Fruit, forbidden.

 

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Kathal: A Jackfruit Mystery (2023), but it still managed to surprise me.  One thing's for sure - it's not really about jackfruit.

 Mahima Basor (Sanya Malhotra) is a Deputy Superintendent of Police in the town of Moba in Uttar Pradesh.  It isn't always easy; in addition to the usual small town police politics, Mahima is a member of the Basor caste, and faces low-key discrimination, sometimes even from her own subordinates.  To make things even more complicated, she was dating Sub-Inspector Saurabh Dwivedi (Anant V Joshi) before her promotion; they're still trying to make the relationship work, but he's now her direct subordinate.

Still, Mahima is very good at her job, and after watching her supervisors take credit for a dangerous and high profile criminal she captured, Mahima is assigned her next case.  Two jackfruitrs were stolen from the home of local politician Munnalal Pateria (Vijay Raaz), and he wants them back.  They are not ordinary local jackfruits, they are "Uncle Hong" jackfruit from Malaysia, and when picked they are so delicious that he can trade them for political favors.

 Clearly there are more important things the police should be focused on, but Pateria is a powerful and important person, so despite her protests Mahima and her quirky subordinates are on jackfruit duty.  Suspicion quickly falls on former gardener Birwa Mali (Ambrish Saxena).  However, when she gets the chance to interview him, She discovers that Mali has been desperately searching for his eighteen year old daughter Amiya (Apoorva Chaturvedi.)  Digging deeper she learns that Amiya is only one of a number of girls who have vanished in the area and the disappearances have been largely ignored by the police.  Even worse, Mali had approached Saurabh earlier and been ignored.

Mahima has an idea.  She convinces Mali to claim that Amiya stole the jackfruit, which means that suddenly suddenly the police department is using all its resources to find the missing girl.  It also means that mahima will be in huge trouble if anyone finds out, and the faintly ridiculous local amateur journalist Anuj Sanghvi (Rajpal Yadav) doesn't believe the story for a second.

Meanwhile, Mahima also has to deal with the cracks in her relationship with Saurabh, who is both her subordinate and of a higher caste, and has been behaving like a typical Indian movie cop.  Not even his famous berry chutney can make this better.

It's not unusual for an Indian movie to play with genres, and Kathal does it better than many.  It's an interesting mix of quirky character-driven comedy, police melodrama about human trafficking, and complicated drama about a woman forced to navigate a corrupt system who finds a way to make her corner of the world just a little bit better.  But the impressive thing is that it maintains a fairly consistent tone throughout.  It helps that the good guys are quirky but not hilarious, the bad guys are dangerous but not particularly competent, Amiya is more than just a victim, and Anuj, the ridiculous looking wannabe reporter played by legendary comic actor Rajpal Yadav, turns out to be very good at his job.  It's the kind of movie that seems like it should be a black comedy, but winds up hopeful instead.