RK/RKAY movie review: Rajat Kapoor film is meta several times over

A couple of minutes into this 95 minutes lengthy crowd-funded movie, one of many principal characters tells one other, ‘Oohhh, I like the script. It’s so that you.’ The one being addressed known as RK, a movie director performed by the real-life director Rajat Kapoor. Not content material to depart it there, the movie director RK performs the hero within the movie at present on the flooring. The latter goes by the title of Mehboob. And no, the movie shouldn’t be ‘Mehboob Ki Mehendi’, although it’d properly be, given the time it’s set in.

Received it? By no means thoughts if not all is immediately clear, as a result of Rajat Kapoor makes the type of movies which do among the work, and trusts us do the remaining, a rarity in Hindi cinema.

Earlier than we get into the rest, I’ve to say, sure, it is a very Rajat Kapoor movie. The premise is clever and self-aware, and it isn’t simply meta, it’s meta a number of instances over. RK/ RKAY is common like a love letter to previous Hindi films, an period when heroes in double breasted fits sighed over bouffant-clad beauties known as Gulabo (Sherawat) and smoke-wreathed villains known as Ok N Singh (Shorey) hung round shady dens.

After which the hero of the film-within-the-film vanishes, leaving the director, whose previous few movies have been flops, and who’s attempting to breathe a little bit of life into his profession and marriage, flummoxed. It leaves RK staring on the unimaginable– how can a personality he has written– ‘maatra ek paatra’– whose trajectory has been mounted, flee into the true world? The movie references related flights of fancy undertaken by movie-makers previously (Woody Allen and Hannah And Her Sisters is one). Can a fictional character actually tackle a lifetime of their very own, turn into the arbiter of his personal future? And eventually, watching all these actual and fictional characters leaping by means of hoops, we ask, how meta is just too meta? As a result of after some extent, issues begin to slip and slide.

Watch RK/RKAY trailer right here: 

The higher elements of the movie happen on sets-within-sets when Sherawat is doing the diva act: she is aware of how one can throw tantrums, and get everybody to bend to her will, together with a hapless affiliate on the movie (Rai), whom she retains cussing out. Manu Rishi Chaddha is a hoot because the builder-producer who desires the hero to do heroic stuff, which features a happily-ever-after with the heroine. And a climactic hook, if not solely sudden, leaves us smiling.

The hark again into how Hindi cinema was once isn’t madly new, but it surely by no means will get previous. However quickly, we’re left in search of issues to latch on to. We are able to see that RK and his spouse (Sait) should not fairly as simpatico as they could have as soon as been: why? Is it as a result of there’s been an issue, or have they simply grown out of one another? We’re not given sufficient to play with when these two come collectively to share display screen area, whether or not it’s a lunch– quinoa salad for her, hen in pink sauce for him– or a mattress. What’s happening inside her? And when the true and fictional come nose to nose, the previous reacts extra with irritation relatively than an oh-my-god how-is-this- even-possible look.

I missed the surprise that should suffuse the quirky thought {that a} character can write his or her personal future, and may break away. Are we additionally simply characters in another person’s story, taking part in out another person’s script? RK/RKAY wanted to be extra magical, much less matter-of-fact.

RK/RKAY film forged: Rajat Kapoor, Mallika Sherawat, Ranvir Shorey, Kubbra Sait, Chandrachoor Rai
RK/RKAY film director: Rajat Kapoor
RK/RKAY film ranking: Two and a half stars