The Kerala Story 2 Goes Beyond Review: The Film Is Insufferably Screechy

Three M's - Muslims, Malayalees and Meat - are what The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond tilts at with quixotic gusto. In the process, it goes completely overboard and loses its way.

Propaganda demands no major creative acumen. All it calls for is a willingness to flow with the tide and pass off street-corner tittle-tattle as truth. That is all there is to this film.

TKS2, heavy-handed and mealy-mouthed, would have been dismissed as the rant of a fevered mind had it not been so vituperative.

The overcooked cinematic harangue proves that while it may be easy to profit monetarily from alarmist postulations, agenda-driven filmmaking can sink quickly and completely into inanity when not backed by solid research and rigour.

TKS2 has all the failings of a quickie made with an eye of factors extraneous to the craft of filmmaking. Its heaping of calumnies on a community is relentless, rancorous, irresponsible and frequently laughable.

Even if you are inclined to cut the film some slack, if not buy into it fully, its cinematic qualities are well below par. It is garish, garrulous and godawfully messy. The writing is rudimentary. The treatment, driven by iniquitous imperatives, is sloppily in your face.

What is TKS2 trying to tell us? Nothing new: it goes on and on about love jihad and forced conversions as tools for altering India's demographics. That is a wild swing indeed for a film that lacks the depth of understanding or the sense of restraint required to tackle the complexities of a combustible and sensitive theme.

One of the film's bad guys is a deceptively amiable Salim (Sumit Gahlawat), pejoratively referred to as a "liberal journalist". He tricks a Malayali girl, Surekha (Ulka Gupta) into a live-relationship and then tells his co-conspirators that each one the 8.5 crore unmarried Hindu girls in the country today must be targeted so that India becomes an Islamic nation by 2047.

Two other unrelated men, Faizan (Arjan Singh Aujla) and Rasheed (Yuktam Khosla), both projected as drifters who live off the support they receive from maulvis and other leaders of their community, do their bit by leading Neha (Aishwarya Ojha) and Divya (Aditi Bhatia) astray.

The three victims are from three different states. Surekha, a broadminded non-believer, lives in Kochi. Divya, is a social media star with a passion for dance, belongs to a conservative Jodhpur family. And Neha, a javelin champ who aspires to represent the country at the highest level, is from Gwalior.

TKS2 would have us believe that these stories are based on true events fictionalised only for dramatic purposes. But there isn't a shred of authenticity here. The sportswoman - she is never shown on a playground - is a Dalit girl, but a portrait of Swami Vivekananda adorns a wall in her home. Go figure!

The other two have family names - Nair and Paliwal. Neha's surname remains unspecified. Their paths never cross but all three fall prey to treachery of the same kind. They have the door slammed shut on their dreams.

The film abounds in scenes in which the girls are beaten black and blue, locked up, raped and (in the case of one), forced to eat beef. With no room available for subtlety in this nightmarish construct in which not a single Muslim, man or woman, is blameless, it goes hammer and tongs.

Balance is not on the radar. Predisposed towards a worldview, TKS2 cherry-picks sticks to beat its enemies with. Relying on unsubstantiated claims and unverified sources, it rattles along merrily without pausing to assess the pros and cons of the exercise, with each scene more cringe than the previous one.

The producer (whose Bollywood directorial career was built around pure and persistent pulp) is not new to the game. Let's hand it to him: he has a clear polemical purpose. But the director, Kamakhya Narayan Singh, is a new votary. He does not tamper with a template that is primed to pay dividends.

Singh fishes in troubled waters with the same vigour that Sudipto Sen brought to bear upon The Kerala Story a few years ago. The result is expectedly the same - the film all noise and no nous.

Oscillating between the bizarre and the noxious, it ends by listing three or four instances of men, or groups of men, who were punished across India for religious conversions. But it offers no empirical evidence to prove that these aren't isolated incidents.

Giving a wide berth to logic, if flogs a dying horse that has been kept alive because for filmmakers incapable of original ideas, it is still a cash cow and a means of currying favour with the establishment.

Peddling specious arguments and facile inferences, it feeds off and into theories that support pre-determined conclusions. It is moviemaking at its most recklessly opportunistic at a time when artists, storytellers and filmmakers should build bridges rather than fan majoritarian disaffection. But if TKS2 did that, it would lose its raison d'etre.

Its questionable premise isn't the only thing that is amiss with TKS2. Nothing that the film presents as socio-cultural and political context rings true.

The definite article in the title suggests that the yarn that the film spins is true for all of Kerala, that this is "the" Kerala story. The tone is absolutist. The film should instead have been named "A Story Each from Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan". It is as all over the place as its triptych of stray tales.

TKS2 simply isn't interested in engaging with alternative perspectives. The makers have a beef with certain people and irrespective of how unreasonable their stance might be, they keep baying for blood until it is time to throw in an anthemic number that warns the wrongdoers of dire consequences.

The producer and the director, men chasing short-term gains, weaponise the anguish of women wronged not as a tool of empowerment but (in the guise of a cautionary tale) as a means of painting a community into a corner.

It presents its arguments not as tenable points of debate but as incontrovertible 'facts' that aren't open to interpretation or any further probe. It plays fast and loose with veracity. It is aimed at furthering a line of thinking rather than starting a meaningful conversation or, at the very least, serve the medium.

Its all-round ineptitude is glaring. TKS2 is insufferably screechy. What it does is demonstrate how not to do propaganda. If there is anything that it goes beyond, it is muckraking.