Perfect world, characters too good to be true

Mona

Duniya toh shaatir hai, aur vishwasghaati hai, but in this very clever and deceitful world exist a few honest individuals that make it tick. This is the world director and writer Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury (‘Pink’ and ‘Lost’ to his credit) sets his ‘Kadak Singh’ story in.

The film opens with AK Shrivastav (Pankaj Tripathi) admitted in hospital, suffering from cinema’s favourite retrograde amnesia. The film takes another of cinema’s favourite trope, the Rashomon effect, to take the story forward.

Sakshi (Sanjana Sanghi) shows up at the hospital as his daughter, and it is information that AK takes with a pinch of salt. She doesn’t have any recent pictures with her father and isn’t able to bring her brother Aditya that she claims is 17. Now, AK has no memory of this daughter, and he also believes that his son Aditya is five. Nonetheless, he gives in to listen to the story that slowly takes a turn from a family to a crime drama.

Kids call him Kadak Singh, for he is a strict father to these motherless children. As the leaves turn, the same story is told from the point of view of Naina/Noyona (Jaya Ahsan) — AK’s woman friend; his boss at the Department of Financial Crime Jeetender Tyagi (Dilip Shankar); his junior at work Arjun (Paresh Pahuja), to be finally concluded by AK!

What works is definitely Pankaj Tripathi at the driver’s seat. An accomplished actor that he is, he keeps the viewers invested in the story — now ‘kadak’, now jolly, sharing the light banter with the nurse, Ms Kannan (Parvathy Thiruvothu).

Parvathy provides a perfect foil to AK, who sets out to solve the mystery of his life. Sanjana Sanghi gets a meaty role, and she delivers it well. Paresh Pahuja, Dilip Shankar and Jaya Ahsan fill the narrative with able performances. The director is in control of the story and balances out the other departments, including cinematography and sound, well. Shantanu Moitra’s soundtrack, specially ‘Tu Jo Hai’, works very well.

However, the story, that bats for every person doing his or her job correctly to make this world a better place, becomes a tad boring and predictable. Five points of view reflecting the same outcome seem stretched at two hours’ runtime. While one wants to believe that near-perfect characters like Sakshi and AK exist, they come across as too good to be true. Here is where Chowdhury and the other writers on the project — Viraf Sarkari and Ritesh Shah — fail to make them and the plot convincing and intriguing enough.

The film ventures in the same space as ‘Scam 1992’ (only it takes the opposite side, that of machinery involved in catching fraudsters scamming the poor populace through Ponzi schemes), and ‘The Family Man’, about the life of a dedicated officer sacrificing the personal for a larger good.

There are no huge highs or thrills. It’s a simple story with a heart that believes in a fair world. An easy, sweet, one-time watch, for this is the world we want to live in and not the adrenaline-filled one, celebrating hyper masculinity, gore and violence, seen these days on screens largely.