Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Amar Singh Chamkila: Review

There’s a strange blip that happens 50 minutes into Amar Singh Chamkila. A trio of cops is listening to the life story of folk singer Chamkila, who's just been murdered. When Chamkila’s wife, Amarjot, enters the story, the DSP interrupts the bandmate who's been talking, Kikkar. “She started singing with him, they became a hit pair. They sang a lot of dirty songs together, and then someone shot them. Is this the story?” he says. “No sir,” Kikkar protests. He launches into an anecdote about how their first show was cancelled. “And then it happened,” he says. “They sang a lot of dirty songs, became a hit pair. What you were saying, it happened now.”

Why this brief but entirely unnecessary digression? For one, it’s really funny, the dismissiveness of the DSP met by the guileless tones of Robbie Johal as Kikkar. But it also gets at something close to the heart of Imtiaz Ali’s film: a sense of competing narrators and narratives. There’s a later scene which stretches out in similarly curious ways—a message to take a phone call that passes from person to person until it finally reaches the singer. This piling on of perspectives is a smart way to handle a story like Chamkila’s, an ambitious young man, a Dalit songwriter, who became hugely popular singing bawdy songs in 1980s Punjab, shot dead at 27, the cause of murder still a mystery. Hated by rival musicians, two sets of in-laws, religious fundamentalists; loved by the akhaara crowds who saw him as one of their own. When there are so many stories, why not use them all? 

It’s all over in the first few minutes, but there’s no time to grieve. His wife, Amarjot (Parineeti Chopra), catches the first bullet, then Chamkila (Diljeet Dosanjh). There's a cut to black as we hear the rat-a-tat of a machine gun, then Chamkila is on stage singing about his sister-in-law, then the film’s title in Holi colours against a black screen. For a minute, the film turns elegiac as the credits roll, the camera pans over the dead bodies and we hear the plaintive start of A.R. Rahman’s ‘Baaja’. But the song quickly becomes something else—catchier, funnier, less respectful. All of Punjab becomes the cast of a musical, families, labourers, truck drivers, schoolgirls, hockey players, each singing a line and passing on the tune. Though it ends as it started, with the dead singer and his wife, sadness has been brushed aside. 

It's quite something to see Ali this focused, urgent and fertile. You get the sense he’s finally found a story he can pour himself into. The pace is unrelenting, scenes cascading, unfurling, slowed down and sped up, flashes of monochrome and sepia, spliced-in photographs of the real Chamkila, the screen splitting into two, three, 12. Sometimes a scene will switch to animation for a few frames, as if the film’s rude energies can’t be contained by live action. Editor Aarti Bajaj’s work is constantly driving, surprising; what fun she and Ali must have had with this mix-and-match approach.

The first narrator of Chamkila’s life we’re introduced to is Tikki (a glowering, scene-stealing Anjum Batra), his percussionist-turned-agent, now a blustery drunk who insists “Maine banaya Chamkila (I made him)”. There’s a debt here to Citizen Kane, which also starts with the death of a celebrity before fracturing into competing recollections of him. But unlike the jumbled timelines of Orson Welles’ film, Chamkila’s life is presented more or less chronologically by Ali and co-writer Sajid Ali. We see his rise from a penniless composer of bawdy songs, working as a servant in the home of a famous singer, becoming a performer by accident, his musical chemistry with Amarjot, their marriage and meteoric success. Rather than directly refer to Khalistan or Bhindranwale or Blue Star, Ali allows the unease of that tumultuous decade to seep into his film. It’s there in every mysterious threat Chamkila receives, in the blues holler intensity of Rahman’s interpretation of his music, in the line from the electrifying ‘Ishq Mitaaye’: Long live the fire within me/let it burn and create new life

In a break with tradition, Dosanjh and Chopra did their own singing, recorded live on set. This results in a few flat notes, but also gives their scenes an immediacy that just wouldn’t be possible if they were entirely lip-synced. The music is a mix of redone Chamkila numbers, Rahman originals, and fascinating scraps, like the old man in an early scene plucking a tumbi and wailing like Son House, or the surf guitars soundtracking a defiantly lit cigarette. 

Ali loves a martyr, and Amar Singh (‘Chamkila’ was added when an announcer misheard the name of his village, Sandila) is a formidable example: discriminated against, castigated for his art, murdered as a result of it. The film works overtime to convey just how explicit his writing was considered then. There’s a stiff scene with a female journalist in Delhi telling off Chamkila for his randy lyrics. But it leads to a terrific sequence, starting with a group of women gossiping about how despicable Chamkila is, until a grandmother argues that his music isn't much different from the naughty wedding songs they sing (there’s a moment early in the film when young Chamkila listens to one of these songs). The women start to sing, which segues into ‘Naram Kaalja’, with various other groups of women addressing Irshad Kamil’s playfully horny lines straight to the camera. 

Dosanjh resists the urge to make Chamkila larger than life, even though that’s what he became. His quiet intensity manages to suggest very poignantly Chamkila’s excitement about his own possibilities, distilled in his repeated assertions of “This is our time” to Amarjot. In two scenes an hour apart, we see Chamkila feel his way towards a new track, one secular, the other spiritual. He sings a line or two, stops, searches for words, goes again, a smile on his face. It’s a unique pleasure, mostly denied to us by the nature of Indian film, to see a singer play another singer coming up with a song.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Love Lies Bleeding: Review

It’s been a while since the Central Board for Film Certification has been in the news. It helps that Indian filmmakers are so aware of what can get them into trouble that they just avoid it now. And it’s true that the Hollywood films that release here, nearly all blockbusters or franchise instalments, rarely offer up a hard R. Heading into Love Lies Bleeding, I hoped the censors had relaxed their moral standards. No such luck: the two love scenes were cut to shreds. Oh, and the labels on beer bottles were blurred, because how will audiences (in India) buy (American) beer if they don’t know what it’s called?

There remains, thankfully, enough of Love Lies Bleeding on the screen to put the viewer in a dreamy headlock. Rose Glass’ film is set in 1989 (the Berlin Wall is about to fall) in a small town in New Mexico. Lou (Kristen Stewart) is the manager of a scuzzy gym. She lives alone with her cat, fends off the attentions of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) and worries about her sister, Beth (Jena Malone), who’s stuck in an abusive marriage. Then, one day, Jackie (Katy O’Brien) appears. She’s a bodybuilder headed to Las Vegas, ripped from head to toe, and Lou is so infatuated she can barely look at her directly.

Glass’ film has a sensual sheen that recalls the heyday of the ‘90s erotic thriller. Ben Fordesman’ camera lingers on Jackie’s Olympian physique; we see the sweat glint and the sinews pulse. Clint Mansell’s score is a throbbing electronic wash—though for the first moment of intimacy between the two women, Glass uses Kay Starr’s ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’, a jazz number from 1948. An exquisitely horny montage a little later is soundtracked to ‘Nice Mover’ by Gina X Performance, a song that’s equal parts lusty and sinister.

Love Lies Bleeding too exists in the fertile space between lusty and sinister. Lou has a past—or rather, an uneasy present she’d very much like to be past. Her father, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), is a gangster who may have killed her mother. She doesn’t talk to him anymore, but when Jackie gets a job waitressing at his gun range, we know it’s a matter of time before it all blows up. The film’s first moment of graphic violence is as shocking as Christina Hendricks getting shot in Drive (2011). Love Lies Bleeding did bring to mind Nicolas Winding Refn’s film; both are genuinely felt love stories against the backdrop of hideous violence and electro-pop. Yet, as the film progresses, Glass takes bigger and bigger swings, moving beyond neo-noir into more phantasmagorical realms. 

One of the films Glass made her crew watch was the pervy, brilliant Crash (1996). There are, indeed, multiple signs pointing to Cronenberg. Lou trying unsuccessfully to move on from her gangster family has shades of A History of Violence (2005). There’s the casting of Harris, so memorable in that film, and Stewart, incandescently weird in Crimes of the Future (2022). Lou Sr. is a bug enthusiast—a Cronenbergian hobby. And there are vivid flashes of body horror, not just a face with the skin hanging off it but the more surreal sight of a human coughed up like larva. 

Stewart is a natural heir to Gena Rowlands in that watching her is often unsettling and nearly always surprising. Every now and then she’ll say a line—something simple like “That’s big of you” or “Yup”—in a way no other actor would. She’s so adept at playing on-edge characters it would be fascinating to see try her hand at someone who’s entirely at peace. Still, as good as she is here, the star turn is O’Brian’s. She’s magnetic from the moment she appears, with her easy confidence and broad smile that’s the exact opposite of Stewart’s nervous grimace. Late in the film, Jackie gets so angry that she roars and her shirt rips. It’s a superhero moment the likes of we haven’t seen in ages.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Silly voices and the weight of words in ‘Shōgun’

To play the English major taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War II in his 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, director Nagisa Ōshima cast David Bowie. It was an inspired choice to complete the superb quartet at the heart of the film: English actor Tom Conti, another musician in Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takeshi Kitano, then a comedian, a few years from embarking on a distinguished directorial career. Ōshima, an idiosyncratic, acclaimed filmmaker, commanded respect—though as Bowie mentioned in an interview to Movieline, his countrymen were the ones who felt the heat. “With his Japanese actors he was very severe, down to the minutest detail,” he recalled. “With Tom Conti and me, he said, ‘Please do whatever it is you people do’.”

I was reminded of this story while watching the American limited series Shōgun, which premiered in February (it’s on Disney+ Hotstar in India). It centres on an English pilot of a Dutch trading ship, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), who washes up with a skeleton crew on the coast of Japan in 1600. As in Oshima’s film, the performances of the Japanese actors in Shōgun seem calibrated to the minutest degree, while the Europeans are given more leeway. Néstor Carbonell plays a Spaniard sailing with the Portuguese (the only Europeans in Japan then), talkative, boastful, ribald—a type familiar from fantasy-historicals like Game Of Thrones. And then there’s Blackthorne. 

Shōgun’s charms are manifold, and this would be an engrossing series had Blackthorne been played conventionally. It’s to Jarvis’ great credit that he takes a real risk. His Blackthorne is a memorable weirdo from the moment we see him, unkempt and almost delirious. When the ship runs aground, he’s taken prisoner, but manages to remain alive by proving useful, first to warlord Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), and then to his daimyō, Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada). The regent engages Blackthorne to teach his men European warfare —a task he’s entirely unsuited for. They communicate through Mariko (Anna Sawai), though by episode 4, Blackthorne has picked up rudimentary Japanese.

The biggest risk Jarvis takes is with Blackthorne’s speaking voice. It’s not the gruff baritone you’d expect from this barrel-chested man; it’s a little higher and faster and posher. There’s a bit of Richard Burton in there—and Blackthorne’s creative cussing brings to mind Ian McShane in Deadwood. “Tell this poxy little bastard I piss on his whole damn country,” he rages mere minutes after being captured by Yabushige’s nephew. 

Jarvis commits fully to the voice, and everything else follows from it. There’s a scene in episode 3 that’s a litmus test for viewers in how it combines the voice done full-throttle with physical comedy. Toranaga is being smuggled out of Osaka, where his enemies have him imprisoned, in a covered palanquin meant for his wife. Just as they are leaving, a check is ordered. Blackthorne creates a diversion, yelling at the offending soldier in English for outraging the modesty of a woman. “It’s not proper!” he seethes. “Worse than that it’s vullllgar!” The same scene occurs in the 1980 miniseries adaptation of James Clavell’s novel, with Richard Chamberlain in the Blackthorne part and the great Toshiro Mifune as Toranaga. It’s played for slapstick comedy there, Chamberlain dancing and pretending to have gone mad. The 2024 version of the scene is funnier and more believable because Jarvis, though deliberately agitated, isn’t behaving too differently from his regular self. For all the locals know, this is how Englishmen are. 

Actors doing unusual voices is cinematic catnip for me. Hollywood tends to value respectable passes at tough accents—say, Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar in Invictus. Even something as weird as Julia Garner’s Russian-German-American hybrid in the Anna Delvey series Inventing Anna is an expert take on something that already exists. But when Robert Pattison’s first words in The King emerge as a mad Pepe Le Pew parody of Frenchified English… it fills me with a weird delight. With his startling southern US accent in The Devil All The Time and his ornate seaman ranting in The Lighthouse, Pattinson has climbed to second spot on my Silly Voices ranking. The reigning champion, of course, is Tom Hardy, whose Peaky Blinders performance was all the more exciting for me because I genuinely couldn’t understand anything he was saying and was therefore unsure if he was going to help Cillian Murphy or slit his throat. Just when you think he’s out of voices, the trailer for The Bikeriders drops, with Hardy playing a tough 1960s biker who sounds like a cross between Lee J. Cobb and Elmer Fudd.

Blackthorne may not always choose words carefully, but Shōgun does. The series, created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, makes a significant departure from the 1980 version by subtitling the Japanese dialogue. This has the advantage of making the Japanese characters much richer, and reduces the pressure on Blackthorne and Mariko’s exchanges (they are actually speaking Portuguese—the English were entirely new to Japan at the time). 

The title of the first episode (also the name by which Blackthorne is addressed) is a pun—anjin, Japanese for “pilot”. It sets the tone for a show alive to the malleability of language, the ways it can sustain but also deceive and misdirect. The first translator for Blackthorn, a Portuguese priest, twists his words and is dismissed by the hilariously irritated Yabushige. The second, stung by Blackthorne’s assumption that he’ll misrepresent him, “gives him” the Japanese word teki (enemy) so he can tell Toranga himself. When Mariko takes over as interpreter, her translations have little bits of advice and context for the anjin she’s increasingly fascinated by.

This arrangement crumbles in episode 5, when Mariko’s husband returns practically from the dead and is immediately suspicious of the familiarity between the foreigner and his wife. Over a long dinner followed by a tense sake-drinking session, Mariko mistranslates almost everything Blackthrone says to her violent husband, and issues a stream of warnings in place of translating his words back. Conversation breaks down, Mariko suffers, and the two men nearly end up duelling. 

The same episode shows the fatal power of words misconstrued. Blackthorne is given a pheasant by Toranaga as a gift for training his troops. Moved by the gesture, he hangs the bird from a hook outside his house, with the intention of cooking it later. He brushes aside the concerns of his consort and house help about the stench, causally saying “If touch—die” in Japanese. This leads to a tragic series of events: the gardener is ordered to take down the bird by the village head, but is then killed because of Blackthorne’s unwitting edict. “The bird meant nothing to me,” he protests to Mariko. “Your words gave it meaning,” she replies. In a genre where actions usually determine outcome, Shōgun is unique in its insistence on language being the real battlefield.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Ae Watan Mere Watan: Review

Of all the sacrifices made in Ae Watan Mere Watan, the weirdest is friendzone via Gandhi. Baby revolutionary Kaushik (Abhay Verma) and his friend Usha (Sara Ali Khan) are at a meeting in Bombay in 1942, presided over by none other than Mohandas Gandhi. Just a while earlier, they’d been flirting on the tram. Now, Gandhi’s call for a celibacy vow (so as to love your country better) finds its first responder in Usha. Kaushik’s eyes fill with tears. You have to feel for him. His situationship is already resembling a suicide pact, and now it’s a chaste one.

Freedom isn’t the only thing that’s a struggle in Ae Watan Mere Watan. Set in the final, violent years of the British in India, Kannan Iyer’s film focuses on the contribution of Usha Mehta—a Gandhian revolutionary who died in 2000—to the freedom movement. The Usha we see at the start is an idealistic college-goer who hits upon the radical idea of disseminating the Congress Party’s message via pirate radio. Soon, Usha, assisted by Kaushik and their fervently committed friend Fahad (Sparsh Shrivastav), is broadcasting revolutionary messages every night, to the growing irritation of the authorities.

Over 120 minutes, this promising premise is transformed into one of the ineptest Hindi films in recent memory. Usha, Fahad and Kaushik are a school play’s idea of young freedom fighters: one-dimensional, painfully sincere, enthusiastically shouting “vande mataram” and “karo ya maro” in everyday conversation. “I’ve saddened his heart,” Usha says, looking pensively out of the window. “How could I know it would hurt so much to do the right thing?” What young person talks like this after fighting with their parents?

Director Kannan Iyer and co-writer Darab Farooqi struggle to find a casual speaking style for the characters that’s period-appropriate but not stilted. This lack of balance extends to the code-switching—the British are an “organized fauj” but message remains “sandesh”; Congress leader Ram Manohan Lohia (Emraan Hashmi) follows “ikai” and “ailaan” with “speech” and “green signal”. Much time is wasted saying obvious things in obvious ways. “What a world this is,” says Fahad, as they struggle to gather funds to buy radio time. “You can’t bring about a revolution without money.”“Lohia. A political agitator we’ve not yet caught,” sadistic inspector Lyre (Alexx O'Nell) hisses when he hears the Congress leader’s voice on the radio, even though the Indian subordinates he’s addressing must know who Lohia is.

In one scene, Usha, pursued by Lyre, slips on a burqa and hides in a mosque. The ensuing search is soundtracked by a qawaali—a composition with “azaadi” (freedom) in every second line. This was a word familiar to every English person in India at the time (the Hindi-speaking Lyre would probably understand the rest of the song as well). The film correctly points out the excessive censorship by the British around the time of Quit India Movement. And yet here is a large group of Indians in a public space, singing about freedom without repercussions.

Everything that’s wrong with the performances can be traced back to the writing or the casting. Sara Ali Khan is proof that you can’t put just anybody in a period film and hope it’ll work—she has the look of someone who knows what a meme is. So does Verma, whose actions say freedom fighter but hair says Archies. Shrivastav, delightful in the recent Laapataa Ladies, has the right look but is saddled with egregious scenes like Usha saying she’s had it tougher because she’s a girl compared to him growing up with polio. Emraan Hashmi, most compelling when playing characters with some grey in their soul, is desperately boring as straight-ace Lohia.

It doesn’t feel like Iyer, whose only other film as director is the wickedly amusing Ek Thi Daayan (2013), was given a lot to work with by Dharmatic, Dharma’s OTT arm. Yet, even a lack of resources can’t fully account for the diseased yellow look, the fake-looking sets and crowds, and the lack of rhythm. It’s a pity, because this is a rare recent Hindi film that refuses to view Indian history through an explicitly Hindu lens. Rather, it’s almost nostalgic in its unifying gaze, with Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Parsi characters working together for freedom.

In a 1970 interview to the Centre of South Asian Studies, screenwriter and director K.A. Abbas speaks about Usha Mehta’s work, adding that the situation was complicated by fascists abroad broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda and calling it “Congress Radio”, which confused the Communist Party in India. A better film on Mehta might have incorporated such fascinating cross-currents. This one is just a lot of dead air.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Murder Mubarak: Review

For about a decade and a half after the release of Khosla Ka Ghosla in 2006, we made Delhi films well. After decades of neglect and cliche, there were all these different accents, experiences, subcultures… Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Dev.D, Band Baaja Baaraat, Dilli-6, Piku, Titli, Queen. Recently, though, it feels like we’re back to seeing the city through a Mumbai gaze, to watching Punjabi aunties coo at their labradoodles and angry Jats question your relations with your sister.

Even if you’re trying to skewer something, it’s stronger if it comes from a place of affection. But Murder Mubarak has no fondness for Delhi, and it shows in the kind of ugly caricatures it offers. At the elite Royal Delhi Club, trainer Leo (Aashim Gulati) is found dead, his weights apparently slipping from his grip and crushing him. ACP Bhavani (Pankaj Tripathi), assigned the case days before he leaves for Lucknow to join his wife, immediately declares it a murder (they’d eat up Bhavani’s relaxed, grandiloquent speaking style in Lucknow).  

There’s a large list of well-heeled suspects: minor royalty Rannvijay (Sanjay Kapoor); Shehnaz (Karisma Kapoor), a former movie star now doing horror schlock; garrulous aunties Cookie (Dimple Kapadia) and Roshni (Tisca Chopra); Roshni’s druggie son Yash (Suhail Nayyar); rich kid Bambi (Sara Ali Khan) and her lawyer friend, the one outsider, Akash (Vijay Varma). It turns out Leo was blackmailing nearly everyone, so there’s plenty of motive to go around. In his gentle way, Bhavani starts pulling the rug out from under everyone’s feet. 

This ensemble has potential for inspired silliness but director Homi Adajania can’t corral them effectively. Sanjay Kapoor is usually one of the funnier bit players in Hindi film, but here he’s just loud and one-note—and the same goes for Kapadia. Khan and Varma get a love story to play (they're longtime friends but she got married, now her husband is dead but he's seeing someone); though it's a large part of the film—long at 142 minutes—it’s not particularly involving. I like the way Tripathi goes about playing the inspector, pontificating like a Hindi professor, gently requesting where most detectives would demand. But this performance suffers because the flamboyant ones aren’t pitched right—I’d compare it unfavourably to Neeyat, not that much better a murder mystery but with a wittier cast of moneyed despicables.    

Besides a handful of other screenplays, Gazal Dhaliwal and Suprotim Sengupta have a sparkling comedy each under their respective belts: Qarib Qarib Single in the former’s case, Meri Pyaari Bindu in the latter’s. Their source material here is promising: Anuja Chauhan’s satirical murder mystery Club You To Death. But something goes wrong in Murder Mubarak, which struggles to offer a plausible whodunit and has neither the language nor the incisiveness to skewer Delhi high society in ways we haven’t seen before. 

There must be someone high up at Maddock Films who thinks the average viewer is a rube who won’t understand a joke unless it’s accompanied by a musical cue that shouts ‘JOKE!’. Hindi comedies tend to lean heavily on their scores anyway, but Maddock is a serial offender. I’d mentioned Dasvi’s brass farts in my review, and my notes for Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya have ‘score awful’ underlined violently. And now there’s Murder Mubarak, whose misfiring gags have accompanying bleeps and honks and trills. Every joke fails twice. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Yodha: Review

The opening 15 minutes of Yodha are pure military-patriotism porn. There's the formation of a special task force called Yodha, its founder (Ronit Roy) passing on the legacy to his teenage son, Arun, before dying in the field. Then, in 2001, on the Indo-Bangladesh border, Arun (Malhotra), now a Yodha soldier himself, disobeys orders (“No one taught me how to negotiate”), single-handedly wipes out a contingent of terrorists and sets off a saffron, white and green flare. One love song later, Arun is back in action, this time aboard a hijacked plane. At this point, something weird happens. The film starts to get better.  

It may seem like I’m damning Yodha with faint praise, but I really didn’t expect Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha’s film to tighten its hold on me as it went along. This is partly because commercial Hindi cinema of late has erased hope from my life, and partly because of Malhotra’s track record. His last two actioners were the dunderheaded spy film Mission Majnu and the risible Rohit Shetty series, Indian Police Force. It’s a familiar problem with Hindi action: the stars best suited for it—Malhotra, Tiger Shroff, Vidyut Jammwal—are usually in terrible films.

Yodha kicks into gear as Arun’s fortunes plummet. He's unable to prevent the hijack, and the plane takes off with a nuclear scientist; though the government negotiates with the terrorists, they return his dead body. Yodha is blamed and suspended indefinitely. The film then jumps ahead a few years, with Pakistani terrorists planning to disrupt a trip by the Indian ‘head of state’ (the film indicates, but seems reluctant to say, ‘prime minister’) to Pakistan by activating an unnamed Indian spy. In the next scene, Arun, about to board a flight to Dubai, gets a text message to get on a flight to London instead. With the plane about to take off, he gets another message saying a hijack is underway. 

This is the best passage of the film: a hijacking with no outward signs of one. It’s a while before the spy’s identity is revealed, and the film makes good use of Malhotra’s confused energy as he engages the help of flight attendant Laila (Disha Patani) and trainee pilot Tanya (Kritika Bharadwaj), and keeps an eye on a shifty-looking passenger. A brutal, quick fight in the bathroom keeps the pressure on. The tension is only relieved with a stunning, chaotic sequence where Arun battles the now-revealed terrorist as the plane shudders through turbulence and they’re tossed around the cabin.

Sunil Rodrigues and Craig Macrae continue their fine run as action directors after Pathaan and Jawan. They build everything around their star’s grounded style: a faux one-er, a couple of close-quarters brawls, gunfighting and explosives at the end. Malhotra doesn’t have the expansive skills of Shroff or Jammwal, but he’s a very convincing no-nonsense fighter. There’s barely any slo-mo or stop-start action—a welcome change for an Indian film. 

Ambre (also the writer) and Ojha are first-time directors; like Macrae and Rodrigues, they worked on Pathaan. Their film follows Tiger 3 in staging a terrorist threat on Pakistani soil so India can play saviour. It’s difficult to say whether this patronizing attitude is better than the pantomime villainy of the Pakistanis in, say, Fighter. As usual, Kashmir is the hook to hang all the nation's problems on. Having Arun’s estranged wife, Priyamvada (Raashii Khanna), as secretary to the PM who doubles up as hostage negotiator and Big Decision Taker is about as convincing as these things usually are. This is solid genre fare without a single deep thought. In 2024, in Hindi cinema, it’ll do.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Hearing the Holocaust in ‘The Zone of Interest’

“Did you hear that?” Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) asks a subordinate in German. They’re riding horses beside a field with tall weeds. We assume he’s referring to the agitated shouts just off-screen. But then he says, “It’s a bittern. A heron. A Eurasian grey heron.” They ride into the field in search of the bird, past the shouting Germans on horses herding along a line of prisoners obscured by the grasses.

When I revisited the scene, I noticed that there is indeed a bird call. It’s an example of what makes Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest (2023) a uniquely devastating Holocaust film. Unlike so many other films about Nazi Germany, the atrocities are all off-screen. It’s set in Auschwitz but we don’t see the internees. But we hear them, and the sounds of the genocidal factory system at work. It’s a rarity in cinema—a purely aural horror film.

The first challenge thrown at the viewer is one of sound: a black, empty screen following the film’s title. For three minutes, Mica Levi’s watery score is the only thing to engage with. After a minute, there’s a sudden cut to the countryside and bright sunlight, as we see the Höss family at a picnic. In an interview to Rolling Stone, Glazer, director of Sexy Beast and Under The Skin, explained how he wanted this to be a kind of guide for the viewer. “It was a way of tuning your ears before you tune your eyes to what you’re about to view. There is the movie you see here—and there is the movie you hear.”

The movie we hear is one of great violence and suffering. The movie we see is pristine, bucolic. The home of the Höss family—Rudolf, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their five children—is right next door to the concentration camp he’s responsible for running. But they could be separated by an ocean for all it affects them. Hedwig takes tea in the garden, the kids splash in the pool, seemingly immune to the constant din of shouts, screams, barks, and the terrifying low noise of factories and furnaces. 

The visual information is minimal—like the disturbingly beautiful shot of smoke above the treetops from a train bringing in more internees—so one must parse the soundtrack for clues. Mostly Glazer lets the sounds remain indistinct, but on occasion they are audible, and subtitled. One of the Höss boys, maybe three or four, is playing by himself in his room. He hears distant raised voices and, curious, walks to the window. “What’s he done?” someone asks. Fighting over a stolen apple, he’s told. “Drown him in the river,” the voice says. The boy turns back to his room, says to no one in particular: “Don’t do that again.”

Through small, chilling moments, the film shows us how desensitised this family is to the horrors next door. Nearly all of these are built around the work of supervising sound editor Johnnie Burn and his team. In one of the most deserved awards at this year’s Oscars, Burn and Tarn Willers won for Best Sound. There’s a technical complexity and subtlety to the mix that might have impressed voters—scenes like the garden party, with its subtle layering of sounds. But I’d like to think the award was also given to this film because of how it forces the viewer to reckon with the implications of sounds. There's nothing as chilling as when the older brother locks his sibling in the greenhouse, then leers at him and hisses—the sound of the gas chambers.

The film’s boldest formal challenge, arriving towards the end, is at first visual. Without warning, the film jumps from 1943 to the present day, with the camp now a memorial to Holocaust victims. As two workers clean the premises before the day’s visitors arrive, sound again becomes important. The scrape of the brooms and the whine of the vacuum cleaner feel almost unseemly in their matter-of-factness. 

It’s a complex note to end on, to ask if time and familiarity have dimmed the horror of Auschwitz. Do we see—and hear—the signs? Or do we look past, like the Hösses? At the Oscars, hardly anyone gave an indication of hearing or seeing the protests en route to the venue against the war on Gaza. So it was heartening when Glazer, accepting the award for Best International Feature, said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say ‘look what they did then’; rather, look what we do now… Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.