Kuttey: Fun, if you like to giggle with the gun

Flirt with hurt until you hit paydirt….This could well be the catchline for debutant director Aasman Bhardwaj’s debut film. Kuttey –why this title for a film where every character is unfailingly slovenly and pathologically untrustworthy, when dogs are known to be devoted and faithful?—is a film where ‘noire’ gets expanded, subverted and tortured into eccentric shapes that suggest an out-of-control heist drama where the characters live by the gun and die by the gun.

Somewhere at the start—or was it later, it’s hard to decipher the entry-exit road signs in this muddled murky kingdom of trigger-obsessed psychos— Tabu, doing her gritted-teeth, slit-eyed sly act once again, tells Ashish Vidyarthi a fable about a tortoise and a frog crossing a river.

Alia Bhatt had exalted over the same able fable about a multi-legged Kane and Abel in the recent Darlings. Tabu does it with a lot more pauses and punctuations smirks and sniggers and of course Ashish Vidyarthi’s encouraging laughter.

She , the deadpan Arjun Kapoor and the underused Kumud Mishra play rogue cops, planning a huge mid-road heist that would make them richer by three khokha, that is unattainable crores for you and I, the ordinary human beings who don’t go around slaying truckloads of victims with machine guns which are so real, they look unreal.

Kuttey is a broadband blizzard of bacchanalia and bloodshed. Everyone is a potential killer. At the end hardly any one of the characters is left alive… No, that’s not a spoiler. It’s karma. Fed on fables of violence and fornication, the characters of Kuttey are reptilian predators who would do anything for money, killing victims being the least of their worries.

Fair enough. The dark sinister world of mega-murky gold-diggers is never a pleasant tea-and-scones visit. Aasman Bhardwaj deep-dives into wretched lives. Not one character is likeable, even in the sociopathic context. There were better more adroitly etched sociopaths in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara and Tabu played a far more complex and rounded schemer in Maqbool. Here she is just a foul-mouthed grimacing crime ki gory… nozzle na lag jaye, Pammiji ko.

The narration is interestingly edited, the punctuation marks seem far more apt than the content demands. Hats off to maverick editor Sreekar Prasad for trying to make sense of an anarchic world where cops are kinky and corrupt.

There are no good guys , only goodbyes in this moral shredder of a film. The story begins and opens with a Naxal raid led by Konkona Sensharma (who seems to have walked into a role meant for Tillotama Shome). What occurs in-between is crazily homicidal.

Yup, Aasman Bhardwaj is a chip off the old block all right. Only, his world of wounded fractured septic creatures is far more zonked-out and askew than his father Vishal’s. Kuttey is an exceedingly anarchic world of deceit and mayhem, shot by cinematographer Faraaz Ahmed Dehlvi with a desperate lyricism.

The actors look driven and frantic , never pretty. Even the lovers on the run—yes, there’s a love story tucked away in the cluttered crevices of this violent saga—played by Radhika Madan and that interesting actor Shardul Bharadwaj, are more in it for the gun and fun than a solid payoff.

My favourite episode in this saga of guns giggles and double-crossing is when Kumud Mishra asks Tabu why she is doing “all this”.

“Because in my police quarter there is no space for even an angdaai (stretch and yawn). I have bought a plot right behind that poet who has written Ek ladki ko dekha.”

A prominent Javed Akhtar mention in a film which Gulzar is closely associated? Can’t get any more perfidious than that.

Et tu, Kuttey?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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