Kabir Singh
Year: 2019
Director: Sandeep Vanga
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Kiara Advani, Arjun Bajwa, Suresh Oberoi, Kamini Kaushal,

I walked into the theatre late, missing the first few minutes of the film and thus being clueless about the basic premise of Kabir Singh. Then started a series of scenes, which left me bewildered about what exactly was happening. So there was Kabir Singh, an unkempt bearded man, threatening a young woman with a knife to have sex with him in the kitchen, while her fiancé rang bell at the door; Kabir Singh walking out ‘unsatisfied’ and putting ice cubes inside his trousers to ‘cool down’; Kabir Singh walking in drunk and changing into the scrubs to go into the operation theatre, while a nurse ogled at his chiseled body; Kabir Singh (now in the flashback scene) beating a nasty opponent blue on the football field, while some choicest swear words flew all around. It was mindless mayhem!

Only after about half an hour of all this, the actual core story emerged. So Kabir Singh is this flawed ‘genius’ who is a medical college topper, a top sportsman, who cannot control his anger. The man almost ready to leave his medical college so that he doesn’t have to apologize for his rowdy behaviour, reverses his decision when he spots a new girl in the junior batch. He tells all the juniors to back off from the girl since she is going to be his ‘Bandi’! Then he dictates that new girl to choose ‘healthy chicks’ as her girl-friends; takes her out to give anatomy lessons and slowly the subdued, silent, submissive junior becomes his willful love object. With lip-locks and ‘between the sheets’ activities galore, the couple sets the campus on fire. But the ‘Beti Ka Bedard Baap’ comes in between and marries the girl off to another boy. Now Kabir Singh is hurt…. And hurt very badly. So he goes into a downward spiral of drinking, drugging and deflowering without a care, while his loyal friends and loving family members helplessly watch his wanton self-destruction! Will he ever emerge out of his heartbreak?

Verdict:

As a wayward, sick, self-centered and self-destructive man with practically no redeeming feature, Kabir Singh comes across as a repulsive sociopath and his girl as someone with Stockholm syndrome (a timid captive falling in love with a brutal captor!). To call this film a passionate romance or entertainment is a travesty of the terms. The comparisons with Devdas or Dev D are inevitable, but Kabir Singh is a crude and coarse film unlike the two.

True, Shahid Kapoor has played the wacko central character quite convincingly and even the other actors have done justice to their characters. True, there are a few sequences, which even touch the heart but overall, Kabir Singh is a toxic, over-stretched film that tests patience and tolerance with its blatant misogynistic bullying content. That’s why the mass appeal of this film (and that of its original Telugu film Arjun Reddy!) comes as a rude shock. Watch it at your own peril!

Rating

2 stars