CAT review: Gritty portrayal of Punjab is messy yet fascinating

In a scene from Netflix’s CAT, a brash young man exclaims while pinning down a naïve popstar “tuney gaano mein pakdi hogi, maine roz chalata hu ye bandookein.” It’s a casually revealing moment that says a lot about Punjab’s many contrasting fault lines that connect its politics and culture. At one end there is the booming pop music scene, a bizarrely irreverent portrait of the land’s macho men (and women) and at the other end, there is the fractured backbone of law and order. Drugs, sex, grim backstories and cutthroat politics combine in this tale of toxicity and machismo but while everything feels authentic, and timely in a post-Sidhu Moosewala world, CAT struggles doesn’t quite utilise its most potent weapon – Randeep Hooda. Hooda stars as Gurnam Singh, a former police informant who is forced to return to the side of the law to save a wayward younger brother. Singh is reluctant but not pure. Hooda is mesmerising in a role that seems tailor-made for him and yet there is a baffling lack of consistency in the way the show uses him as its fulcrum. For one thing, Gurnam, though he is central to the churn of the narrative in principle, often goes missing for long periods because the series, inexplicably at times, introduces new threads into an already complicated mixer. Singh verbally agrees to infiltrate the inner circle of a local drug cartel which, of course, enjoys the secret patronage of a powerful politician. The ball doesn’t so much so roll as it ebbs and flows in this series, as characters arrive and depart without really being allowed to bloom. There is a lot that CAT actually does well, especially merging the contrasting tones of misery and hope, aspiration and despair. This world, the series tells us, is simultaneously inevitable and inescapable. The show’s most intriguing bits play out in its intimate analysis of a music industry that routinely churns out the absurd. In one scene from the fourth episode, an entitled brat takes to the stage to grope a female singer. Hurt by her defiance, he has his way with her eventually. It’s a grim yet revealing image of masculinity in a culture obsessed with machismo. And yet, the series undermines the gritty, unwavering nature of some of its writing to conveniently choose convenient resolutions over dogged pursuit – i.e. immediate revenge. Halfway through CAT, Gurnam shows his petulant side. A series of flashbacks to the days of the insurgency – littered through the series - tell us, this knack for violence isn’t alien to him. Singh has a past that makes it difficult for him to reconcile with the extraneous issues of the present. Men, they never quite change. This milestone of sorts is impressive, as a teaser for a man’s reality that is about to collide with the glassy scars of his past. Unfortunately, CAT is more interested in telling the wider picture rather than zeroing on a character it has imagined well, but not quite realised. There are some commendable performances to look out for, including the likes of Coral Bhamra, Danish Pratap as Gurnam’s younger brother, and Suvinder Vicky (also of Meel Pathar) as the about-to-retire policeman whom no one can really figure. Randeep Hooda is brilliant and eerily dissolves into the milieu of a Punjab placed precariously at its most inviting and haunting. It’s this dichotomy that is both hilarious and unnerving as the young and the old, the scarred and the sedated, spar in a messy tale of a place learning to stare into the wide cracks it has learned to sleep over. The only problem is that the series doesn’t allow its people, especially the excellent Hooda to grow on you. It instead uses a sweeping Noir-esque coat of paint, on a story that could so easily have been about the grit of one man quarrelling both his present and the past. CAT isn’t poor, it’s just way too disjointed and macro-managed to be about any one thing in particular. In Gurnam, it has an intriguing protagonist, but the series feels far too obsessed to give us a park-side of the entirety of Punjab’s ailments in one go. It’s almost as if different chapters have forced their way into a book, that should have ideally, been about the world as seen through this one man’s point of view. Instead, we get a mix of jarring highs and low, some tasteful insights and yet some truly idiosyncratic diversions that distract more than they help build. Hooda is exceptional but is always struggling against the tabloid version of Punjab for leg space in this series that could have used him better. CAT is streaming on Netflix

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.