It
is like Jake Gittes’ Chinatown or the
Korean thriller Gangnam Blues, but
with “untouchables.” There will be big money to be made in Ernakulam real
estate, particularly if the developers can scoop up tomorrow’s prized tracts
today. Evicting the current landholders should be easy, particularly when they
are marginalized Dalits. That is where Balan Chettan’s gang comes in. However, when
the muscle develops a conscious it leads to a bad end for nearly everyone in
Rajeev Ravi’s three-hour Malayalam crime drama, Kammatti Paadam (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Ithaca Fantastik film festival.
Mumbai
security guard Krishnan thought he had put his criminal days behind him, until
he gets a call from his old running mate Ganga. When a subsequent call is
terminated under suspicious circumstances, Krishnan returns to the title
village in rural Kochi to investigate. Given the D.O.A.-style in media res structure, it is safe to say Krishnan
will eventually get stabbed in the gut for his troubles. However, Krishnan will
be harder to kill than Edmond O’Brien.
As
Krishnan clings to consciousness on a slow bus from Kochi to Mumbai (at least
he’s not going to New Delhi), we watch flashbacks of his childhood and early
gangster years. Despite his caste, he was always attracted to Ganga’s Dalit
cousin Anita and in awe of his older brother, the local gang leader, Balan
Chettan. Like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas,
Chettan could be laughing and scratching one minute and then carving up body
parts the next.
Frankly,
Chettan takes more of a shine to Krishnan, especially when the high caste thug
does a stretch of prison time for Ganga’s sake. Ater his release, he quickly shows
an aptitude for their new booze-running business. Yet, Ganga still assumes Anita
will be his rather than Krishnan’s for reasons of caste and family.
As
one might expect of a juicy Indian gangster movie, the one hundred seventy-seven-minutes
of KP zing along at a gallop. Frankly,
the film could have been a bit longer, allowing more time to establish the
complicated web of relationships. There will be moments when viewers realize: “oh,
so that’s so-and-so’s uncle.”
One
thing is clear from the start, Vinyakan is all kinds of badass as Chettan. It
is a massively physically performance, convincingly portraying spectacular
beatdowns and decades’ worth of aging, but it is also a tragic turn that roots Chettan’s
eventual downfall in his profound insecurities. Likewise, Dulquer Salmaan (DQ)
looks like two distinct actors, one being Kochi Krishnan and the other the
Mumbai Krishnan.