RK/RKAY movie review: Rajat Kapoor film is meta several times over

Got it? Never mind if not all is instantly clear, because Rajat Kapoor makes the kind of films which do some of the work, and trusts us do the rest, a rarity in Hindi cinema.

Before we get into anything else, I have to say, yes, this is a very Rajat Kapoor film. The premise is intelligent and self-aware, and it is not just meta, it is meta several times over. RK/ RKAY is fashioned like a love letter to old Hindi movies, an era when heroes in double breasted suits sighed over bouffant-clad beauties called Gulabo (Sherawat) and smoke-wreathed villains called K N Singh (Shorey) hung around shady dens.

And then the hero of the film-within-the-film vanishes, leaving the director, whose past few films have been flops, and who is trying to breathe a bit of life into his career and marriage, flummoxed. It leaves RK staring at the impossible– how can a character he has written– ‘maatra ek paatra’– whose trajectory has been fixed, flee into the real world? The film references similar flights of fancy undertaken by movie-makers in the past (Woody Allen and Hannah And Her Sisters is one). Can a fictional character really take on a life of their own, become the arbiter of his own destiny? And finally, watching all these real and fictional characters jumping through hoops, we ask, how meta is too meta? Because after a point, things start to slip and slide.

Watch RK/RKAY trailer here: 

The better parts of the film take place on sets-within-sets when Sherawat is doing the diva act: she knows how to throw tantrums, and get everyone to bend to her will, including a hapless associate on the film (Rai), whom she keeps cussing out. Manu Rishi Chaddha is a hoot as the builder-producer who wants the hero to do heroic stuff, which includes a happily-ever-after with the heroine. And a climactic hook, if not entirely unexpected, leaves us smiling.

The hark back into how Hindi cinema used to be isn’t madly new, but it never gets old. But soon, we are left looking for things to latch on to. We can see that RK and his wife (Sait) are not quite as simpatico as they may have once been: why? Is it because there’s been a problem, or have they just grown out of each other? We are not given enough to play with when these two come together to share screen space, whether it is a lunch– quinoa salad for her, chicken in red sauce for him– or a bed. What’s going on inside her? And when the real and fictional come face to face, the former reacts more with irritation rather than an oh-my-god how-is-this- even-possible look.

I missed the wonder that needs to suffuse the quirky idea that a character can write his or her own destiny, and can break free. Are we also just characters in someone else’s story, playing out someone else’s script? RK/RKAY needed to be more magical, less matter-of-fact.

RK/RKAY movie cast: Rajat Kapoor, Mallika Sherawat, Ranvir Shorey, Kubbra Sait, Chandrachoor Rai
RK/RKAY movie director: Rajat Kapoor
RK/RKAY movie rating: Two and a half stars