Between Sympathy and Frustration
Review of Kohinoor (2014)
The pieces in this film-commentary series were originally written in between September 2013 and November 2014.
‘Tapain chinta nagarnus – tyesko mukh ta ma hamesha ko lagi banda garidinchhu!’
Writer-director Aakash Adhikari’s Kohinoor is perhaps better known as the final cinematic vehicle for the much loved actor Shree Krishna Shrestha. Watching it so close to the unfortunate demise of its lead actor makes for a mixture of a sensation of prescience and frustration at the director. As the narrative moves closer to conclusion, the many melodramatic farewells and talk of death hit home with unexpected force. But, Adhikari’s direction is so packed with the unoriginal and the blatant that many occasions will be found for #facepalm.
Aakash Adhikari’s forte seems not to be in telling a story, but in yelling it to the face of the viewer, and with such goldfish-like attention span that he’ll repeat the exact same line, with the exact same platitude of emotion or curiosity, at the beginning of a scene, at the middle of it, and once more, at the end of it. Such repetitions are a waste of theater air-conditioning, not to mention the time and attention of the viewer. And it does the great disservice of making the performer look inept. Most often, performers work to avoid having an auteur like Adhikari look inept by actually breathing intelligence and purpose into the insipid, hackneyed, derivative lines or scenes given to them. Therefore, when a writer-director betrays the trust of a performer by making them look worse than made possible by the drivel given to them, in my opinion, the writer-director has committed the worst possible crime against his craft.
Kohinoor purports to be about human trafficking – but it really just the idea of what a Nepali movie ought to look like, from the inside, as imagined by a person who has no relationship with reality, but sees everything through the lens of all that has come before in the melodrama-steeped world of Nepali and Hindi movies. Consider this: the villain – whose blood the populace screams for at the end of the movie – portrays a politician, and is referred to as ‘Netaji’ throughout the story. We rarely ever get to hear his name, except when he confesses his crimes. Adhikari resolutely refuses to give any roundness to any of his characters – forget the fact that oftentimes they appear positively amnesiac, incapable of carrying the ecstasy or hurt from one scene to the subsequent one. This refusal to create characters instead of mere types belittles the audience.
In my opinion, Adhikari’s generation of filmmakers in mainstream Nepali cinema has thrust upon the Nepali moviegoers this unfair generalization that the viewer is incapable of understanding or appreciating subtext or complexity. I think that is a lazy attitude, and one designed to hide the incompetence on the director’s part. In what real world would a woman ask the man she hates the second-most to now kill her ex-lover whom she hates the most, and then bring a glass of milk to the lover’s mother in a subsequent scene? In what kind of a world would a son, slashed into ribbons by goons with swords, cry in his mother’s arm and say he is afraid of dying, and then organize a meeting to plan his nemesis’ downfall with nary but a kerchief dandifying his thick bicep in the next scene?
As applied on a film set hereabouts, the word ‘damage’ means the trickle or torrent of blood and the patchwork of bruises and tears and rends on garments, etc. Damage accumulates over a scene as punches are exchanged or a man is riddled with bullets or a woman is tossed about like a ragdoll. Think of Slyvester Stallone and any of the Rocky movies – the boxing bouts that always make up the climax are all about damage accumulating over a scene. But, damage also accumulates over the arc of a movie – and this damage may not be visible as blood or broken bones, but it is of the more important kind, because seeing emotional or internal damage accumulate draws us closer to the point of view of a protagonist or character. It is the accumulated internal damage that makes Oedipus Rex an unforgettable tragedy. It is the internal damage that makes us angry at the perfect man of Hindu myths, Ram, for treating his wife with the cowardice he shows in defending her.
This very idea – that internal damage accumulates or transposes itself across scenes over the arc of the movie is an utterly alien concept to the writer-director of Kohinoor. Because of this, the performers fail to perhaps give their best performances, and the blame for it should be Aakash Adhikari’s. Don’t be fooled by the commercial success Kohinoor is enjoying – it isn’t a deserved success.
But there is heartrending poignancy in watching Shree Krishna Shrestha romance Shweta Khadka onscreen. Khadka is awkward on her own; there is something ever so slightly off about her as a performer. But with Shrestha she seems to become illuminated from within: the chemistry between them is believable because they seem to move as one, connected across time and space. Just before intermission, when Khadka’s character Kohinoor waves goodbye to Shrestha’s character Abhishek, the mind can’t but race out of the theater into the real world and imbue the gesture with added meaning. The manner in which Kohinoor and Abhishek’s characters seem obsessed with death also begins to gain new meaning. When Abhishek comes home injured and cries to his mother, and when Mithila Sharma, playing Abhishek’s mother, reminds him that Mother is still there, and that all would be alright, it is impossible not to ask if Shrestha didn’t know of his approaching death, if he doesn’t mean to wave goodbye when he waves in the very ultimate frames of the movie. Thusly informed by reality, the viewer is mesmerized by Shree Krishna Shrestha, seeking clues in the signs and symbols of his gestures and words. Everywhere, in the odd bulge of his neck and arms, or in the strain sometimes seen when he forces an emotion or a line a bit too far, the viewer finds clues pointing to the imminent unraveling.
Kohinoor is a typical Nepali film – indeed, it is one of a dying breed, attacked on one side by mindless drivel the likes of Miss Nepal, and on the other side by more urbane movies that are either original and inspired or carefully copied from foreign sources. Although all of its ideas about women are flawed – a virgin whore is as entirely a patriarchal construct as a virgin mother is – it seems to attract women to the theater in large numbers. It will perhaps continue to be loved out of affection for the performer we have lost, but it should also be criticized for its bad directing.
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Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.
