Rating: **
Once upon time every other Hindi film had its ‘Rahim Chacha’, a token benign Muslim presence who underneath the beard , was a kind soul.
There is not single kind Muslim in director Kamakhya Narayan Singh’s Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond. The ‘goes beyond’ is a significant suffix . It sums up the persistent attempt to polarize the Muslim community as the perpetrators of gruesome religious conversion and filthy ideology.
It doesn’t stop there. The screenplay written by Amarnath Jha and Vipul Shah builds a horrific sinister scenario of exploitation and abuse. One of the converted girls Surekha(Ulka Gupta) fights with her ‘sweet parents’ to live in with a monster who happens to be Muslim…
Actually, no. The film’s character portraits move in reverse: the suitor is a monster on account of his religious beliefs.Soon the Monster devours the hapless(Hindu) girl , but not before he force-feeds her beef.
Clearly the makers have beef with the entire community which is portrayed as fanatical, perverse and barbaric.
Another ‘sweet innocent’ Hindu girl Divya(Aditi Bhatia) who likes to make dance reels is trapped into marriage by a habitual baiter whose family home is a dungeon of devilry. Divya’s only spot of sunshine(and perhaps the film’s too) is another girl imprisoned by , shall we call him, Monster No 2?
Monster No 3 is even more reprehensible in his ruse to trap a national level javlin thrower Neha(Aishawrya Ojha) who is converted(you know what I mean) and gangraped graphically.Made me wonder why we were made to stare at the girl’s brutalization with the ‘backgroin music’ pounding into our heads.
Evidently, No 3’s mother(the brilliant Alka Amin) runs a brothel of converted Hindu girls. She gets her comeuppance in the final reel. So do all the radical monsters.A bulldozers also comes into play to remind us what happens to disruptive elements(this film’s makers not included).
But the chants of Har Har Mahadev and the police thrashings of the trio of monster suitors (Alka Amin also gets her hair pulled and a Mullah is shown being dragged to his doom) seems grossly incommensurate with the trauma and suffering of the three women who dared to follow their heart.
Don’t do that! Says this precautionary tale of trauma and (mild) retribution. Listen to your parents,respect your religion. This is where the other community scores big: they teach their children to know and respect their religion whereas we silly Hindus, we are just lost in a fog of pseudo-secularism .
Don’t do that! If you don’t teach your Hindu children to blow conchshells , ‘they’ will soon take over our country.
If you don’t want to buy into the film’s urgent warning, then just watch Kerala 2 as a pulp affliction…fiction. The film is vividly shot, it holds your attention. There are no digressions from its one-point agenda. The cast does what it is told; aggarbattis for the Hindus,scurrility for the others.
Don’t take the politics of the project to heart. They know not what they do. Just watch this as a slip-in-slip-out masala product, albeit a dangerous one. It is deftly edited and the storytelling’s high decibel never flounders. This is a shrill soprano of divisiveness and proud of it.
