Kurup (Netflix)
Starring Dulquer Salmaan ,Indrajith Sukumaran, Sobhita Dhulipala, Shine Tom Chacko
Directed by Srinath Rajendran
Rating: ** ½
Two questions haunted me as I sat through two hours and 35 minutes of this slog of a film: why a bio-pic on a scumbag like Sukumara Kurup whose life-story is certainly not of any social validity? And if a bio-pic on this trashy man is the need of the hour(you never know what would assuage the nation’s collective conscience in these troubled times) why is the storytelling so unnecessarily complicated and convoluted with multiple perceptions being thrust on Kurup’s life in a most redundant and annoying ‘he-dead-he-dead-not’ kind of storytelling pattern more suited to a bio-pic on Netaji Subhas Chandra than a con-man who seems to have no scruples killing,maiming, burning, and defrauding the innocent.
Since Kurup(which by the way means ugly in Hindi) is played by Malayalam superstar Dulquer Salmaan the criminal is duly humanized. As played by Dulquer , Kurup is roguish, charming , even irresistible, at least to the woman Sharda played by Sobhita Dhulipala who seems to have made a career out of playing women who get involved with the most dubious kind of men.
When we first meet Kurup he has joined the airforce. He is rakish and genial,a favourite. This strain of affable presentation continues to haunt the film right to its over-clever climax. The script writers seem to think in tandem with its protagonist. This would have been a good thing if the subject of the cinematic exploration was a saint , a thinker or philosopher. But a sociopath? Who the hell cares?
What is the purpose behind this bio-pic about a man civilization would like to forget? Are we so short of truly inspirational characters? Or is this just a whimsical excursion for a star who has the clout to do anything on screen, and isn’t using that clout judiciously.
Dulquer’s Kurup is not only elusive, he is also hazy and very badly sketched. As a star-vehicle for Dulquer, the narrative lets its audience down by obliterating him from the screen for a longish period in the second-half. Come to think of it, there is more of the cop Krishna Das in the script than Kurup.
Das is well played by Indrajith Sukumaran a very fine actor who brings a certain nuance into his character seen to be tragically absent from Dulquer’s portrayal of the sociopath. Dulquer’s Kurup is full of loopy grins and enigmatic smoke-rings all amounting to more suggestion than substance, more hints than statements.
It’s not all Dulquer’s fault. The periodicity specially in Mumbai(then, Bombay) portions in the early 1970s is replete with Hindi spoken with a thick Malayali accent . At one point we see a poster of the Ashok Kumar starrer Oonche Log in 1970 when in fact the film was released in 1965.
I couldn’t help comparing Dulquer’s Kurup with Tahar Rahim’s Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent. The two outlaws were similar in their modus operandi. Whereas Rahim plays Sobhraj as calculating and coldblooded , Dulquer’s Kurup is spontaneous and cute, as though the real Kurup became what he was only so that one day Dulquer Salmaan would play him on screen.
