The latest version of this page moved to indiancine.ma - ​Click here

Krantiveer

1994 159’ col/scope Hindi d/p Mehul Kumar pc Mehul Movies s K.K. Singh lyr Sameer c Russi Bilimoria m Anand Milind lp Nana Patekar, Dimple Kapadia, Atul Agnihotri, Mamta Kulkarni, Paresh Rawal, Tinnu Anand, Danny Denzongpa, Farida Jalal Local Maharashtrian ‘anti-hero’ Patekar expands his vigilante image (cf. Ankush, 1985; Prahaar, 1992) into his first big-budget, solo star vehicle. He plays Pratap, the wayward grandson of a Gandhian nationalist. Evicted from his house for dishonesty, which caused the death of his grandfather, he grows up and collects rent for a slum-owner (Rawal), maintaining a fervent contempt for legality and a belief in the basic rightness of taking the law into one’s own hands, an ideology repeatedly endorsed in the film. From this perspective he takes on the might of the corrupt builder Yograj (Anand) and the gang boss Cheetah (Denzongpa). In the end, sentenced to death, he delivers, directly to camera, a spine-chilling harangue ostensibly in favour of communal harmony, but in fact directly invoking the language associated with the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray (cf. Anand Patwardhan’s Father, Son and Holy War, 1994). The film uses the fearless journalist Megha Dixit (Kapadia), raped in the film by Cheetah, to reinforce its basic message that Pratap’s lumpen-brutalism, directly connected with Shiv Sena gangsterism, is the legitimate inheritor of the nationalist freedom struggle. It also continues director Mehul Kumar’s previous odes to macho posturing (Tiranga, 1992). The song Love rap, picturised on romantic lead Agnihotri and Kulkarni, assisted the film’s ominous success.

Film