Kaala: An Unwatchable Tale Of Revenge And Redemption

IN a normal world, a work of fiction would be distinguished as good or bad. But there is another kind, hidden in the far right corner of both. You know it when you see it. Early symptoms on encountering this sub-category are nausea, eye pain and existential crisis. It manifests in making you question everything and staring into the dark abyss that is called life. This kind has a name: unwatchable. There are several contenders for this in this year’s Hindi-language streaming space. But we might have found a winner in Bejoy Nambiar’s new series Kaala.

There are not many ways to describe Kaala except calling it unwatchable. Everything I write from hereon would be an attempt to say this in different ways. It would be to ward off someone, anyone, from this creation which is a narrative mess of dastardly proportions. It would be a way of channelling my angst in a healthier manner rather than breaking down thinking that almost seven hours of my life were spent watching something that should not have existed in the first place.

Nambiar’s eight-episode series is a crime thriller. But that is on paper. In reality it is a jigsaw puzzle where the parts do not resemble the reference picture that has been provided. It is a show that jumps timelines with such excessive speed and urgency it is almost as though it is scared of being coherent. It is a series that unfolds like three series at once and includes 2100 characters — most of them with zero dialogue. Among them, my favourite is filmmaker Qaushiq Mukherjee, who only moves about clicking pictures of dead people.

Even then, nothing I write can prepare someone for the absolute insensitivity with which Nambiar treats queerness in Kaala. In his multiverse of madness, sexual orientation and gender identity are the same thing and a man just becomes effeminate. Also in his world, a fully-clothed woman takes off her t-shirt to wear another one and this abjectly unnecessary scene is included because, the filmmaker seems to suggest, she is queer.

The show opens in 1988 at the India-Bangladesh border. An army jeep explodes on a bridge, leaving behind a sole survivor: Suvendu Mukherjee (Rohan Mehra). He goes missing and is termed as a traitor. The story then cuts to 2018 when an Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer called Riwik Mukherjee (Avinash Tiwary) is chasing a big syndicate of black money in Kolkata. The culprit in question is a man called Naman Arya (Taher Shabbir), a successful entrepreneur who in stealth converts white money to black for illegal purposes. Broadly — very broadly — speaking, this cat and mouse chase is the premise of Kaala.

But Nambiar takes what could have been a fairly straightforward story about revenge and redemption, and butchers it with unnecessary interventions. For one, it makes no sense for the series to take place largely in Kolkata despite the Bangladesh-India border playing a role in the narrative. The characters cannot speak Bengali, the background music contains old Bengali (even Tagore) songs being used in the most absurd circumstances. But the confidence with which it is done makes me believe that the makers were under a misconception that no Bengali-speaking person will watch the series (I would advise that).

Across eight episodes, Kaala moves from 1988 to 2018 with stopovers in 1965, 1987, 1997, as if hurdle jump is the only game it believes in. Along the way, the narrative moves from Kolkata to Darjeeling, and then to some foggy interior shots that are supposed to be New York. Characters keep sprouting in every episode till the show loses track. Even more frustrating is the extent to which the story has been reverse-engineered for easy resolutions.

For instance when a character is poisoned but everyone thinks he had a heart attack, he is automatically revealed to be an organ donor later just so that this detail could be arrived at. In another instance three ethical hackers are introduced out of thin air just because they would be required later. A subplot of a group of bankers asked to track the trail of black money is woefully done just for laughs (filmmaker Vinil Mathew makes an appearance). One of Ritwik’s friends is conveniently a journalist because obviously it will come in handy later on.

Kaala also has a problem of ineffective bullets. No one in the show dies after being shot for the first time. Bullets keep raining in every scene but whoever is hit lives long enough to fulfill whatever it is they had set out to do. Written by five people (Francis Thomas, Priyas Gupta, Mithila Hegde, Subhra Swarup and Nambiar are credited), the series is many things except one coherent story.

It only helps (and I mean it unironically) that the show is held together by really bad performances. The otherwise dependable Tiwary sleepwalks through the episodes. He gets hit and bruised but the actor remains convincingly non-committed to the role. The only exception to this crowd is actor Jitin Gulati. Arguably he is saddled with the worst written role but he makes something out of it. It is both impressive and frustrating. Like he is holding on to a conviction that none of the others involved with Kaala share.

Streaming here. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)