‘Raavi de Kande’: A river runs redundant

Thespian extraordinaire Pankaj Kapur returns to Pollywood after three decades with ‘Raavi de Kande’. But, not much has changed: the stories remain stitched from the same fabric — righteous cause, rustic charm, a few teardrops, a few chuckles, and a sermon.

Comfortably familiar, the music hits harder than heartbreak, comic relief barges in when it shouldn’t — it’s Punjabiyat on film.

The story follows Chaman Lal (Kapur), a respected trader in a scenic yet regressive village, raising four daughters — his own and inherited. The opening, shot across Basohli and Katra, frames the Raavi (Ravi) like a character, while Feroz Khan’s title track alone deserves a nod.

Trouble begins when the youngest daughter rides to Pathankot with a friend’s brother to submit a college form, spotted by a moral-policing elder. A desi Chinese whisper escalates into a scandal about her being “caught” in a hotel — triggering cancelled engagements and patriarchal panic. Chaman scrambles to “fix” reputations, bargaining with in-laws, offering dowries, and selling pride; still believing the bike ride was a mistake — an innocent one, albeit. It’s this refusal to canonise him as a feminist hero that gives the film its rare honesty.

Kapur is magnificent — jittery, tender, utterly human. Cinematography is meticulous, almost too pretty for Pollywood, painting heartbreak in postcard hues.

But the storytelling soon buckles under its own weight. Subplots multiply — an MLA’s predatory drug-addicted relative, inter-caste romance, Chaman being undersold by a friend — crowding a script that barely breathes. The second half undermines the careful build-up of the first.

Enter Sikandar (Harish Verma), a nehar vibhag afsar with a saviour complex and cowboy hat. After a gratuitous montage of him wading through the Raavi in crisp formals (which he always wears, even at home, because that is how the makers see government officials), he declares Chaman’s house government property.

Generously, he settles for one room and, for no apparent reason, “helps” the family — exposing a corrupt fiance, chauffeuring Chaman to estranged in-laws, persuading an inter-caste marriage — generally radiating bureaucratic benevolence. The film suddenly anoints him hero, as if the women’s story awaited a man with a file and fedora.

All Sikandar scenes could be excised — a metaphor for the film becoming everything it claims to critique.

Towards the end, Chaman, broken, places his daughter’s father-in-law’s shoes on his head, begging him to take her back. Kapur’s trembling voice is devastating, but the dialogues over-explain: “Main taan pair te dhari jutti sar te dhar lai,” in case symbolism missed us.

The film often doubles as a podcast, narrating its own emotions in dialogue indiscernible to a school play on road safety. By the end, ‘Raavi’ is like a friend quoting Rumi after three drinks — soulful, but exhausting. Perhaps its most frustrating trait is never being mediocre, leaping between hauntingly brave and shockingly regressive.

At the showing I attended, two men whispered a tally as daughters were “married off”: “Chalo, hun ik reh gayi,” one said; “Chhoti wali vi taa hai, do reh gayiyan,” his friend corrected. Unintentionally, this was the most accurate review — everyone counting the daughters ‘left’. By the final frame, ‘Raavi de Kande’ measures its daughters, not their dreams, while its river keeps running redundant, carrying echoes of what might have been.