InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Set in Mumbai, against a resurgent wave of Covid-19 — an
offhand reference to Dune places the action more precisely at
the tale end of 2021 — Kennedy follows Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat),
an ex-cop who, having faked his death six years ago, now works
for the police commissioner as a clandestine hitman under the
film’s eponymous name. The bodies have piled up over the years,
but Shetty is no closer to his goal of taking revenge on a
gangster named Saleem; his mounting frustration is the primary
motivator for the film’s action. There are small twists throughout,
and new characters pop up to add wrinkles to the story, but for
the most part, this is all Kennedy is: a simple revenge story
starring an unsympathetic killer cop who never manages to be
even slightly compelling.
Were this some aesthetic treat of a brutal action flick, there
might still be some entertainment value here. But Kashyap’s
direction is unexceptional and largely stylized. The film’s opening
briefly flirts with the signifiers of post-Tarantino cool — hip
music, moody lighting, an old-school yellow title card that reads
“Rahul Bhat Is Kennedy” — but soon drops the pretense in favor
of being a by-the-numbers crime movie. Likewise, Shetty is not
the sort of athletic hitman typical of action movies, but rather
just a plodding killing machine. He’s good at murder and his taste
for it is perhaps the only intriguing bit of personality he’s
allowed. The role was originally written for Tamil megastar
Vikram (real name: Kennedy John Victor), and while he might
have brought something more to the character than Bhat
manages here, there’s not much potential in this script to begin
with.
Kashyap’s attempts at pathos and social commentary frustrate
even more. Shetty kills for fun and says as much in a flashback
to his days on the force, but he’s haunted by his victims
throughout. There is little to indicate remorse on his part, though
the ghosts provide commentary in the form of overwrought
philosophical questions about the nature of death and Shetty’s
many sins. The back half of Kennedy is so leaden with this type
of voiceover that it becomes hard not to try and tune it out —
much the same way that Shetty, who remains completely
unchanged by the film’s end, clearly does. The only other space
for the character to grow is in his interactions with his
abandoned family, whom he watches via CCTV footage from afar,
seemingly desperate for reconciliation. This subplot fares better
than the question of conscience and allows for some of
the only climactic narrative beats that work. Even this, however,
can’t overcome the level of disinterest the film has invited
elsewhere.
From the soliloquies and music about police violence to the
constant presence of Covid, it’s clear that Kashyap intends for
Kennedy to say something about the state of contemporary
India. But like the main character’s psychology, these statements
are murky, confused, and playing second fiddle to the film’s
cut-rate crime plot. Kennedy’s Mumbai is clearly a city in crisis,
but what Kashyap has to say about it, if anything — beyond
fatalist discontent — is as unclear as why he chose this turgid
mess of a movie through which to express it. — CHRIS MELLO
THE OTHER LAURENS
Claude Schmitz
Belgian writer-director Claude Schmitz's third feature, The Other
Laurens, is a dry-humor thriller with an existential neo-noir
façade. Viewers expecting a tense, philosophical slow-burn akin
to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye will be surprised to find
what could instead convincingly be described as a Coen brothers
take on David Robert Mitchell’s cult A24 film Under the Silver Lake.
The Other Laurens finds an archetypally down-and-out,
Brussels-based private investigator named Gabriel Laurens
(Olivier Rabourdin) living a life of Sisyphean monotony,
investigating extramarital affairs. His mother is dying, and to
her, he is practically dead; she regularly confuses him for his
twin, François, an exorbitantly wealthy real estate developer
from whom Gabriel is estranged. There is nobody else in Gabriel’s
life — fewer, even, when his mother dies and his niece (Louise
Leroy) arrives from Perpignan in the South of France with the
news that François has died, too, apparently having driven his
car off a cliff. This modest family reunion isn’t occasioned by
mourning: Gabriel’s niece seeks assistance from Gabriel to
investigate his brother’s death, and despite the air of nihilistic
apathy with which Gabriel conducts himself, he’s soon swept
away by a mystery seemingly both of no interest to him, and at
many moments, of no real interest to the audience, either.
Like many films before it, the identical twins at the center of The
Other Laurens fall into the lineage of cinematic doubles,
immediately bringing to mind David Cronenberg’s recently
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