Krantiveer: The Revolution

Sheer incredulity at the film’s solutions to the country’s ills keeps one transfixed.

Krantiveer: The Revolution is a strange film. It picks you up by the collar, takes you on a guided tour of what’s wrong with the country, and provides solutions that border on the bizarre. Like Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, the sheer eccentricity of the movie’s lead character keeps you incredulously transfixed. 

Pratap, the lead character in the original Krantiveer of 1994, was played by Nana Patekar, and his fiery speech before being hanged is reproduced in this edition. It’s an extraordinary sermon, with a declaration that he would rather be dead in an India that is so corrupt.

So now in Krantiveer: The Revolution, his TV journalist daughter Roshni (Bloch) is to take the revolution forward through the media and expose corrupt police officers, builders, corporate heads, politicians et al. 

Clearly, director Mehul Kumar has tender and affecting faith in broadcast media as the panacea to our ills, and so he presents TV investigations in bravura, shorthand style. Wild and heterogeneous political connections are made, such as one between the police officers killed on 26/11 and fictional villains of the movie. Footage of the mayhem on that day, completely out of context, is appended to make the point. 

Nobody discusses anything in this ‘revolution’. Roshni is investigator, speechmaker, law enforcer and  judge. She is the bait, the angler and the cook. Nobody gets a word in edgeways, and the film moves like a runaway train, the entire cast giving her a wide berth to deliver her monologues, all of which are written for the camera and spoken in a soap box oratory style. 

And yet, despite the clumsy filmmaking, the sheer unpredictability of the film keeps you watching. What bizarre idea will Kumar come up with next? This director is an original.

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Ajit Duara