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Kalank:  Bollywood Extravaganza of Flawed Love

Kalank Doesn’t set off the fireworks, yet still worth a watch

For Bollywood fans, this latest blockbuster has lots of plus points starting with the hi-octane star cast – Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan, Sanjay Dutt, Madhuri Dixit, Sonakshi Sinha and Aditya Roy Kapur – they are what will draw the fans to the theater seats. I guess the lure is too much – the ability to see six well-loved stars on the same screen – and in color-coordinated matching outfits, no less! To that add  stunning production values, luminous sets, opulent dance numbers and over-the-top masala drama.

Yet somehow it’s a damp squib and doesn’t really set off the fireworks.

The three love stories just don’t set off sparks from the beginning and somehow you just don’t get emotionally hooked. Inspiration seems to come from a whole lot of successful Bollywood movies from Sanjay Leela Bhansali films to ‘Bahubali’ to even earlier masala movies. Yet somehow the film never finds its own voice or reason to be.

Kalank – Varun, Alia, Aditya, Sonakshi, Madhuri, Sanjay – Six Intersected Lives

All the stars give good performances: Varun Dhawan probably gives the best performance of his career and to that add Kunal Kemmu, superb in a dark role. Alia Bhatt gives an intelligent, subdued performance and holds her own in scenes with the legendary Madhuri Dixit. One would have liked to see more of the relationship between the characters played by Aditya Roy Kapur and Sonakshi Sinha – both these fine actors would have benefited Kalank with some more emotional scenes.

The clothes are gorgeous (a la Manish Malhotra), the sets stunning as stage sets but they don’t move you to really take the story seriously to heart. Big sets don’t a big movie make. I would have loved to see sets which really conveyed the pre-partition India instead of the over-ostentatious Hira Mandi sets which were supposed to portray a rough, disreputable part of town.

Every time we stepped into Hira Mandi, the thought came that this is a set, so far removed from reality it appeared to be. (Bhansali’s ‘ Sawariya‘ had the same problem. Life is believable only in sets which look like real life and not obvious stage sets, no matter how pretty.)

My emotional involvement always got sidetracked by logical factors – How could people in a red light area have such grand celebrations and how much did Bahar Begum (Madhuri Dixit) get paid by her singing students that she could maintain that palatial residence with the giant, eye-popping chandelier?

If Bahar Begum was no longer performing and was just teaching music how could she maintain such a royal household? Why were there such elaborate song and dance numbers if she had not a single patron to view them? Were they solely for the benefit of us, the movie-going audience?

Also when Zafar (Varun Dhawan) urges her to take the train out of Husnabad as the partition riots break over the city, Bahar Begum demurs, saying she would rather stay on to safeguard her Hindu girls. But shouldn’t she have been rushing them to the train station to safeguard them? Her character seemed just a skeletal sketch and not a fleshed out personality. Her conflict didn’t seem real enough. She abandoned her son and never did anything to help him; he remained a blacksmith (a well-muscled one, we agree.)

In the same way, Sanjay Dutt’s stern patriarch Balraj Choudhry doesn’t change at all nor does he show any remorse for the mistakes he made. I wish there had been a strong script with some character development for all the sterling talent in the film. Cinema should be about transformation, about change and growth but here it just doesn’t happen.

So in the end Kalank is eye candy – gorgeous to look at but little else. In the end, even beauty can become boring if there is not enough emotion. The dramatic partition train scenes in the climax seem to be from another movie – I wish there had been more of this deglamorized story-telling so that we could care about these characters. With more of an emotional context, Kalank could have been a real keeper.

The way it is, what could have been a timeless film becomes a time pass.

Visit the Town of Husnabad, built by the Kalank team

And yet, and yet – as a film-goer I must pay tribute to the technical wizardry, this raising of an entire township for a 3 hour film, this passion for excellence in details.  Kalank is a labor of love and this is what makes our Indian film craft so special – this talent and ability to pull all the stops out.

Watch this little video on the making of the elaborate sets for the city of Husnabad and its ostentatious areas of Hira Mandi and you see the kind of hard work and imagination that has gone into creating the elaborate visuals of Kalank, of each and every scene, the clothing, the jewelry, the artifacts and the atmosphere.  Fans all over the world will marvel at the Indian ability to create such beauty.
I think of all the hours and hours craftspeople and artists and laborers must have put into these sets – and the livelihoods earned and families sustained.
Bravo to Karan Johar, director Abhishek Varman and the team of Kalank for that.

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