Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Kennedy’ is a Tedious Film, But Talking to Him About It Is Fun

Kennedy

Cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, Mohit Takalkar, Abhilash Thapliyal, Megha Burman

Direction: Anurag Kashyap

Rating: **

Writer-director Anurag Kashyap broke down when he got an email from the Cannes Film Festival, confirming that his film, Kennedy, was in the official selection and would premiere at the 2,300-seater Grand Theatre Lumiere (GTL).

“This is my first screening ever at Theatre Lumiere, one of the biggest screens in the world. It is a dream come true,” Kashyap told Rolling Stone India in Cannes on Thursday, a day after his film was screened at GTL in the out-of-competition, midnight section.

There were long queues outside Grand Theatre Lumiere late on Wednesday to Thursday night and Kashyap walked the red carpet with the lead actors of his film — Sunny Leone and Rahul Bhat — his producer Ranjan Singh and others. More than 50 members of his team who worked on Kennedy had arrived in Cannes and were at the GTL to attend the film’s world premiere.  

Cannes Film Festival’s midnight section is reserved for genre films. And Kennedy, Kashyap says, is a “mood, character piece” whose story “was triggered by the Scorpio incident.”

“Cops in India are lowly paid and a lot of their income comes from bars and restaurants. Lockdown mein sab band tha,” says Kashyap, so he wrote a film about “what happens when police become the mafia.”

On February 25th, 2021, a Scorpio was found near industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai residence, Antilia. It had 20 gelatin sticks and an extortion note which called the threat a “trailer.”

The Scorpio belonged to Mansukh Hiren, a car-décor shop owner in Thane, who was found dead about a week later. The trail eventually led investigators to a Mumbai cop, Sachin Vaze. 

In a different case, Vaze turned approver and told investigators that he would collect hafta from bar owners on behalf of Anil Deshmukh, NCP politician and former home minister in the Uddhav Thackeray government.

Fictionalized versions of all these events and many others make up the plot of Kennedy which is set during the Covid lockdown when, the film announces at the onset, Mumbai police — once compared to the Scotland Yard — plumbed new depths of criminality. 

Shot at night, between 12 midnight and 4 am, Kennedy has the complexion and feel of a noir thriller. During the film’s 29-30 day shoot, Rahul Bhat, who plays the lead character, did not sleep because Kashyap wanted him to have the voice and eyes of an insomniac. 

“I slept for an hour or two for those 30 days, surviving mostly on coffee,” Bhat told Rolling Stone India. His character, Uday Shetty aka Kennedy, wears a mask, including that of Vin Diesel, and barely talks. When he does speak, it’s in a strange and distracting guttural voice.

The film’s background music by the Prague Philharmonic Choir is quite stunning, and adds a layer of operatic drama to the mundane business of a rogue cop killing people. 

And yet watching the film is tedious. Kennedy annoys more than it thrills because though it’s all poised to go somewhere, it barely moves from where it begins.

But talking to Kashyap about the film and what went into making it is fun, and way more interesting than the film itself. 

Kashyap says that he stole the idea and name of his lead character, Uday Shetty, from a real-life cop that director Sudhir Mishra knew in the Eighties. The real Uday Shetty would talk to the ghosts of people he had killed, and in the film, Uday Shetty — a former cop who is thought to be dead — is stalked by the ghosts of men he killed. Unable to sleep, he drives a taxi at night under the assumed name Kennedy and kills people at the behest of police commissioner Rasheed Khan (Mohit Takalkar), because he thinks Khan will eventually lead him to his bete noire, Saleem, with whom he has an old, personal score to settle.

The film doesn’t explain why Uday Shetty calls himself Kennedy, but Kashyap explains its tangential link to Tamil star Chiyaan Vikram, whose real name is Kennedy John Victor. “Initially I was writing the film with Vikram in mind and it was titled Project Kennedy,” he says. Vikram didn’t respond in time, but the title stayed.

There are moments in Kennedy, including the opening sequence, which are very stylized and cool.

Kennedy arrives for a murder with elaborate paraphernalia, including an LP record that he plays. This is moody assassin stuff where violence is framed as a performative art, a skill, a fetish.

But this narrative style is not carried through. Almost immediately after this sequence, the film begins a countdown to its climax with text on the screen announcing, “Five days to the night, Four days to the…” and Kennedy settles into being the usual corrupt Mumbai cops assassinating people to settle scores and save their own ass sort of film. 

A lot of killing happens in Kennedy, most of it inspired by events during lockdown. And around the main characters, there is ambient talk about the pandemic and lockdown. “Lockdown affected me a lot. I got depressed with the situation and how things were. People [were] dying, yet there was apathy and lying… So I wrote a fictional story around it. In the periphery you hear what was going on, not through the central character, who is a robot, a mechanical skilled killer with a low IQ,” Kashyap said.

There is talk about a politician, Supremo, in Delhi, Big Papa in Mumbai, arguments over “thali bajana, diya jalana,” about cremations and deaths, about countries not being run by the government but by billionaires who profited from the lockdown. 

“Today how do you escape being political? But my politics,” says Kashyap, “is not about a party anymore. It’s about people.”

While all this political talk delighted me, most of it is not organic to the film’s story, its main characters or their concerns. It doesn’t distract from the main story, but doesn’t add anything to it either. It stands apart from the film, and we receive it as a coded aside from Kashyap to liberals. 

The time spent on this could have been used to give more screen time to Rahul Bhat. Though in a flashback, we get a glimpse of his full face and sociopathy, there should have been more of Bhat in the film apart from the harangue by a dismembered voice that asks him, repeatedly, “Bata kitne qatl kiye tune/Bata kitna mazaa aaya/Kitne sikkon mein beche murde/Bata kitna kamaa laaya (How many have you murdered? Did you have fun? How much did you sell the dead for? How much did you earn?).”

And then there’s the decision to cast Sunny Leone, an inspired choice that made me feel a little cheated.

“I wanted someone who is beautiful and gorgeous and has paid the price for it all her life. The prerequisite for the role was it has to be someone who is in her 40s. There’s nobody better than Sunny. She has been judged all her life. She has never been given that chance though she has worked so hard at putting the whole past behind her. The world is shit. She puts up a simple post and you see such vulgar comments from such shit people, it makes you angry. I saw her interview with Bhupendra Chaubey where Bhupendra Chaubey was being such an asshole and the way she dealt with it, with such dignity. I have tremendous respect for this woman,” Kashyap said.

Leone’s presence adds that must-have touch of glamor to Kennedy that all noir films need.

She appears in the film as a curious item of vintage style and grace who will add a twist to the story. 

Leone’s Charlie begins with a laugh, and keeps repeating that. Though it felt forced, it also felt like something that would lead to something. But I kept waiting for her character to do something, to let us connect — but that didn’t happen.

Sunny Leone deserved more, Kennedy deserved more. And so did we.