame of the brothel, but Nitin sketches her with a false bravado rather than with any depth. It is to Varalaxmi’s credit that she lends some character to the otherwise hollow role. The co-habitants of the brothel are terribly clichéd and carry shades of Lohithadas’s Soothradaran (2001) — for instance, the scene where an old man tries to force himself on a young resident, who is later bedridden. The elderly pimp (Alencier, wasted in a shallow role) is similar to Cochin Haneefa’s character in Soothradharan, while the good-hearted sex worker (Neha Saxena) reminds you of Chithra’s.
Yes, we get the kind of cinema this first-time director believes in — the commercial mass hero-taking over a powerful villain variant. But where are the thrills? Or the adrenaline-pumping scenes? The investigation trail is sketched without surprise or anticipation. Instead, there are constant reminders about Zachariah’s machismo with crude innuendos. Probably the only worthy scene is the emotional moment between Zachariah and his superior (Siddique) soon after news of the latter’s son’s death.
The sub-characters hardly merit a mention. There is a local student leader (an uninspiring Maqbool Salmaan) and a sub-inspector (Jagadish). There is a badly choreographed, remarkably distasteful item dance (another version of Dabangg’s Fevicol se maybe) — a sort of welcome for Zachariah by the villain.
And what can we say about Mammootty! Rajan Zachariah certainly has no place in the list of his thrilling cop roles.
(This review was first published in fullpicture.in)