Kantara A Legend - Chapter 1 Review: The Film Belongs To Rishab Shetty

All that you expect it to be and then some, Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1 is an audaciously conceived and mounted visual spectacle packed with high points that are strong enough to make amends for the sections that appear a touch laboured and overstretched.  

Lead actor and director Rishab Shetty leaves no stone unturned to enhance the scale and sweep of Kantara, a pan-Indian hit that paved the way for this ambitious prequel that now also has a sequel in the works. The makers are clearly aware that they always had a hard act to follow.  

The sense that a comparison between the two films would be inevitable is baked into the heart of this exercise, which prevents it from looking or sounding different from its precursor. It is set hundreds of years ago and the budget at Shetty's disposal is considerably bigger.          

Cinematographer Arvind S Kashyap goes all out to aid the mythmaking at the core of the film, while music director Ajaneesh Loknath's background score hits the high notes all through the nearly three-hour film. The effort clearly is to make the follow-up brighter and bulkier.  

Do they succeed? For the most part, they do. But the collision between ambition and the organic spirit that drove Kantara takes some of the edge away.    

Since the focus in the first hour of the film is to build a convincing world in which a community of forest dwellers fight for their rights against an oppressive kingdom that benefits from trading the produce of the jungle from a port they control.     

Set in the fourth century, when Karnataka was ruled by the Kadamba dynasty, Kantara A Legend appropriates tribal folklore to spin a myth around a land rich in natural resources supposedly created by Parshuram (an avatar of Vishnu) and protected by divine beings sent by Lord Shiva. The pantheistic gods of the Adivasis and their ways of watching over the tribes are kept out of the narrative.   

An evil king enters the forest and seeks to infiltrate Shiva's enchanted garden, translated in the Hindi dub of the Kannada film as "Eeshwar ka madhuban".

A guardian of the forest, Guliga, a powerful and benign force that the protagonist Barme (Rishab Shetty) transforms into in a later timeline to rid the people of another tyrannical king, kills the invader and saves the tribals.  

The slain king's son Rajasekhar (Jayaram) refrains from any such adventurism until his reckless successor, Kulasekara (Gulshan Devaiah), makes an ill-advised foray into the forest with his army and proceeds to burn down the tribal village that has been sustained for eons by the abundant produce of the region. 

Kantara, the mystical forest, has an invincible protector in Barme, endowed with superhuman strength and courage, which, as it was in the case of the protagonist of Kantara, set principally in the 1990s, springs from a divine source - the boar god, Panjurli. 

Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1 is markedly different in one key respect - it has a female character whose importance and attributes grow as the story unfolds in fits and starts.

She is a princess (Rukmini Vasanth, terrific), Kulasekara's sister. She knows what she is all about. She weighs in assertively when her brother goes astray. At one point in the story, she has a dalliance with Barme. It promises to evolve into something substantial.

But the script does not play out along expected lines. The princess transforms into much more than just a romantic interest of a masculine messiah or a voice-of-reason sounding board for a sibling who does not know that power without responsibility is a recipe for disaster. 

The film belongs to Rishab Shetty. However, nothing that he does here can put his Kantara act in the shade. Since much of his heroics and ritualistic acts of defiance and derring-do hinge on largely familiar tropes, the surprise elements that enlivened the first film are conspicuous by their absence. 

The final stretch of Kantara - which comprised about half an hour or thereabouts of screen time - elevated the film to a level that blew audiences away. In Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1, the finale is not only predictable, it is a tad low on power compared to what Shetty delivered the first time around both as a writer-director and an actor. 

Although the film hinges on tribals asserting themselves in the face of exploitation, the contemporary resonance of the confrontation between the might of a kingdom and the resolve of a community does not develop into a significant facet of the film. It seems to have been incorporated merely as a plot device rather than for creating a larger philosophical context. 

Among the supporting actors, Jayaram stands tall. Gulshan Devaiah's principal antagonist borders on caricature and is, therefore, drained of genuine menace. 

Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1 is a manic, sometimes befuddling, mix of history, myth, cinematic craft and performative power. When the disparate components and conceits blend well, it is an undeniably compelling watch.  

At all other times, it is immersive enough to keep the audience glued to the screen in an attempt to scan and decipher the riot of colours, the grand gestures, the larger-than-life action sequences and the portentous dialogue that have gone into the project.