DIRECTOR: R Balki
STARRING: Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Swaroop Sampath, Rajit Kapoor
RATING: 3 stars
Since women don’t go out to earn, their efforts to make a home, run a family and raise kids are often forgotten and taken for granted. We forget they do a job as well, round the clock, round the year, unpaid and sometimes unappreciated. Ki And Ka addresses the same thought in the climax where a mother minces no words and points out the sad power game as is. Ki & Ka starring Kareena Kapoor Khan as Kia, an ambitious and successful young marketing pro who feels marriage is designed to destroy women’s careers by placing the onus of household management on the wife. When she meets Kabir (Arjun Kapoor), whose sole goal in life is to run a house (or be the “artist” his mother was, as he puts it), it is a perfect fit.
They fall in love. They marry. He cooks, cleans and supports her from home. She becomes a VP in her company and supports him financially. Cracks appear. Tensions arise. They fight. They make up. They move on.The film tries so hard to be funny that it shows, hence fails to tickle. Secondly, the issue of gender equality takes a backseat. And in this confused attempt to address the issue, the film furiously judges everyone in sight. The plot is not unconvincing. After all, unspoken power equations in most homes are governed by who earns money and who does not. Many of the individual episodes in the film are independently believable in the way they deal with the rarely explored, tricky territory Kia and Kabir are treading.
It is imaginable, for instance, that Kia would initially be embarrassed to tell her colleagues that Kabir is a househusband.There is plenty of humour too in the film, especially in the first half. The film is so taken in by its concept that it rarely rises above it to become a fully fleshed out story about fully fleshed out people. This is in keeping with adman-turned-writer-director R. Balki’s body of work so far. He is a concepts man. Ki And Ka suffers from lazy, confused, amateur writing. There is out-of-character behavior and illogical scenes inserted in the name of feminism. Sample this: The husband accuses the wife of adultery when she gets busy with an American marketing big shot at a corporate do. She shouts and screams and even slaps him. And then they do exactly what a couple in such heightened emotions must do: make love! The performances are as superficial as the writing. Everyone is ‘acting’.
There can be no other explanation for visual imagery like Kabir wearing a mangalsutra on his wrist or Kabir in red high-heeled shoes in the closing song, ‘High heels te nachche’. Besides, to emphasise a point, Ki & Ka also sporadically gets characters to do and say things that are completely out of character. For instance, Kabir’s father’s aggressive, unkind reaction to their announcement of marriage is credibly handled, but Kia’s mother’s initial comments seem contrived. She asks him if he is a freeloader, a query that seems solely planted in the script to give Kabir an opportunity to ask her if she would have asked the same question to a prospective bride of a hypothetical son if the girl had expressed a desire to be a stay-at-home wife. Besides, the Ki and Ka of the film have that unusually sparky chemistry between them making us enjoy every bit of the film..
Kareena is the pick of the cast. She is particularly good in her emotionally over-wrought scenes. It is such a joy to see her playing a substantial role after a string of marginal parts in male-centric films. It is also nice to see her deservedly getting top billing in the credits, which is uncommon for women. Arjun’s brooding intensity is always attractive, but he has delivered better performances in the past. Hats off to this youngster though for his experimental Film. Swaroop Sampat, who plays Kia’s mother in Ki & Ka, is cute and likeable but she just cannot act. Ki & Ka are fun, considerable sections of it are unexpectedly broad-minded, path-breaking for Bollywood and insightful.
