RK/RKay movie review: An enjoyable meta comedy about a director's existential crisis

Writer-director Rajat Kapoor’s latest feature is a quirky crowd-funded comic drama, a film within a film that explores a creator’s existential crisis. The opening scene is set in a blue-walled corridor with identical wooden doors on either side. A man in a brown suit and trilby, carrying a blue attaché case, goes in and out of these doors. Then clones of this man do the same thing. As doors open and shut, the jaunty music gives off a French comedy vibe.

Turns out that an independent, not highly successful, filmmaker named RK (Rajat Kapoor) is experiencing a crisis of faith when he realises that the retro romantic drama he has written, directed and starred in might be untenable. The producer Goel ( Manurishi Chadha), a builder backing his first movie venture, believes that Mahboob’s death at the end, at the hands of the comic book villain KN Singh ( Ranvir Shorey), will not go down well with audiences.
The low-budget film is in the editing stage when an already riddled-with-doubt RK faces a much bigger crisis. The film’s hero Mahboob (Rajat Kapoor) has disappeared from the negatives. He has run out of the frame and into real life (much like the character of Tom Baxter does in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo), to keep a rendezvous with his love Gulabo, played by a diva-like actress Neha (played by Mallika Sherawat).

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Once Mahboob is found, the script hits its stride as RK and his crew attempt to explain reality to the fictional character while trying to convince him to go back into the film. Frustrated by Mahboob’s refusal to return to the confines of the digital canvas, RK taunts and demeans Mahboob, repeatedly reminding the runaway that he is a figment of RK’s imagination.

As it turns out his doppelganger, who is also a talented chef, is more popular and appreciated than the self-absorbed RK himself, including by his own wife Seema ( Kubbra Sait).

Through this situation, Kapoor touches on themes of creativity, commerce, conceit and self-doubt. The final question is how far will you go for the sake of your art. The story gets stuck in a bit of an endless loop and the meta plot gets a bit knotted till Kapoor spins it to a crowd-pleasing climax.

With spirited supporting performances by Kapoor as Mahboob, Shorey, Sait and Chadha and a fun cameo by Namit Das as a waiter, RK/RKAY is won’t shock or delight but it’s an enjoyable and whimsical film which is homage and wistful tribute to the meta world it inhabits.

Rk/Rkay is playing in cinemas

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic, and festival programmer.

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