DIRECTOR: RATING:

★ ★ ★

Writer- director Abhishek Kapoor’s Kedarnath carries a heavy burden. In a short span of just 121 minutes, the film tries to do a lot many things. For starters, it is the launch film of a star bachcha Sara Ali Khan — the biological daughter of Amrita Singh and Saif Ali Khan, and quite obviously one who has been groomed and nurtured for stardomcum- divadom by Kareena Kapoor Khan.

Kedarnath also tells a love story about a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy and sets it in one of the sanctum sanctorum of Hinduism.

And while it does so, it wants to side with humanity and rap the bigotry of petty, petulant men. Kedarnath wants to show how personal tiffs between men are given an ugly, larger communal twist because of commercial interests, or because a man’s feelings of deep inadequacy about his size and girth.

Kedarnath also wants to make a point and raise consciousness about unbridled tarakki and development in our beauteous but fragile hill areas by setting its love story in the 2013 Uttarakhand floods in which about 5,000 people died.

That’s a lot of load on one film. Yet, like the many khachchars in hill areas, as well as the film’s own well- behaved khachchar, Rustom, it diligently carries to the finish line all that’s piled on its back, only sometimes pausing to take a dump, pee, or walking dangerously close to the edge.

When Kedarnath does reach the end, three things will stay with you for a long time. One, Sara Ali Khan. Ms Khan is a spitting image of two very cool, spunky women. She carries in her pleasant frame glimpses of her mother’s looks, and the screenpresence and she has Amrita’s power and confidence, and Kareena’s self- love. But those are strains she carries in a personality and with a style that’s uniquely her own. There’s a maturity and intelligence about her that makes her presence on quite appealing.

Two, the Shiva iconography. For bhakts of Bum Bum Bhole, there are enough rousing scenes and chants, breathtaking tandav of the elements to raise a chilam to him that make you want to plan a trek or a teerath to Kedarnath and beyond.

Three, the film’s politics. While Kedarnath creates a Hindu- Muslim confrontational scenario, one that dips into the screen