Kapata Nataka Sutradhari is clogged with issues

Director Kranthi Saina’s Kapata Nataka Sutradhari, streaming on Aha, is cinematic pamphleteering at its worst. The plot is a multi-purpose convenience store. The characters are embodiments of cheap sloganeering. The five youngsters in a local basti full of unvarnished dreams and unsophisticated desires look like clones of Nana Patekar and gang in N. Chandra’s Ankush. Except that they are so cardboardish and stilted, they look like they’ve just walked out of a pamphlet on chawl manners for the newly initiated. One of the wastrels Yadagiri (dadagiri?) played by Vijay Shankar acts in sex films…not XXX only XX, he is quick to affirm. So no private parts. This is his escape route to salvation. Another hotheaded guy is head-over-heels in love with a transgender woman who is often referred to as ‘Transgender Girl’ before she is shot by a cop who suspects the youth squad to be responsible for a high-end gold scam. There is also a little boy running around screaming and shouting, perhaps as confused as those who conceived him and the plot of this freaked-our film. It is exhausting to see the writer-director trying to cram so much into one narrative bowl, with no breathing space for the characters to grow. The actors mostly amateurs and newcomers, seem to be told by the director to let themselves go. There is singing, dancing, romancing, drama and chase sequences, all meant to leave us breathless in excitement, all of a very sub-standard quality. The over-loaded plot just reaffirms the old belief that making a film is a very different task from rolling out safety pins in a factory. One after the other, Kapata Natakan Sutradhar rolls out the shrieking theme-based messages. At one point the narrative seems to move at gunpoint as if some forces from behind the scenes were bleeding the plot to a squirming death. The film claims to be based on real facts about a gold scam where the employees of a bank were themselves involved in appropriating huge amounts of gold. Whatever the real story may be, its screen version screams too hard for attention. The suspense element—yes, apart from being a piercing propaganda and shoulder-shaking activism, there is a whodunit tucked away in the story—involves a retired widower bank manager who sits on a rocking chair listening to old Telugu songs and a comely bank staffer who brings him khana in a jumbo-sized tiffin carrier because as she puts it, one cannot eat all alone forever. Burp to that. Back in the chawl, one of the young protagonists dares to raise her voice against an extortionist who threatens to take her with him as collateral if he doesn’t get his money.This is the kind of blaring cinema where the women are either sneaky sirens or spunky and single only so that predatory men can ravage them. Did I like anything in this cheap potboiler masquerading as a socially relevant film? There is a chase sequence where the youngsters are shown fleeing from the cops. It is shot with the kind of raw zest that the rest of the film never seems to achieve in this irresponsible, over-heated over-loaded ode to the shrill cinema of Nana Patekar and Rajinikanth in the 1990s. Why is Aha dumping so much garbage on a regular basis? Slow down, guys. Take a break. Watch N Chandra’s Ankush to know what rebellious youngsters really do when they are pushed to the brawl. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.