A similar thing he does with his storytelling, full of that spunk which lifts scenes, by leaving them behind. Unlike, say, a Baby Driver (2017), where the thrill of the opening car chase keeps ricocheting from the formal set-up of cars whizzing through the cinematic cut, to the rock music that overlays it, Kaala sees the style separate out from the scene. The first episode crescendos with a chase that begins when we hear the breathless musical panting that bumps to Hanumankind’s rap as an IB officer begins his chase on a bike. Nothing about the chase itself is thrilling, the camera swooping in the air like an eagle, you almost forget what is being chased, surfing about, doing tango to the music, with road traffic.
This is style that feels like it is floating above the story, whipped out every now and then, like the show’s indissoluble oil over its water.
Is this the failure of substance or the overreach of style?
Unraveling in Kaala
Every episode of Kaala begins with images spliced, silence in between. Sometimes the image being spliced is as banal as a kettle being boiled. The point is not to see what is being spliced, but that things are being spliced. To evoke that agitation. For what end, except the sunglassy coolness of it all?
Nambiar chases moments, as his plot topsy turvies, leaving characters by the roadside. Kaala has five writers—Bejoy Nambiar, Francis Thomas, Priyas Gupta, Mithila Hegde, Shubhra Swarup—with dialogues by Karan Vishwanath Kashyap, and there is a joke somewhere in here about needing five writers, so at any point, at least someone knows what is going on in the script, that moves across continents and decades. Suddenly you are thrust into a war in Jaffna, shot gorgeously in slow-motion; a flashback in Punjab here, a fast-forward in London there, with Kolkata, Darjeeling, New York, and Siliguri flung around like flipcards. This, too, is style. To be so intentionally choppy you have to spend time piecing together the debris, like a puzzle.