Although inroads have been made in the recognition of Asian genre cinema in the past twenty years, most notably in crime films hailing from Hong Kong and Japan, India’s Bollywood gangster epics have remained comparatively under the radar. But we hope to help change that with our revival of director Sanjay Gupta’s massive 2002 heist epic (and delirious Reservoir Dogs knockoff!) Kaante. An ambitious undertaking by anyone’s standards, Kaante was the first Bollywood production to be shot entirely in Los Angeles, with the lion’s share of the principal cast flown in from Mumbai for the compact month-long shooting schedule. One of the major differences from Quentin Tarantino’s original is that we get a peek at the tragedies going on in the crazy quilt of the heist members’ existence, spotlighting their love lives with their significant others. With the intersection of the fugitive men’s occupations – from nightclub life to drug-dealing and their contentious relations with the LAPD – director Gupta hits all the bases, including wild musical numbers and comedy bits! Unspooling like an unruly ball of yarn from cinematic antecedents such as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987), Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) – not to mention Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, Michael Mann’s Heat and Takashi Ishii’s Gonin (all from 1995!) – Kaante fires on all cylinders.
“I think it was fabulous. Of the many rip-offs [of Reservoir Dogs], I loved Hong Kong’s Too Many Ways To Be No.1 and this one, Kaante. The best part is, you have Indian guys coming to the US and looting a US bank. How cool is that! I was truly honored… Here I am, watching a film that I’ve directed and then it goes into each character’s background. And I’m like, ‘Whoa’. For, I always write backgrounds and stuff and it always gets chopped off during the edit. And so I was amazed on seeing this. I felt, this isn’t Reservoir Dogs. But then it goes into the warehouse scene and I am like, ‘Wow it’s back to Reservoir Dogs‘. Isn’t it amazing!” – Quentin Tarantino
“A delirious Bollywood reimagining of Reservoir Dogs, complete with musical numbers, Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante shifts as fluidly between cinematic idioms as it does between Hindi and English.” – Dave Kehr, New York Times
Marc Edward Heuck discusses Kaante on the New Beverly blog.
