Pulao in ‘Geeli Pucchi (from ‘Ajeeb
Daastaans’)
Neeraj
Ghaywan’s segment in Ajeeb Daastaans is one of the clearest
illustrations of how food helps enforce and perpetuate caste-based
discrimination. Bharti (Konkona Sensharma), a machine worker in a factory, and
newly hired accountant Priya (Aditi Rao Hydari) are eating lunch in the
canteen. Priya offers Bharti a bite of pulao from her spoon. Bharti, who
rejected Priya’s offer of food once earlier in the film, shakes her head, then
looks around a few times and takes the bite. Those quick glances contain a
lifetime of wariness: Priya doesn’t know that the woman eating her food, from
her cutlery, is Dalit, but the other workers do. Later in the film, once Bharti’s
caste is revealed, she’s given tea in a steel tumbler while Priya’s mother and
husband have theirs in China cups. Yet that moment in the canteen is also an
intimate connection being forged, a way for Bharti – whose feelings for the new
girl run deeper than friendship – to let Priya into her life. (Netflix)
All the dead in ‘Sardar Udham’
At the
heart of Sardar Udham is an excruciating recreation of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Stretching over half an hour, it is key to understanding Udham’s subsequent
trajectory in life. One unforgettable image comes after the killing and the
rescue work. The camera pulls out slowly to reveal a field strewn with the
dead, bodies still being stretchered off. The cinematic parallel here is, of
course, the famous first shot of Gone with the Wind. But for those
watching it a few months after covid devastated Delhi, there was another, more
immediate comparison: the late Danish Siddiqui’s searing photographs of
cremation grounds and burning pyres, taken during the second wave. (Amazon
Prime Video)
Hope in ‘Sherni’
Forest
official Vidya (Vidya Balan) and college professor Hassan (Vijay Raaz) look
down upon a gigantic quarry. “This used to dense forest here,” he says. “And
now this copper mine.” The tiger they’re trying to save needs to get from one
end of the chasm to the other. As they’re struck into silence by the enormity
of the task, director Amit Masurkar offers a flicker of hope: in the centre of
the frame, nestled in the flowers through which we see Hassan and Vidya, a
solitary, industrious bee. (Amazon Prime Video)
The fight with Dancing Rose in ‘Sarpatta
Parambarai’
No
character this year was as memorable as the boxer Dancing Rose in Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta
Parambarai. In fight movie terms, Rose is the junior boss the hero must
defeat before battling the final boss. But Rose, played by Shabeer Kallarakkal,
is anything but a second villain, stealing every moment he’s on screen. His
clowning in the ring – he dances, jumps up on the ropes, even does a backflip –
has no bearing on his abilities as a boxer, something the protagonist Kabilan
(Arya) realizes seconds into their fight. The two-round bout is a masterpiece
of editing, sound and action revealing character. (Amazon Prime Video)
Personal turns political in ‘Karnan’
Composer Santhosh
Narayan and director Mari Selvaraj demonstrate in Karnan, as they did in
Pariyerum Perumal, a knack for uniquely structured political musical
sequences. Initially, Thattan Thattan is a straightforward romantic number. But
then the focus shifts from Karnand (Dhanush) and Draupadi (Rajisha Vijayan),
and we hear folk singera Meenakshi Elayaraja. “Our ancestors lost the uplands,”
she laments. “Our forefathers lost the farmlands. We became wasteland. We
became labour.” There’s a return to romance, but not before Karnan is told “You
must triumph, child” – a reminder that while love and all is fine, his people
come first. (Amazon Prime Video)
Walk: ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’
Towards the
end of Jeo Baby’s film, Nimisha Sajayan’s unnamed protagonist finally snaps and
walks out of her husband’s oppressive home. As she strides down the road
purposefully, the camera tracks alongside. We see in the background women
washing clothes, cooking, bathing their children, while the men read newspapers
nearby. It’s a subtle reminder that while we’ve just witnessed one woman
throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, that action carries with it its own
privilege. (Amazon Prime Video)
Asking for thought in ‘Milestone’
Ghalib (Suvinder
Vicky) is a trucker from Punjab. His wife, Etali, died by suicide, and he’s
back in his ancestral village to try and make restitution to her father (Arun
Aseng) and sister (Gaurika Bhatt). In front of the village council, he offers
them one, then two lakhs. Both times, he’s rejected – but surprisingly, the
sister clarifies it isn’t that the amount is too small. The council gives
Ghalib 30 days to come up with something else. It’s a resonant idea: that the
person who, in some small way, is responsible for the tragedy not try and buy
out his obligations but actually put some thought into it and make amends
through a personal gesture. (Netflix)
Fusion in ‘The Disciple’
Sharad
(Arun Dev) is at a pivotal moment, when it’s finally dawning on him that he
might not make it as a classical singer. Instead of carrying forward the name
of his gharana, he’s reduced to teaching schoolkids. When one of them
approaches him along with his mother and asks if he should join a fusion band,
Sharad lets loose his frustrations. “Let him join,” he says in a mild voice.
“But if he does, he needn’t come back here.” He carries on, laying out in increasingly
harsh terms how the child had little chance of being a classical singer anyway.
His anger is, of course, fed from a well of self-loathing. But it’s also, in a
strange way, a kindness. Sharad knows better than anyone how difficult it is to
make it in this world, especially if one isn’t the most talented. (Netflix)
Arjun unlocked in ‘Sandeep Aur Pinky
Faraar’
For about
110 minutes in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, Arjun Kapoor punches above his weight,
yet gives little indication why Dibakar Banerji thought of him for the part of
a crooked cop who goes on the run with the executive he’s supposed to kill. But
he’s unlocked by something strange in the film’s final 10 minutes. To escape
the cop who’s tracked him down to a town on the Nepal border, Pinky disguises
himself as a woman, a chholiya wedding dancer accompanying the groom’s
procession. Suddenly, tentativeness of character and actor are one, and when
Pinky starts to move his hands and hips in time with the music, there’s a grace
to him that I’ve never glimpsed in his acting before. (Amazon Prime Video)
Octopus: ‘Nayattu’
Nayattu is
the leanest film of the year. There isn’t a wasted frame, nothing to distract
from the pessimism of Shahi Kabir’s screenplay about three cops are on the run
after they inadvertently cause the death of a young Dalit man in a bike
accident. The tone is set by an unusually grisly wedding song addressed to a ‘drunk
octopus’: “He doesn’t give two hoots about her/he chops her up into pieces/until
the knife’s sharpness wanes.” And a little later: “The knife glitters/and his
wife grins in his dreams.” It’s an early warning that the arc of the universe
bends towards chaos in Martin Prakkat’s film. (Netflix)
This piece was published in Mint Lounge.
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