The film is an impressionistic series of scenes that showcase the restlessness, the powerlessness, the confusion of an unprivileged man in a changing city.
In Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, the protagonist is an immigrant to Bombay, and he is pulled into the underworld. Sahadev Kelvadi’s Kenda is set in Bangalore and its protagonist – Keshava (BV Bharath) – is from Bangalore, but he might as well be an immigrant. The story, like Satya, shows his descent into crime. The film’s time frame is not exactly stated, but it appears to be a time before the city became Bengaluru. There are no cell phones in sight, and the hot song of the season appears to be one from another Ram Gopal Varma movie, Rangeela. It appears to be the time that BPOs and IT companies began to invade our cities and began to widen the rift between the English-speakers and local language-speakers, the haves and the have nots. Keshava may be a local, but in a way, he is also an outsider.
Keshava works in a steel factory, and we meet farmers outside the city who seem to live in temperatures hotter than what Keshava experiences at work. Kenda does not show us many people who work in cooler temperatures, in air-conditioned offices, but we do get a self-styled prophet named Narasimha Shastri (Vinod Ravindran). With his flowing beard, the man looks like sage, and he gives speeches about the materialism that has gripped the city. He runs a newspaper devoted to exposing crimes, but the man himself is a borderline criminal. He has a group of young men who create unrest, and these “staged” incidents are reported in the paper. In other words, Narasimha Shastri is not merely reporting the news, he is making it. The rest of the film is about Keshava, who is pulled into this gang of youths, and becomes what we’d call a “rowdy”.
Unlike Satya, Kenda is more of a non-narrative film. There is a “story” we follow, yes, but this is more an impressionistic series of scenes that showcase the restlessness, the powerlessness, the confusion of an unprivileged man like Keshava. Look at the first shot of Keshava, as he walks with a cap covering his head. He is practically anonymous. If he were to vanish one day, no one would miss him – except maybe his mother, who keeps shouting at him for staying single and not helping out with her husband who is content to stay drunk using her money. The strap of her slippers comes off, and when Keshava buys her a new pair – much later – there is no softening, no sentimentality. This is a hard film that is not interested in spoonfeeding easy emotion to the audience.
At first, Keshava feels uncomfortable about this new line of work, staging protests and bandh-s. His friend, the one who brought him in, tells him not to think small. And when Keshava asks why they are doing all this, the man says: “Why do we need to know that? What we do is on TV, non-stop. Isn’t that enough?” In other words, for these anonymous people, this is an erasure of their anonymity. It gives them a sense of purpose, a sense of self-worth, a sense of self. And in Keshava’s case, there is also a sense of conscience. Unlike the others in Narasimha Shastri’s gang, he is conflicted about right and wrong. He does not want his teenage neighbour, a boy named Ravi, to be courted to hurl stones and small bombs just because Ravi is a good bowler.
And we get to one of the most interesting scenes in Kenda, when Keshava tries to talk about Ravi to his sister Sangeetha. Keshava knows her as a neighbour, but like many men, he has not had the courage to walk up and talk to a woman. All we sense is a hint of interest. But when he sees her with another man, he is filled with rage. He calls her a whore. It probably doesn’t help that she wears “modern clothes” like T-shirts. This is another aspect of this kind of man, who wants to keep up with the times but finds himself bound by conventional notions of patriarchy. Ritwik Kaikini scores the film with an acoustic guitar, and the spareness of the instrument kept telling me that it’s probably impossible to fully know the complexities of Keshava’s mind.
Another beautiful scene involves a rich man. We know he is rich because his car has a driver, and because he approaches the tea stall Keshava is often found at and asks for a pack of Benson and Hedges. Of course, that brand of cigarette is not available here. The man then asks Keshava’s friend if he has some “powder”. To him, Keshava’s friend “looks” like a drug supplier, and that tells us a lot about the class divide between them. Kenda is packed with such moments, where small scenes say a lot. Take this other bit, involving Keshava’s colleague at the steel factory, who asks him to get married to a good woman and be happy. He uses himself as an example. But a little later, he suffers an accident and the “good woman” that he is married to now faces a lifetime of uncertainty and unhappiness.
These existential points find a mirror in Narasimha Shastri’s Sanskrit quotes, like “the ones you will trust are the ones who will end up betraying you”. I found the subsequent twist (it involves Narasimha Shastri’ s philosophical understanding of mankind) a little too concrete a plot point for a film whose appeal is its abstractions. There is a crusading journalist and a sense of “good will prevail” – these elements seem to have been force-fitted into this nihilistic universe. Keshava’s relationship with a transgender sex worker fits in much better. This is not a conventional romance, and its lack of specificity fits in beautifully with the aimlessness in men like Keshava. Like the direction and the cinematography, the performances are wonderfully muted, and in its best moments, Kenda holds up a mirror to the humanity of the young men we casually tend to dismiss as inhuman criminals.
Pingback: Sahadev Kelvadi’s ‘Kenda’ is both muted and hard-hitting, a deep-dive into the life and mind of a “lowly” rowdy | Baradwaj Rangan