Moments in Indian cinema: 2023

A perfect murder: ‘Ponniyin Selvan: II’

There were any number of gruelling action sequences in Indian films this year. The best set piece, though, was pure helium, a thing of invention and beauty that arrives midway through the second part of Mani Ratnam’s historical epic. A conspiracy is brewing to assassinate Chola prince Arulmozhi (Jayam Ravi), who’s been living in a monastery in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu. From the moment you hear A.R. Rahman’s ‘Soodanathu Rattham’, with its rumbling beat, and Deepthi Suresh’s keening vocal, you know something’s about to go down. A. Sreekar Prasad cuts between prayer hall and the teeming market outside, where, amid preparations for Varman’s ceremonial procession, Pandya assassins are flitting like ghosts, with Vallavaraiyan (Karthi) in pursuit. The build-up is so mesmerising you wish it would go on forever, though Karthi doing his best Errol Flynn is great fun too. It’s capped with a whispered instruction to an elephant—a perfect dramatic flourish.

Forgetting: ‘Three of Us’

Shailaja (Shefali Shah) is visiting her childhood town on the Konkan coast. She drops in to pay her respects to an old dance teacher, who asks her students to perform for the guest. When Shailaja demurs, the teacher says jokingly, “I want to see how much you remember.” If Shailaja—who is in the initial stages of dementia—is stung by the unknowing remark, she doesn’t show it. She watches impassively at first as the girls perform, then begins to enjoy the recital, Shah’s subtlety allowing us to register slight changes in Shailaja’s body language. The teacher insists Shailaja join the students, which she does. It all goes well until, mid-step, Shailaja seems to forget everything. Her response is to shrink away from the group, edge towards a corner, and try and hide behind a pillar—a child’s response to embarrassment, devastatingly apt for this adult moment.

Background is foreground: ‘Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam’

One of the most radical ideas in Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is the near-constant babble of Tamil film scenes and songs. A brilliant reconfiguring of a Greek chorus, it’s both a wry commentary and a clue to the unsaid feelings of the family who are shocked to have a complete stranger (Mammootty) turn up and act exactly like Sundaram, the man of the house who disappeared two years ago. Tamil speakers are best-placed to understand the many layers of allusion and reference. But the basic import isn’t difficult to grasp—like the beautiful moment where the false Sundaram comes to the realization that he isn’t who he thinks he is. His confusion and the family’s renewed grief are interspersed with dialogue from an old melodrama playing on TV, a scene where someone’s leaving home, possibly never to return.

Alive: ‘Pathaan’

What a difference a year makes. Shah Rukh Khan was anything but a safe bet at the start of 2023. His last film as lead actor, Zero, was in 2018, and you had to go back to 2016’s Dear Zindagi for a film of his that was universally liked. There was the drawn-out drug case (later thrown out) involving his son, Aryan, in 2021. Pathaan seems to play on this by having our first glimpse of Khan be a battered figure tied to a chair, surrounded by enemies. Their leader addresses him in Arabic, but Khan replies in Hindi. It finally dawns on the interrogator who the prisoner is. “Pathaan?” he says disbelievingly. “Zinda hai (is alive),” Khan growls, his face coming into view for the first time. A cracking action scene follows, but this is the moment I kept returning to this year, a comeback distilled to two words, raised to mythic proportions: a resurrection.

Fast-tracked romance: ‘Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani’

Screwball comedy is, above all, speed. The gags in Rocky and Rani’s first manic meeting—“Naam toh suna hoga… just like a Rahul”, his mixing up “objection” and “objectify”, the himbo pantomiming by Rocky’s friend (Abhinav Sharma)—are all funny, but what makes them sing is the breakneck speed at which they keep coming. It’s essential, then, to have an actor who’s a perfect storm (Ranveer Singh) paired with the best reacting performer in Hindi cinema (Alia Bhatt). Scenes like these dispense with the need for a courtship arc—you can see them become fascinated with each other in real time.

Test: ‘12th Fail’

Manoj (Vikrant Massey), a poor boy from a village in Chambal, is desperate to ace the UPSC exams. The euphoria of passing the preliminary stage—itself a massive achievement—quickly turns to determination about the daunting finals. After racing through the streets of Delhi at night (he can’t afford a cab), Manoj manages to bluster his way into the house of Deep (Sam Mohan), who’d once mistaken him for a waiter when he was a star student, and is now a rising bureaucrat. He begs him for advice on how to qualify. Deep crisply tells him that his chances aren’t good; he talks so rapidly in English that Manoj has to ask him to slow down. He sets him a task—write about yourself in eight minutes. Manoj fumbles the assignment. “Tere se nahi hoga (you can’t do it),” Deep says calmly but with finality. All our sympathy is with Manoj, since we have seen his sincerity and his struggle against overwhelming odds. Yet we also know that Deep’s snap judgement is more realistic than cruel in a country where millions take the civil services exam every year and only a handful make it through. This scene is Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s film in a nutshell, at once unabashedly emotional and mercilessly clear-eyed.

Crucial commentary: ‘Maaveeran’

Sathya (Sivakarthikeyan), a timid comic artist, survives a near-death fall. He is left with a bizarre side-effect: a voice in his head narrating his every move in the manner of a comic book hero. It’s a huge annoyance, and gets him into trouble with a corrupt minister. But when the MLA’s goons arrive and start to beat him up, he realizes the voice-over has one crucial advantage: it arrives a few seconds before any event, allowing him to execute the “hero’s” moves just in time (this kind of ‘pre-vision’ is its own action movie trope). Suddenly, Sathya is evading and pummelling his attackers. But Sathya is a regular guy, and his confusion at his own success—and his constant apologising to his assailants—is hilarious. At one point, the narrator takes a poetic detour as a thug advances towards Sathya with a pole. “Get to the damn story, man,” he yells.

Flushed: ‘Goldfish’

One of the most-discussed scenes in 2023, albeit a terrible one, is the one in Animal where Ranbir Kapoor asks his father to pretend to be him, while he plays his father. A far more incisive version of this scene appears in another film about a flawed parent and resentful child, Pushan Kripalani’s Goldfish. Anamika (Kalki Koechlin) makes her mother, Sadhana (Deepti Naval), play her in an effort to get to the root of their rocky relationship—many years ago, Sadhana had killed Anamika’s pet goldfish. Sadhana, who now has dementia, finally admits that although the fish was dead when she flushed it down the toilet, she told her daughter it was alive to hurt her. Anamika rewards this honesty by flushing the medicine she’s been dosing her mother’s water with to keep her in a pliant state. Then something surprising happens. “Sometimes I tell people I’m adopted,” Anamika says. “So do I,” Sadhana admits. There’s a beat, and mother and daughter burst out laughing.

Crying: ‘Dhuin’ and ‘Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar’

In Achal Mishra’s second feature, Dhuin, an aspiring actor in Darbhanga, Pankaj (Abhinav Jha), is watching a tutorial on how to cry convincingly. He tries to keep track of the instructions—think of something sad, open your eyes wide, hold your breath. He lets out an experimental whimper, unsatisfied with the result. I was reminded of this scene while watching Jha in another film set in Darbhanga, Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, directed by Parth Saurabh, co-writer on Dhuin. Sumit (Abhinav Jha) and his wife, Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha), are having one of their protracted arguments, which is cut short when he starts to weep profusely and, this time, convincingly. The overlapping nature of the films is evidence of close, fertile art film scene in Darbhanga, even though Mishra and Saurabh have their own distinct styles and attitudes.

Enter Phulo: ‘Joram’

Phulo Karma’s eyes scan the manual labourers she’s come to give handouts to, then fix on one man. Something in Smita Tambe’s calculating, unblinking gaze gives the MLA’s commonplace greeting to Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee)—“Ae bhai, kahaan ke ho?”—an unfathomable unease. Phulo’s subsequent actions justify this menace, but she’s no simple antagonist, just one of many characters bound in a web of grief and revenge in Devashish Makhija’s scathing chase film.

Morning: ‘Thuramukham’

Rajeev Ravi’s Thuramukham opens around the Kochi harbour in the 1940s, unfolding in high-contrast black-and-white. In the pre-dawn murk, the men of the village grab their torches and pack themselves into a hall where they jostle for work tokens cruelly tossed into the crowd by the headman. We then see them unload boxes off a ship, carry them ashore, collect their meagre earnings, while a saxophone wails atonally on the soundtrack. The opening stretch, with its striking photography and leftist politics, brings to mind the great Malayalam director John Abraham, though Ravi’s film uses drama and action in a way that Abraham would never.

Exhumation fail: ‘Purusha Pretham’

In Krishand’s mordantly comic Purusha Pretham, the discovery of a dead body throws an incompetent police precinct into turmoil. This is a shaggy dog procedural, with characters perpetually getting distracted from the task at hand, the narrative chaos underlined by rapid cutting, eccentric framing and a mocking score. Nothing exemplifies this better than the exhumation scene, where the actual work is interrupted by arguments about alocasia plants and orange juice, a missing body and a heart attack. It ends with a rap number summing up the futile efforts of the group, “EXHUMATION FAIL” plastered across the scene in bright colours.

Wedding song: ‘Animal’

Animal strains so hard—for effect, for shock value—yet the best thing in Sandeep Vanga Reddy’s film is an expert bit of music curation. Bobby Deol’s entry in the film is accompanied by an old Farsi number, ‘Jamaale Ghodoo’, on the soundtrack. The song was so catchy, and the wedding scene so playful after the laborious initial hour and a half, that fans had already tracked down the original version by an Iranian women’s choir the following day. There's an unexamined tension between song and scene—girlish voices serenading a wedding that ends in murder and rape.

Ways of fighting: ‘Lakadbaggha’

It's rare to get a Hindi film that's serious about presenting martial arts. It's rarer to have someone as mild-looking and wispy as Anshuman Jha as action hero. And it's unheard of for an Indian action film to have a woman as the Big Bad. Towards the end of Victor Mukherjee's Lakadbaggha, Jha's vigilante animal-lover finds himself exchanging blows with a formidable fighter played by Eksha Kerung. Their bout is thoughtful, almost theoretical—and she gets the better of him the first time.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Salaar: Part 1—Ceasefire: Review

(TW: sexual assault)

“Violence violence violence,” Rocky says in Prashanth Neel’s K.G.F. Chapter 2 (2022). “I don’t like it.” It’s funny because it’s so untrue. Rocky loves violence and, after four brutal films, it’s reasonable to assume Neel does too. It’s his calling card: Rajamouli does the grandest action, Lokesh the hippest, Neel the bloodiest. 

Salaar: Part 1—Ceasefire is my first Neel in a movie theatre—though it felt more like an amphitheatre, erupting every time Prabhas chopped off a limb or put a spike through someone. Hearing an all-male crowd baying for blood first thing in the morning is an occupational hazard, but the bigger problem with Salaar is the constant threat of sexual violence. Of the three prominent female characters, two narrowly escape assault. It sets the film in motion. Deva’s mother is on the verge of being raped when his friend, Vardha, eldest son of Khansaar’s ruler, saves them. Thirty odd minutes in, Aadhya (Shruti Haasan) is surrounded by goons who call her their ‘property’ and grope her before she’s rescued. There’s a musical sequence building up to the rape of a young girl, and a big action sequence that just prevents another. It’s a disappointing thing for Neel to thread through his film, and does nothing to alter the image of Telugu action as India’s Neanderthal cinema. 

Years later, Deva (Prabhas) and his mother, Radha (Easwari Rao), are in hiding in Tinsukia, Assam, far from the fortress town of Khansaar. Even for a three-hour film, the opening stretch is protracted, and simmers with unconsummated violence (Deva, who’s given Radha his word not to break heads, leaves his handprint on a pole after gripping it in frustration). Aadhya’s arrival changes everything, forcing Deva to emerge from the shadows, slaughter her would-be abductors, who are actually looking for him. 

Having put Aadhya in danger and plucked her out, the film reduces her to a narrative device. She—and the viewer—are given a potted 1000-year history of Khansaar, a fierce (fictional) outpost that resisted British occupation and assimilation with independent India. Over time, three resident tribes fall out and vie for control of what has become a powerful criminal empire. When Vardha’s (Prithviraj Sukumaran) father, Raja Mannar (Jagapathi Babu), is away on business, assorted chieftains—too numerous to name here—try and force a coup. In the resulting confusion—exemplified by Aadhya saying ‘wait’ and ‘what’ at regular intervals—the clans assemble their armies (mercenaries from Ukraine, Serbia and ‘south Sudan’ are brought in). Vardha’s army is just Deva, who's so formidable his enemies seem to forget they can shoot him from a safe distance. 

The density of the plotting—there are close to two dozen characters that require keeping track of—is at odds with lack of formal invention the writing displays. The K.G.F. films had more coherent mythmaking. The extended flashback taking up a whole half and continuing into the sequel is the legacy of Baahubali. Instead of doing something new and fun with the beats he has to hit (entry scene, heroes team up scene), Neel gives us stock situations slowed down. But a head lopped off in slow motion isn’t that much more interesting than a head falling in real time. The fights are passable; not an advance on Neel's previous work, not close to challenging for the all-India crown. 

In the months leading up to Salaar’s release, its publicists touted the use of a visual technique called DCT (dark centric theme). I can’t find a single citation of DCT online that doesn’t mention Salaar, but even if it’s a thing that actually exists doesn’t mean it was the right decision. It’s one thing to have a supersaturated palette, another to apply it indiscriminately to every frame. Some scenes are undeniably striking in their charcoal grittiness. But after a while, day looks like night, one warring tribe looks like the other, and everyone could do with a wash. Murkiness, murkiness, murkiness. I don’t like it. 

(TW: sexual violence)

“Violence violence violence,” Rocky says in Prashanth Neel’s K.G.F. Chapter 2 (2022). “I don’t like it.” It’s funny because it’s so untrue. Rocky loves violence and, after four brutal films, it’s reasonable to assume Neel does too. It’s his calling card: Rajamouli does the grandest action, Lokesh the hippest, Neel the bloodiest. 

Salaar: Part 1—Ceasefire is my first Neel in a movie theatre—though it felt more like an amphitheatre, erupting every time Prabhas chopped off a limb or put a spike through someone. Hearing an all-male crowd baying for blood first thing in the morning is an occupational hazard, but the bigger problem with Salaar is the constant threat of sexual violence. Of the three prominent female characters, two narrowly escape assault. It sets the film in motion. Deva’s mother is on the verge of being raped when his friend, Vardha, eldest son of Khansaar’s ruler, saves them. Thirty odd minutes in, Aadhya (Shruti Haasan) is surrounded by goons who call her their ‘property’ and grope her before she’s rescued. There’s a musical sequence building up to the rape of a young girl, and a big action sequence that just prevents another. It’s a disappointing thing for Neel to thread through his film, and does nothing to alter the image of Telugu action as India’s Neanderthal cinema. 

Years later, Deva (Prabhas) and his mother, Radha (Easwari Rao), are in hiding in Tinsukia, Assam, far from the fortress town of Khansaar. Even for a three-hour film, the opening stretch is protracted, and simmers with unconsummated violence (Deva, who’s given Radha his word not to break heads, leaves his handprint on a pole after gripping it in frustration). Aadhya’s arrival changes everything, forcing Deva to emerge from the shadows, slaughter her would-be abductors, who are actually looking for him. 

Having put Aadhya in danger and plucked her out, the film reduces her to a narrative device. She—and the viewer—are given a potted 1000-year history of Khansaar, a fierce (fictional) outpost that resisted British occupation and assimilation with independent India. Over time, three resident tribes fall out and vie for control of what has become a powerful criminal empire. When Vardha’s (Prithviraj Sukumaran) father, Raja Mannar (Jagapathi Babu), is away on business, assorted chieftains—too numerous to name here—try and force a coup. In the resulting confusion—exemplified by Aadhya saying ‘wait’ and ‘what’ at regular intervals—the clans assemble their armies (mercenaries from Ukraine, Serbia and ‘south Sudan’ are brought in). Vardha’s army is just Deva, who's so formidable his enemies seem to forget they can shoot him from a safe distance. 

The density of the plotting—there are close to two dozen characters that require keeping track of—is at odds with lack of formal invention the writing displays. The K.G.F. films had more coherent mythmaking. The extended flashback taking up a whole half and continuing into the sequel is the legacy of Baahubali. Instead of doing something new and fun with the beats he has to hit (entry scene, heroes team up scene), Neel gives us stock situations slowed down. But a head lopped off in slow motion isn’t that much more interesting than a head falling in real time. The fights are passable; not an advance on Neel's previous work, not close to challenging for the all-India crown. 

In the months leading up to Salaar’s release, its publicists touted the use of a visual technique called DCT (dark centric theme). I can’t find a single citation of DCT online that doesn’t mention Salaar, but even if it’s a thing that actually exists doesn’t mean it was the right decision. It’s one thing to have a supersaturated palette, another to apply it indiscriminately to every frame. Some scenes are undeniably striking in their charcoal grittiness. But after a while, day looks like night, one warring tribe looks like the other, and everyone could do with a wash. Murkiness, murkiness, murkiness. I don’t like it. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dunki: Review

For the second time this month, a Persian song has a strange effect on a Hindi film scene. In Animal, the effect is perversely counterintuitive, a childlike folk song to celebrate the wedding of a debauched killer. But in Dunki, the song is at cross-purposes with the desired effect. A group of illegal immigrants from India run into a patrol in an Iranian desert. One of the guards orders them to run. He then walks to a vantage point and starts picking them off with his rifle. Every time we cut back to him, a catchy Farsi tune plays. I know he’s meant to be a sadistic villain, but the music and dangling cigarette and the way he’s shot just make the guard look incredibly cool.  

You can tell this scene got away from the director. Rajkumar Hirani's films might be unique and popular but they're never cool. His protagonists are brawny goofs and kindly aliens and misfit geniuses: unformed, bumbling, endearing types. No major Hindi film director has a more nondescript visual style. He goes from slapstick to sentiment to sermon quicker than anyone. Everything is planned. There’s always—always —a message. 

Having successfully solved all of India’s problems in his earlier films, Hirani turns a judging eye on immigration policies in the West. Manu (Taapsee Pannu), Balli (Anil Grover) and Buggu (Vikram Kocchar) are friends in a small village in Punjab in the mid-90s, all broke and underqualified but desperate to move to England. They’re joined by visiting soldier Hardy (Shah Rukh Khan), who’s charmed by Manu and becomes the group’s de facto leader (there’s also the lovelorn Sukhi, a cameo by Vicky Kaushal). In its slapstick first half, the film runs through the options available to immigrants: fake marriages, forged certificates, student visa after passing a language exam. When all these fail, a cheaper, more dangerous option is suggested: overland from India to Europe on the ‘donkey’ route, which in the film’s parlance becomes ‘dunki’.  

This is Hirani’s first film since Sanju (2018) and the allegations of sexual misconduct against him in an investigative piece some months after its release. On the evidence of an early morning first-day screening, he still has that direct line to the public that eludes most of his peers. I continue to find his humour facile and his lecturing exasperating, but he has a way of making viewers feel like they’re in on the joke. Hirani and longtime collaborator Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon build simple ideas into comic set pieces that ripple into other scenes, a system of delayed punchlines and callbacks that's more formally impressive than actually funny. Nothing is used just once—Buggu’s mother having to wear trousers is fodder for at least half a dozen jokes.

The problem with construction this meticulous is you can’t help but see scaffolding everywhere. For all their emotional excesses of their films, I’ve always felt Hirani and Joshi treat their material with an engineer’s detachment—every joke, every plot development a problem to be solved. Dunki is a vacuum-packed 161 minutes, so bent on utilizing every moment that its very industry becomes oppressive. There's a scene where Hardy is overcome and Manu tells the others: “He's a soldier, let him cry alone.” Yet, in the next shot, she's right with him, talking him out of his grief.     

During the long ‘dunki’ passage, I was reminded of a film I saw recently, Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes (1972), also about dangerous border crossings. The tension Saleh builds up is searingly emotional because we feel the desperation of the people putting themselves in harm’s way. Hardy and his friends face similar dangers, yet Dunki doesn’t have anything like the same tension. The film is only interested in illegal immigration and the refugee crisis to the extent that it allows Hirani and Khan to grandstand—one especially blatant instance is Hardy saying he won’t ‘give gaalis’ to his country to gain political asylum.   

Hirani uses a 3 Idiots-like structure, introducing us to old Manu and Hardy and then showing their story in flashback. It’s not a fruitful decision, not least because Khan has spent so many years playing younger than his actual age that his instincts for playing older aren’t as sure (Pannu is better as older Manu because she doesn’t try as hard). After Pathaan and Jawan this year, Dunki is a break from Khan the action star but offers no respite from the Khan the perfect screen idol. It’s not as if there’s anyone better-equipped in Hindi cinema to play a romantic feminist soldier patriot friend. But Khan is always more interesting with kinks. I’d like some grey in the soul to go with the hair.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Joram: Review

Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee) is sitting in the back of a truck, on route to his village in Jharkhand. He asks a passenger who says he’s sold his cattle, “Have you given up farming?” “There is no grain, our fields sprout iron now,” comes the reply. “Why isn’t anyone fighting now? Where are the guardians of the jungle?” Dasru asks. A woman at the back says, “Fighting fills the soul, not the stomach.”

There’s not a lot of talk in Joram, but what there is cuts to the bone. “You’ve already gotten screwed, keep quiet and sit,” politician Phulo Karma (Smita Tambe) tells her subordinate. It has Cormac McCarthy bite—and the film of No Country For Old Men also hovers over Devashish Makhija’s fourth feature. Though he makes severe, uncommercial films, Makhija likes to work with genre—his second feature, Ajji, was a rape-revenge story, and Joram is a chase film with revisionist Western morality. It's his most evolved work, sparse in its writing and performances, a taut thriller that’s also a bleak social drama. 

Bala is a manual labourer living in Mumbai with his wife (Tannishtha Chatterjee) and baby daughter. They’re living hand to mouth, but there’s worse to come, in the unlikely form of a handout from Phulo, an Adivasi MLA from the same region as him. She sees Bala, and though he doesn’t seem to recognize her, her unnerving stare leaves no doubt she knows him. We learn that Bala was Dasru back in the village, where he was a Maoist rebel. And though we only find out later what ties him to Phulo, it's like a death sentence when she says, “It seems like him.”

Soon, Dasru is on the run with his baby. Inspector Ratnakar Bagul (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub), through whose fingers Dasru slips in Mumbai, is in pursuit (Phulo, who commands a significant vote bank, is pulling the strings). Ratnakar is driven, conscientious, a rule-follower, but not as worldly wise as he thinks he is. In this he resembles Rajkummar Rao’s eponymous lead in Newton, another big city government employee sent to a conflict-ridden jungle, where he has to learn to trust his instincts. 

Like the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns, Makhija takes archetypes—the pursued outlaw, the lawman, the unblinking villain—and adds layers of unease and complexity. Dasru has our sympathies, but we’re also shown how he’s caused, albeit indirectly, great suffering in the past. Phulo is terrifying, yet we know she was a different person before revenge consumed her. Ratnakar is the closest thing to a moral centre, but seems more ineffectual as the film progresses. In Makhija’s bleak frontier world, revenge trumps order, logic and humanity.  

Joram is a rare angry political film, releasing in theatres at a time when critiques of the state have dried up. Dasru is one of a handful of Adivasi protagonists in Hindi cinema in the last few decades. Makhija loads the dice against him in a way that feels realistic; he can’t fight his way out of trouble, like Komaram Bheem or Karnan. Green Hunt, the operation to eliminate Naxalites in Jharkhand and other states, is mentioned several times; so are the efforts of companies colluding with the state to force tribals off their land. Everywhere there are reminders of what passes for development. The steel company trying to make inroads in the area is called Pragati—progress. The item number performed by a junior cop for his randy superiors has lyrics about 4G and missed calls. An obelisk has the preamble to the Constitution painted on one side and wanted posters stuck on the other. Phulo sets death traps and floats development schemes in the same conversation.

Piyush Puty’s camera plucks stray, surreal details out of the landscape and makes them ominous: giant towers obscuring Ratnakar’s view of the sky; a ghostly twisted tree trunk in the mines; a giant earth mover, brutish symbol of development. Bajpayee, the lead in Makhija’s third feature, Bhonsle, is a haunted presence here, so sad and persecuted one forgets he’s on home turf and a former guerilla fighter (there’s a scene where he holds a spike inches from an informer’s eye, just as he did in Satya all those years ago). Ayyub is fine too as the weary Ratnakar, but the film belongs to Smita Tambe’s uncanny, unnerving Phulo. It’s an arresting performance before we know anything about her. The second she fixes her gaze on Dasru, alarms went off in my mind. 

On the way to Dasru's village, Ratnakar finds the route blocked by protestors. They sing about their land being snatched, dams being built where there were jungles. One of the labourers, an old woman, stares at him as she walks past. It’s a recurring motif, weathered faces looking directly at the camera. Their gaze carries a rebuke that passes from character to filmmaker to viewer.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The Archies: Review

When Betty realizes it’s Veronica’s father who’s putting her dad out of business, she confronts her friend. They have a loud argument in Pop Tate’s diner, after which Betty storms out, leaving Veronica in tears. These are the next few lines, contributed by members of the Archies gang:

“What just happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is she behaving like this?”

“Upset hai. And why wouldn’t she be? Har cheez profit ke baare mein nahi ho sakti. For some people there’s more to life.”

“Get stuffed, Jughead. Mere father ek businessman hain and I’m not going to feel guilty about that.”

“And I’m not going to be apologetic for my ambition!”

“Easy guys, relax, it’s all okay.”

The Archies, directed by Zoya Akhtar and co-written with Reema Kagti and Ayesha DeVitre Dhillon, isn’t always this awkward. Still, this is a representative exchange: flat, frictionless, code-switching because it has to. It’s easy to see why Netflix wanted Akhtar: besides her other qualities, she’s one of the few Indian directors who writes fun English dialogue (“You’re kissing them all…in French” is one of the better lines here). But the challenge of taking these archetypal American characters and making them interesting in an Indian context seems to defeat her. 

Where the increasingly batshit Riverdale pushed the boundaries of what an Archies narrative could be, Akhtar’s film plays it incredibly safe. The worst thing you could say about Archie (Agastya Nanda) is that he kind of strings along painfully nice Betty (Khushi Kapoor) and rich brat diva Veronica (Suhana Khan), both of whom are madly in love with him. Ethel (Dot.) and Dilton (Yuvraj Menda) are both sweethearts; Jughead (Mihir Ahuja) is a goof with a good heart. Even Reggie (Vedang Raina) is a decent kid with a James Dean pout. 

The stakes could not be lower. There’s the usual situationship à trois with Archie, Betty and Veronica. Reggie is vaguely in love with Veronica, and Dilton ardently with Reggie. Archie may go abroad to study; Ethel wants to be a better-paid hairdresser than she currently is. All this is tied together by the (barely) evil plan of businessman Hiram Lodge (Alyy Khan), Veronica’s father, to build a hotel in the gang’s beloved Green Park. Soon, they're agitating and whipping up support across town. It is, needless to say, a bloodless revolution. 

Akhtar creates her own Riverdale, a fictional Darjeeling-like town in north India. It’s set in 1964, in the Anglo-Indian community—the only solution that allows the makers to retain the canonic characters’ names with some plausibility. It does feel odd, though, that this Riverdale is seemingly populated only by Anglo-Indians, to the extent that Vinay Pathak’s corrupt councilman is the only resident who gives the impression they’d rather be speaking in Hindi. The heightened unreality of the setting runs counter to the deliberate situation of the story in post-independence India. There’s a lot of talk of duty towards India as a growing nation (“This is our mulk,” Archie’s father says, explaining why he stayed behind). A few insertions of quotidian India might have helped, not harmed, the film. And while Jean Luc-Godard is namechecked and ‘Wooly Bully’ plays on the stereo, the writers only seem interested in the ‘60s as a backdrop for cosplay and flash mobs.

Akhtar’s abiding interest in, and affection for, choreography is a bright spot. The song sequences, done in the style of an American musical rather than a Bollywood one, are the most inventive bits in the film. ‘Jab Tum Na Thee’ starts with Archie and Veronica singing across a table to each other and soon the whole restaurant is dancing. ‘Dhishoom Dhishoom’ has the performers on roller skates. ‘Va Va Voom’ is all ecstatic swirling camera movements. If only the music had more ambition: ‘Sunoh’ cribs from ‘Top of the World’, ‘Everything is Politics’ takes its beat from ‘That Thing You Do’, ‘Va Va Voom’ is a combination of ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Twist and Shout’. 

If you grew up in ‘90s and 2000s, you coud do a decent spot-that-actor/VJ/model drinking game with this cast… Alyy Khan, Luke Kenny, Koel Purie, Kamal Sidhu, Delnaaz Irani. Suhaas Ahuja is wonderful as Archie’s supportive father, quietly patriotic by example but not foisting that burden on his son. The young leads aren’t bad; there’s really not much you can do with this material. After the fire and crackle of Gully Boy, it’s disappointing to see Akhtar settle for chirpy blandness. “To make art, you have to go in, not out,” Fred Andrews tells his son. The Archies stays outside.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Animal: Review

“You have a big pelvis,” Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor) tells Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) after she leaves her fiancée for him. “Are you calling me fat?” she asks. This is a compliment, he insists, it means you have child-bearing hips. Several years and two kids later, the couple has hit a rough patch. He’s sick, obese, paranoid. He pinches her roughly, she slaps him. Somehow this rekindles a fire. In their living room, he motions to her to come over. She complies, shedding her kurta in full view of the help. Somewhere between pelvic praise and exhibitionism lies Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s idea of romance. 

Animal is a film about toxic relationships. Yet also, the very act of watching it is to enter into a toxic relationship. If you’re not a raging incel, chances are you’ll be appalled by much that you see. But then Vanga has designed it to provoke. He wants you to call for a ban, to say the film is misogynistic and upsetting. And when you do, he’ll say, what did you expect, the film’s called Animal. So you grit your teeth and try not to be triggered. The film keeps pushing your buttons. And so on, until 201 minutes of runtime are done and you stumble out of the theatre, vibrating with unreleased anger.   

What are we even doing here? Who benefits from this one-upmanship? Vanga is like a magician pulling mutilated rabbits out of a hat and asking if you’re shocked yet. It’s staggeringly immature artistic practice. Yet it feeds his cult, which is built on staggeringly immature responses to criticism.     

Ranvijay’s father, the tycoon Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor), has never shown him the slightest affection. After one flare-up too many, the slacker son is exiled. He settles down with Geetanjali in the US, but an attempt on Balbir's life brings him back to the homestead, and onto a path of bloody retribution. It’s like the bit in The Godfather when Vito is shot and Michael returns to the family fold, except here the revenge killing of Sollozzo is replaced by the slaughter of hundreds. 

Vanga has a way with genuinely bruising set pieces. Animal turns on a bloody battle in a hotel with shades of Oldboy and Scarface. It starts as a gunfight, then Ranvijay picks up an axe and starts dicing men in shiny masks, before finishing off with a modified Gatling gun. When the axeing starts, his army of Sikh toughs hang back and start singing the martial anthem ‘Arjan Vailly’. It’s a whacky decision but Vanga sells it, probably because he has no fear of audience contempt. 

After Kabir Singh, Vanga knows people are waiting to see if Ranvijay slaps Geetanjali. He keeps that threat dangling through the film while having Ranvijay threaten his wife, grab her throat, point a rifle at her. Ranvijay is Kabir on steroids, a monstrous monogamous Dionysus whose excuse for every transgression is that his papa didn’t love him. Late in the film, he has Balbir roleplay the neglected son while he assumes the part of absent, callous father. Therapy for dumbos, sure, but there’s a feral anger to Vanga’s films that gets under your skin. Kapoor channels all the misunderstood sons and lovers he’s played into a dead-eyed performance that feels somehow unclean and makes me wonder if we’ll ever see the light-footed performer again.

There will be chatter in the coming weeks about Geetanjali’s calm acceptance of her husband’s outbursts, his murder sprees, his humiliations of her in the guise of straight-talk. I felt true revulsion, though, at the film’s treatment of another female character. At first it feels like a cruel joke on Mandanna’s lack of presence to cast the superior Tripti Dimri as a sad, mysterious woman who turns Ranvijay’s head. But it turns out the joke is on viewers who think there could be a challenge to total male control in this film. Dimri willingly subjects herself to one indignity after another. There’s no place in a Vanga film for a female who isn’t pliable.

Bobby Deol enters the film late, another terrible man bent on revenge. Abrar is barely fleshed-out, has a flimsy connection to the main plot—he’s only there to make Ranvijay look less unhinged, and to supply a ‘name’ antagonist. Animal starts to fray once it becomes clear Vanga has nothing meaningful to say about unloved sons or inherited cycles of violence, and is only interested in deploying Ranvijay and Abrar as shock jocks until they clash. 

Throughout Animal, there are remarks about strong genes, the dominance of alphas, the capacity of women to bear children. This sort of master race talk would be suspect in itself, but then there’s Balbir’s company: Swastik. There’s a scene where Ranvijay addresses workers in front of a giant swastika and raises his hand in salute. Vanga can argue all he wants that it’s the Indian swastika, not the tilted Nazi one; that it isn’t a Nazi salute because the fist is clenched. The fact is, he’s playing with fire because he can. It doesn’t get much lower than that.

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

Sam Bahadur: Review

Halfway through Sam Bahadur, Lieutenant General Manekshaw (Vicky Kaushal) is sent to lead the dejected Indian forces at the China border. He reaches one of the bases and immediately whistles the troops over. “There will be no more withdrawals,” he barks. “Sam is here!” He marches off but the camera lingers and settles on one of the awestruck soldiers. “This is the sort of commander we needed,” he says. This is what Hindi directors think a film should be like now—no subtext, no shadow of a doubt, nothing between a scene and the audience’s umblemished understanding of it. 

Sam Bahadur is a worshipful tribute to one of the most significant Indians of the last century. It’s also a great disservice—happy to print the legend, uncurious about the full measure of the man. The Manekshaw of Meghna Gulzar’s film, co-written with Bhavani Iyer and Shantanu Shrivastava, has no flaws that matter, no failures that aren’t someone else’s fault. It starts with Sam the ‘gentleman cadet’, a rule-breaker like the wayward soldiers in Lakshya, Shershah and Pippa. Indiscipline soon expunged from his system, he rises through the ranks, ascending to the rank of Lieutenant General by 1962. By the time of the 1971 war with Pakistan for the liberation of Bangladesh—his signal achievement—he’s chief of army staff. All the while speaking like a Wodehouse character and calling everyone from his men to the prime minister ‘sweetie’. 

The film takes the blandest possible route from the 1930s to the 1970s, reducing tangled conflict zones like Kashmir and Mizoram to a few textbook talking points. The overenthusiastic score is poured over everything—domestic scenes, strategy meetings, battles. After hearing a noncommittal Lord Mountbatten lay out his plans, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel (Govind Namdev) sorrowfully mutters, “Divide and rule”. Even the social commentary is vague and insubstantial. When Manekshaw’s superiors in Delhi try to discredit him, they brand him ‘anti-national’—but all it takes is a grimly smiling testimony by Sam for the smear campaign to crumble. 

One particularly promising strand is Manekshaw’s friendship with Yahya Khan (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), when they were both majors in the British Indian army. We see how much Partition hurts Yahya, whereas it seems to bounce off Sam. It might have been interesting if Sam Bahadur checked back in with Yahya over the years, building up to 1971. Instead, he’s only reintroduced once the war begins, and is treated as a bloated caricature.  

The best moments in the film are when the action takes over. The battle scenes are terse and effective: the bombing of the Indian troops in Burma; the night-time Pakistani incursion at Poonch. There’s not a lot of visual storytelling, but I liked the scene where Jawaharlal Nehru (Neeraj Kabi) introduces Indira Gandhi (Fatima Sana Shaikh) to Sam. She reaches across to shake his hand, obscuring our view of her father—siginaling the changing of the guard that’ll soon happen. 

Sam Bahadur is a reminder that it’s devilishly difficult to make even a balanced film on the armed forces in India, let alone a critical one. All films on the military have to apply for a certificate from the Army HQ and/or Ministry of Defence. The makers of these films rely on the military for equipment, weaponry and expertise. The censor board can ask for ‘expert opinions’ from army staff and hold up a film’s release. Jawan, which had no qualms going after politicians and big business, stopped well short of assigning any blame to the army for the faulty guns that endanger the lives of Shah Rukh Khan’s team. 

Gulzar is responsible for Talvar—one of the best-written Hindi films of the last decade—and Raazi (written with Iyer and featuring Kaushal), which dared to suggest that a Pakistani army family might have honour and grace. It’s disappointing, then, to see her new film reflect the depressing traits of mainstream Hindi filmmaking in 2023. A weak, ailing Nehru, betrayed by China, telling Manekshaw he doesn’t know what to do next. Indira Gandhi getting mocked, corrected and patronized by Manekshaw. Yahya Khan, obese and evil, unleashing his sadistic forces on Bangladesh, contrasted with the moral force that is the Indian army (Manekshaw tells his troops not to harm women or non-combatants; a very similar speech is made in Pippa).  

Early on, it sometimes feels like Vicky Kaushal playing Dev Anand playing Manekshaw, with the dad jokes and singsong voice and crooked posture. It’s an entertaining turn but Kaushal gets caught up in the accent and the stoop. There’s no interiority, no sense of Sam the thinking individual (part of why Kaushal was so effective in Uri was the suggestion that his major genuinely didn’t have an inner life). There’s no spark between Sam and Silloo (Sanya Malhotra), right from their first meeting at a party where he tells her, “I’m going to marry you.” Malhotra is too good an actor to have to play the dutiful wife waiting at home for her soldier husband. She’s starved of material; the film’s idea of giving Silloo something to do is to have her be jealous of Indira (they glare at each other across a banquet hall). Shaikh is an intriguingly unsure young Indira, yet we never see the steely version that was surely around by the time of the 1971 war.  

Sam Bahadur is definitely not unwatchable—it’s just a waste of a good director, cast and subject. The film closes with a song that goes, he’s an extraordinary man, he’s god’s special man, he’s the people’s man. We get it, sweetie. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Napoleon: Review

“I was having a succulent breakfast.”

The speaker is one of the Directory, the committee that ruled France in the years after the Reign of Terror, who finds himself inconvenienced by an early morning coup d’etat. It’s a line worthy of Monty Python and, coming somewhere around the half-hour mark, reveals the silly soul of Napoleon. If there’s any chance Ridley Scott’s film will be a serious Great Man biopic, this gleefully dashes it. Scott is determinedly, completely unserious. 

It’s not that Scott isn’t trying to make the best film he can. He just isn’t interested in making a certain kind of epic: rousing, edifying, Oscar-winning. Maybe he’ll return to these—Gladiator 2 is in the works. But the last three films he's made dare you to take them seriously. The Last Duel (2021) is memorable not for its Rashomon games but the Chaucerian ribaldry Ben Affleck gets up to. House of Gucci (2021) is comic opera pretending to be tragic opera, half a dozen different Italian accents tossed in a blender and served on ham. 

Napoleon ups the scale, but is nevertheless (intentionally) a farce. It begins with the future emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) a lowly army captain. Ambitious, gifted and impatient, he rises up the ranks as France passes from monarchy to Robespierre to the Directory. His great love—France—acquires a rival when he locks eyes with the widow of one of the victims of the Revolution. He falls so completely for Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) he doesn’t care that she’s flirting with an old friend at their wedding dinner, or failing to reply to feverish missives sent while conquering Egypt. 

It's the slyest of ideas to make Napoleon and Josephine’s convoluted sex life and marriage the backdrop to his relentless militarism. When he finds out about an affair she's having, he immediately leaves Egypt for France. Too late: her dalliance is front page news. He throws her out, takes her back in almost immediately. When he becomes emperor, it’s an aphrodisiac so heady that he can’t even form sentences; he just turns up in her dressing room and hums hornily. There’s also the growing problem of the lack of an heir, a situation in which everyone from Napoleon’s advisors to his formidable mother are involved. 

Phoenix, brilliantly and unexpectedly, plays the man as an occasional genius and a consistent dolt (“Destiny has brought me this lamb chop” is his wittiest salvo). This is a far cry from Abel Gance’s Napoleon in the 1927 silent film, leading the crowd in the first singing of the Marseillaise. Instead, you get a petulant man-child asking the British emissary: “You think you’re so great just because you have boats?” Napoleon has an instinctive feel for warfare; as he himself says, he just knows where to place a cannon. He’s awkward and brusque in all his other dealings, which sometimes serves him well (he brushes past niceties that would’ve held others back) but also means that Josephine ends up his only friend, even after they’re divorced. Their bond is surprising and touching, born out of self-preservation (on her part) and lusty fascination (on his) but growing to include concern and tenderness. Kirby is terrific as the acidic, intelligent queen, playing Hepburn to Pheonix’s stolid Tracy. 

Scott runs through Napoleon’s biggest hits: Toulon, Egypt, Moscow. Austerlitz is the centrepiece, an extended battle in the snow, Napoleon systematically outthinking the Austro-Russian army. It’s as stunning as anything in Gladiator (2000), but Scott has changed as a filmmaker: he has little use for heroes now. Pheonix’s Napoleon is a cold fish—his victories are cerebral but uninvolving. The Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) is even colder, turning Waterloo into a hilarious sodden chess game of military strategy and lack of charisma. 

One of the famous unmade films is Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’, which he planned for years but couldn’t get off the ground. It’s weirdly fitting that Scott’s Napoleon has much in common with a period film Kubrick did make: Barry Lyndon (1975). Both films are mocking, ironic, unimpressed by the petty politics of late 18th and early 19th century European high society. Though his playing field is much smaller, Barry is not dissimilar to Napoleon, a resourceful dullard of (relatively) modest birth who stumbles through high society. But there’s a crucial difference. A tension exists in Kubrick’s film, between the compositions like oil paintings, the perfectly chosen costumes and mansions and classical pieces, and the dull advance of its protagonist. In Scott's film, there's no pathos or incidental beauty. The joke is always on Napoleon. This makes it more fun, and also more disposable.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

No Bears: Autofiction at the border

Zara (Mina Kavani) is attending to customers at the Turkish café she works in when she gets a call. She runs to meet a gaunt, tense man, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei). They speak in Farsi. He shows her a fake passport he has arranged for her, so she can go to Europe. They have crossed borders illegally before—he tells her this time there will be “no risk, no danger, no death”. But Zara is upset that Bakhtiar is sending her off without arranging a passport for himself. She runs back into the café, leaving him to fret and smoke outside. The camera pans back to him—this has all been one shot—and then a new face pops up in front of the lens. “How was it?” he asks. The next shot reveals the person being addressed, Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

In three of the four feature films he made before No Bears (2022), Panahi presided as a mostly genial master of ceremonies. This Is Not A Film (2011) was made in reaction to the restrictions placed on him by the Iranian government in 2010: house arrest, no travel abroad, no directing or writing scripts. It showed Panahi in his apartment, talking about planned scenes, conferring with associates—all the while insisting he isn’t directing. The satire was extended in Taxi (2015) where, his restrictions relaxed somewhat, Panahi drives around Tehran talking to “passengers” ranging from his DVD supplier to activist Nasrin Sotoudeh. 3 Faces (2018) pushed the boundaries further—Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari travelling to a village to try and help a young woman.

No Bears continues the extraordinary “NotFilm” cycle but changes the direction of inquiry. From the assistant in the opening scene onwards, the film is full of people staring at the camera and asking Panahi increasingly pointed questions. Often, he deflects, or swats away the query. The Panahi of this film isn’t in a great place, literally and emotionally. He’s staying in a rented room in a village on the border with Turkey (“A film-maker banned from leaving the country, sitting on the edge of the border, you could have been recognized and arrested,” his assistant says). An innocent candid photograph he takes causes a scandal: of a young couple who plan to elope, though she has been promised at birth to another. Yet even before that, he’s moody and distracted.

The playfulness of the previous films in the cycle is largely absent. Panahi seems to be asking himself whether he has inadvertently caused others to suffer by making films about his troubles. Not only does the question of the photograph consume the village, Panahi’s film shoot, on the other side of the border, is barely holding itself together. The actors in the film-within-a-film are playing characters based on their own lives and are actually planning to flee with fake passports (Iranian cinema revels in this sort of meta-commentary). Even though his actors are plainly suffering, Panahi keeps filming. It’s not a flattering self-portrait.

Yet, it’s also important to remember that this is not documentary but autofiction. Flight from the country seems to have been a hot topic in the Panahi household around then—Jafar’s son, Panah, made his own directorial debut in 2021 with Hit The Road, about an Iranian family driving to the Turkish border to smuggle their older son across. In No Bears, Panahi’s midnight drive to the border is immediately set upon and discussed by the villagers and, we later learn, the authorities. As one of the locals speculates, “You don’t come to the border unless you’re up to something fishy.”

Though Panahi is as much interrogated as interrogator in the film, he hasn’t stopped needling the authorities for their obstruction to his art. In the film, he insists he hasn’t taken a photograph of the young couple but the locals aren’t satisfied. It’s not difficult to see a parallel to the Iranian state’s treatment of Panahi: vague, sinister charges drummed up for taking a few pictures. The corruption of the whole process comes to a head when Panahi is asked to take a ceremonial oath. An elder tells him conspiratorially, “Even lying is acceptable, as long as it’s for peace-making.”

The film returns Panahi to the tension and paranoia of Closed Curtain (2013), a stylistic and conceptual outlier in his post-This Is Not A Film work. The sense of profound unease running through No Bears had a grim coda in real life. About a month after production wrapped, he was arrested when he went to inquire about an imprisoned director, Mohammad Rasoulof. He spent the next six months in prison. It was only after he went on hunger strike that he was released. In the meantime, No Bears played at the Venice Film Festival.

Worried about taking a desolate road alone at night, Panahi asks his companion, “What about the bears?” There aren’t any, the man replies, just made-up tales. “Our fear empowers others. No bears!” Panahi’s films, with their logical, humane, witty gaze, are all about dispelling myths. He may not have chosen to make so many self-reflexive films, to turn the camera on himself repeatedly. His predicament is our gain. The cycle from This Is Not A Film to No Bears is something unique in the entirety of cinema.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

The Railway Men: Review

In the past couple of years, Indian streaming has gone tragedy shopping. The hook could be anything from a spate of grisly murders to a fire in a movie theatre to a terrorist attack. Trauma is a powerful draw right now, which can’t be a great sign for the national psyche. Not all these series are exploitative, of course. But it's very difficult to see The Railway Men as anything but tragedy porn.

You can sense the eagerness to pile trauma on trauma. This four-episode series, produced by YRF Entertainment and streaming on Netflix, is set in Bhopal in 1984, during a deadly gas leak at a factory belonging to American fertilizer manufacturer Union Carbide. It killed over 2,200 people at the time and more since, and the aftereffects were felt for generations. Yet, series creator and director Shiv Rawail and writer Aayush Gupta don’t seem confident that the worst industrial disaster in Indian history is tragic enough material. So they have a running subplot about passengers on a Bhopal-bound train inflamed by Indira Gandhi’s murder and looking for Sikhs to lynch. 

The first episode sets things up portentously. Stationmaster Iftekaar (Kay Kay Menon) runs a tight ship, though he’s haunted by the memory of a child he couldn’t save in a previous train accident. He hires Imad (Babil Khan) and puts the capable young man to work in the engine yard. A serial thief who specializes in train robberies (Divyenndu) has his eyes on a crore of rupees sitting in a locker at Bhopal station. At the Union Carbide factory, the workers are barely trained, safety measures are inadequate, and the management doesn’t care about supervisor Kamruddin’s (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) warnings.  

The Railway Men likely took the HBO series Chernobyl (2019) as a model. Yet, Rawail might have looked closer to home for a lesson in staging this exact incident memorably. Mahesh Mathai’s film Bhopal Express (1999) crosscuts the first moment of leakage with a boozy ghazal performance. The factory is shown only a few times, sinister in the shadows of night. When the gas leaks from the pipes, it’s a single stream of smoke. The shot of the fumes escaping the factory is eerily beautiful. We see it spread in empty streets, a cat trying to dodge the advancing cloud. The first human reaction is a baby waking up and crying, followed by scattered coughs. 

Compare this to how Rawail stages it. After the death of Imad’s boss to kick things off, we see the gas’ deadly effects on a marriage party. Everywhere, people gasping, collapsing, vomiting, asphyxiating. There isn’t a single haunting image, just a whole lot of dramatic suffering. Some viewers might be ground into pity, but it can’t match the hellish claustrophobia of the Jallianwala Bagh sequence in Sardar Udham (2021), let alone the eerie, composed destruction of Chernobyl.

The rest of the series is officials teaming up in various places to save the city: Iftekaar, the thief and Imad at Bhopal station, a committed journalist (Sunny Hinduja) in town, a general manager with the railways (R Madhavan) a few stations away, and Juhi Chawla’s bureaucrat in Delhi, battling political unwillingness to get an antidote and supplies on a train. With about two dozen other storylines also crammed in, and frequent flashbacks and jumps ahead, it’s all too much for four episodes.

The Railway Men made me long for the clarity of Virus, Aashiq Abu’s fine 2019 film about the Nipah outbreak. The series is stagey and sentimental—selfish employees find reserves of courage, bandits have a change of heart, a little boy sings in memory of his dead friend. Placing children in peril is often an indication that the makers don’t want to work too hard to win over an audience; here at least four are endangered (or sacrificed). In this hothouse atmosphere, the performances wilt. Babil Khan is the exception. He has an intriguing way of drawing out his sentences; he will not be hurried. It helps that his eyes are so expressive, since Imad is mostly seen with a handkerchief over his mouth (as are all the Bhopal characters after the leak). The scene where Iftekaar tells Imad to go home and leave the rest to him, and the younger man sadly, calmly replies that his mother is dead and he isn’t going anywhere is the most affecting in the whole show.

In the fourth episode, something new is attempted. Actual press photographs and news clips from Bhopal in 1984 are inserted in the middle of scenes. This sort of switching needs a deft touch—and it doesn’t work here, there’s too much difference between the show’s impersonal look and the grainy clips and photographs. It ends with a series of snapshots—filmed scenes beside their original layout. But imitation is no substitute for imagination. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

The Killer: Review

David Fincher has done some perverse things over three decades in film. But nothing, not even a head in a box, can compare to the repeated interruption of Smiths songs in The Killer. Michael Fassbender’s unnamed assassin is in the habit of listening to the English band as he goes about his work. But Fincher won’t let us hear the familiar plaintive tracks, cutting into them with diegetic sound or the killer’s voiceover. It’s a maddening, mischievous choice: spend millions acquiring some of the most beloved tracks in pop music, then prevent the viewer from enjoying them. Hang the DJ. 

This sort of willful subversion is very much the point. The Killer, based on a French graphic novel of the same name, deconstructs the figure of the professional assassin. And when it puts it back together, the parts don’t quite fit. Fassbender’s killer speaks in motivational blurbs, Sun Tzu-like aphorisms and bad hardboiled patter. He’s an ascetic and a workaholic. He has no style, but a lot of ability. His aim is to blend in, but he stands apart. He has no personality, yet is unique.

Tonally, too, The Killer is a weird mixture. It’s cold and slick like so much of Fincher, yet doesn’t seem to take itself, or its protagonist, very seriously. More than once, it punctures the killer’s very serious recitation of his habits with the same disdain it shows the Smiths tracks. After all the talk about preparation and concentration, the first significant action by the killer is a mistake, a botched job in Paris, when his sniper bullet hits a dominatrix instead of the target in a high-rise across the street. The killer flees to his home in the Dominican Republic, only to find that his employers have already paid a visit and badly injured his girlfriend. 

Like John Wick, this killer then digs up a box of weapons and goes in search of those who want him dead. But Fassbender’s assassin isn’t sympathetic like Keanu Reeves’ Wick, and his opponents—save one—aren’t formidable. If The Killer is in conversation with another film, it’s Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967). Fassbender’s floppy hat-wearing, philosophy-spouting loner is the uncool mirror image of Alain Delon’s sharp-dressed, philosophy-spouting loner. Melville took American noir rules and interpreted them through a stripped-down, highly aestheticized French gaze. Fincher here is working with French source material for an American film, but making it faintly ridiculous, as if noir is past its sell-by date (the voiceover is like Elmore Leonard that misses the mark every time).

Given how internal the film is, it’s easy to imagine it as Fincher’s dialogue with himself. He's in the same place as the killer at the start of the film: this is, after all, tailor-made Fincher material, he can’t miss. “I’ve actually grown to enjoy proximity work… anything with a little creativity,” the killer confesses. Is Fincher bored with his reputation as a director of hard, cold, beautiful things? Did the fervent calls for a third season of Mindhunter annoy him, a public clearly happy for him to sacrifice years of motion picture work for the narcotic of serialized storytelling? The assassin keeps repeating how important it is to stay detached—even after he goes on a very personal series of kills. Three years ago, Fincher stuck his neck out with Mank, a more personal story than usual, written by his father. The reception was lukewarm. “How is ‘I don’t give a fuck’ going?” the killer asks himself—perhaps Fincher wryly noting his return to ‘detached’ films.

The film’s lone fight scene—a violent, cramped struggle between the killer and the assassin who was sent to kill him at his home—reminded me of the incredible tussle between Gina Carano and Fassbender in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire (2011). There’s a nail gun fired into a chest thrice—but that’s all the provocation Fincher is offering. The other murders are efficient, dispassionate… one is even abandoned. You could see it as a refusal to provide genre thrills, but even more than that, this is Fincher refusing to comply with a lay viewer’s idea of a ‘Fincher film’.

It may not behave quite like one, but it does look and sound and move like a Fincher film. Longtime editor Kirk Baxter helps chop up Morrissey and Marr. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker reunites with the director 28 years after Seven. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor supply what only they can, a score that’s sometimes like huskies in a wind tunnel and sometimes the most beautiful electronic wash you’ve ever heard. 

The film’s pivotal scene has Fassbender across a table from Tilda Swinton in a high-end restaurant. She’s ordered a gourmet spread and expensive whiskey. The killer won’t partake—she assumes it’s out of caution, but it’s actually a philosophical choice. He rejects the high life, that of the aesthete killer with good taste. He eats McDonald's instead. He listens to classic rock. He dresses like a dork. He wants to be “one of the many”, even though this seems impossible. That Fincher allows him his wish is the final surprise in a fascinating puzzle of a film. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Pippa: Review

Pippa starts with an unfortunate decision. A quick animated introduction to the 1971 conflict—the events preceding the genocide in East Pakistan, the war and the formation of Bangladesh—leads into the opening scene, an ominous advance towards a Dhaka university hall, where we can hear anti-Pakistan slogans. Pakistani soldiers file in and, without warning, start firing on the crowd. As the protestors scatter, they’re followed into the hallways and rooms and killed. It’s a scene that calls for no music at all, or something haunting. Instead, it’s overlaid with one of those frantic rap numbers that A.R. Rahman is so fond of. It’s tough to take a massacre seriously when it sounds like MC Sher is warming up offscreen. 

The film shifts into a more easy-going register after this as it introduces Captain Balram Singh Mehta (Ishaan Khatter). Balli, as he’s known to friends and family, is a promising soldier with an anti-authority streak. In his very first scene, he disobeys his superiors during a training exercise, driving his amphibious tank (nicknamed ‘Pippa’) into the deep end of the river. He compounds this mistake by publicly hitting on the interpreter for the visiting Soviet officers. Soon, he’s back home, getting a earful from his elder brother, Ram (Priyanshu Painyuli), and concerned advice from his sister, Radha (Mrunal Thakur), and mother (Soni Razdan). 

Balli is a familiar figure to Hindi film viewers—a clean-cut, callow solider who’ll learn discipline and brotherhood in the army. His biggest gripe is everyone comparing him to his brother—played with effective reserve by Painyuli—who’s already a war hero and a straight-laced head of the house (the father, also a soldier, is no more). Pippa is unsubtle about this sibling tension; Balli calls him ‘Mr Perfect’ over and over, and there's a running subplot about the literal filling of shoes. A more interesting tangent is Radha’s recruitment out of college as a code-breaker for Indian intelligence services—I’d have liked to see more of her and her laconic superior intercepting enemy messages.

Director Raja Krishna Menon has a knack of constructing set pieces with a lot of moving parts—we saw this in his Airlift, also a war film of sorts. Pippa has one very well put-together battle, an extended sequence where Balli has to assume command of his platoon midway and blow up several Pakistan tanks (though the staging lacks clarity about the enemy’s positioning and capabilities). There are a couple of pounding shorter sequences as well, like the unbroken shot of Balli racing to his tank after Indian troops are caught unawares by an attack on their camp.  

In other respects, however, Pippa is unadventurous. Balli and Ram’s relationship, the film’s emotional throughline, is a sibling standoff of little depth (the constant ribbing between Balli and his platoon members is more affecting). There’s a lot of sermonizing about the civilizing influence of the army—and the moral force of the Indian army. The Pakistani soldiers are painted as outrageously evil, a murdering, pillaging, debauched lot, inept in and out of battle. Inaamulhaq’s buffoonish Bangladeshi solider is a particularly sordid caricature. The Indians, of course, treat their prisoners well, give commands to follow the rules of war, even accept Pakistani deserters.

Khatter is quite watchable, as he tends to be, but lacks the authority of someone who might inspire others to follow him into battle. He remains a promising young actor in search of a great project. My favourite performance is Chandrachoor Rai as Chiefy, Balli’s commanding officer. As the one who takes the brunt of Balli’s insubordination, Chiefy could have been a comic heel. Instead, Rai and Menon turn him into a touching portrait of a regular soldier, unlucky in love and war, yet finding solace in something as simple as perfuming his socks so they smell nice on the battlefield.  ­

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

The Dupes: A classic of Arab cinema tackles the Palestine question

The Dupes opens with a close-up of a human skeleton and the distant figure of someone making their way across the burning desert. The credits end with the warning: “A man without a country will have no grave in the earth.” Tewfik Saleh’s film is wedded to death from the start, a scorching blast from a time when the Palestine question was no less tragic but perhaps more hopeful.

It has been almost three weeks of relentless bombing of Gaza by Israel, with no signs of an end. More than 6,000 Palestinians have died but there is no time to dig graves. The dire situation of Palestine charges the already fraught atmosphere of Saleh’s 1972 film, which is playing as part of the Restored Classics section at the Mumbai Film Festival (27 October-5 November). It’s based on a 1963 novella by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, Men In The Sun, about three Palestinian refugees who undertake a fraught journey from Basra in Iraq across the border to the promised land of Kuwait.

The Dupes was one of the first films to take a definitive pro-Palestine stance. Director Saleh was Egyptian and the film was funded by Syria’s National Film Organization. There are no Israeli characters in the film, though mentions of Zionists are frequent. The Arab nations are also criticised, both as historical actors and as part of the film’s plot. There’s a brilliant montage of still images showing political leaders in the aftermath of the 1948 Naqba that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Abou Keïss’ narration over this speaks of the betrayal of his people: “Talks, talks, talks… discussing nonsense… They bought you and sold you. You have been waiting 10 years over their words. For nothing. You have the Zionists before you and the traitors behind.”

Abou Keïss (Mohamed Kheir-Halouani) is the oldest of the three refugees, the only one with clear memories of the Naqba. Assaad (Bassan Lofti Abou-Ghazala) is the most charismatic of the trio, a young man on the run for his part in armed struggles. And there’s baby-faced schoolboy Marwan (Saleh Kholoki), whose father has divorced his mother and left him with the responsibility of providing for his mother and three siblings. These three converge on a corrupt smuggler in Basra, the closest this film comes to comic relief (there are no song sequences either—unusual for an Arab film of that era—though there’s a haunting a cappella refrain sung by a boatman). The smuggler is discarded in favour of Palestinian Abou Kheizarane (Abderrahman Alrahy), less shady and charging less to get them across the border.

There’s a catch, though. Abou Kheizarane drives a water tanker for a rich patron. His plan hinges on the trio getting into the tanker at the two border checkpoints and sitting quietly for the six minutes it will take for him to get the formalities done. In the 50 degrees Celsius desert heat, this is not a sauna (as Abou Kheizarane jokingly calls it) but a potential death trap. The expertly ratcheted tension recalls another great film about four men and a truck, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear (1953). There’s also the possible influence of The Battle Of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s revolutionary 1966 film: in Bahgat Heider’s high-contrast black and white photography with its haunting faces, and the way Salhi El Wadi’s score resembles Ennio Morricone’s at times.

Through disruptive, associative editing, Saleh conveys a sense of perpetual displacement that matches the characters’ own experiences. A flashback with Abou Kheizarane in a hospital cuts abruptly to a black screen, lit a second later with the striking of a match. Abou Keïss lifts a handful of rich soil as a happy younger man; when he puts it down, he’s an old, broken refugee. Sometimes the editing is on allegorical lines: Two separate conversations with Assad are cross-cut, both involving foreigners and about rats.

Throughout the film, there are reminders of how little has changed in the lives of the Palestinian people. The radio is “a prophet… (that sows) the seeds of nonsense”. Abou Keïss wonders whether he should have accepted defeat and eaten “the flour of the UNRWA”. Above all, there is the idea the film begins with: people on the move, without a country. In an interview on 24 October in The Drift magazine, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, says: “Nobody who’s kicked out is ever allowed to return. Every Arab, every Palestinian knows that. Nobody driven into Egypt will ever come back to Gaza or any other part of Palestine. Most of these people, of course, have already been displaced.” The Dupes gives us a glimpse into the lives of the first generations of displaced Palestinians, at a time when so many others are being violently forced to accept a similar fate.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

12th Fail: Review

12th Fail is the Hindi film that’s surprised me the most this year. After years of successful producing, I didn't think Vidhu Vinod Chopra had the drive to make a film that spoke urgently and eloquently to these times. And I definitely didn’t think he would erase so much of the aesthetic that’s worked for him in the past to tell this story. 

In a school in rural Chambal, Manoj Sharma (Vikrant Massey) is making chits to cheat on his exams. A brush with a conscientious cop (Priyanshu Chatterjee) sparks in him a desire to be a police officer—his own father, a teacher, equally moral, is too downtrodden to be an inspiration. He clears his 12th exams the following year—barely, but honestly. He sets out for Delhi to give the police service exams. Even before he reaches, his luggage and money are stolen. It’s at this point he meets the first of his angels.

One of Chopra’s best decisions is to give the voiceover not to Manoj but to Pritam (Anant Vijay Joshi). Manoj’s commentary would add little to a film that already features him in almost every scene. Pritam, on the other hand, is a wonderful narrator—especially after we meet the man. He’s as chatty as Manoj is reticent, well-off, taking the IPS exams to please his father. He takes Manoj under his wing, getting him a place to stay and introducing him to Mukherjee Nagar, where all the coaching centres are. 

There he meets another unlikely angel, Gauri bhaiyya (Anshumaan Pushkar). Long haired and soft-toned, he’s a messiah to small-town students who can’t afford coaching and can barely speak English. It scarcely matters that he’s made five unsuccessful attempts at the IPS exam; he’s one of them and that’s a comfort in a cut-throat world where the competition has received education in English all their lives and attend expensive coaching classes. Manoj joins his cohort and also gets a job dusting and cleaning toilets at a library so he can make money to send home. He works during the day and studies at night. His initial run at the IPS falters at the first stage. 

12th Fail could easily have been a lachrymose detailing of Manoj’s tribulations; his circumstances become even more dire over the course of the film, and there's a fair bit of speechifying. But a couple of things cut through the sentiment. One is the sharpness with which Chopra and co-writers Jaskunwar Kohli and Aayush Saxena draw up the characters. Gauri and Shradha (Medha Shankar), a student Manoj falls for, are fairly unequivocal in their goodness but Pritam is prone to jealousy and resentment while remaining a support (and Joshi is a delight to watch). There are wonderful small sketches too: the wily proprietor of a popular coaching class; the IAS topper who tells Manoj “I owe you one”, then destroys him years later. 

Then there's the visual syntax Chopra adopts. The sweeping images of Parinda and Mission Kashmir and 1942: A Love Story, the perfectly judged slow motion shots, the elegant song picturization—all gone. In their place is unadorned, efficient camerawork by Rangarajan Ramabadran. The only flourish is in the way several shots are allowed to continue unimpeded by cuts. The editing in the montages is wonderful, at once rhythmic and merciless. It doesn’t feel like any of Chopra’s earlier work—even his Oscar-nominated documentary short, An Encounter With Faces, has a poise that’s deliberately eschewed here. Shantanu Moitra’s score is the only old-fashioned element; there are a few too many sad speeches with a sitar crying in the background (though the scene with Manoj, home after several years, his goal still unachieved, getting a head massage from his mother, who's lying about how well they're doing so he doesn't worry, could draw emotion from stone hearts).

Caste doesn't figure much in the film—though Manoj mentions Ambedkar and “educate, agitate, organize” in an interview—and the main divide is between those with an English education and everyone else. In that sense, Manoj’s journey is impossibly difficult but utterly commonplace, just another fragile dream jostling for space with millions of competing ones. Abdul Kalam is a particular inspiration of his, someone who studied under a street lamp and became President of India. The portraits on the walls tell their own story—Kalam, Manmohan Singh, Tagore, Premchand, scholars and scientists and statesmen. Massey is steadfast, the determined, calm centre of a turbulent story. There’s a lovely moment when Manoj is about to get the first expensive haircut of his life. “IAS or IPS cut?” the barber asks. It’s been a while since a Hindi film has moved me like this. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Ganapath: Review

In every Tiger Shroff film, there’s an exchange so weird it stands out from all the regular bad writing piled up around it. In Ganapath, written and directed by Vikas Bahl, it’s just before the climatic MMA bout starts. Shroff’s opponent eyeballs him and menacingly bites off a chilli pepper. “I’m going to eat you up,” he says. Shroff’s response: “Good boy.”

It wasn’t that long ago Shroff’s legion of fans would also eat this up. But things might be changing. Next year will be a decade since Heropanti, during which time Shroff has been in one great film, a couple that didn't reinvent the wheel but were good fun, and a lot of unmitigated trash. Apart from War, there’s no indication that Shroff seeks out good films or that he knows what one might look like. Ganapath is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Shroff—twirly kicks, spinning kicks, a lot of dancing and silly comedy, some kind of hidden life revelation, more pirouetting kicks. It has its moments but the act is getting dangerously old. Tiger needs to change his stripes.

In the post-apocalyptic world of this film, the rich live in the futuristic Silver City. The masses are so downtrodden their tenements don’t even have a name—it’s simply called ‘gareebon ki basti’. They’re kept out of the city by a wall, starved, hounded by drones, and kept in a state of fear and subjugation. At first glance, Guddu (Shroff) would appear to be one of their oppressors. He’s a rich playboy (though his tapori-speak reveals his humble origins) and scout for evil impresario Johnny Englishman, who organizes MMA tournaments for the city’s wealthy patrons (the poor have their own tournament). But since Amitabh Bachchan shows up every 15 minutes muttering about a warrior who will lead them out of the dark, we know it’s a matter of time before Guddu is revealed as the chosen one, Ganapath.    

Playing Trinity to Shroff’s Neo is Kriti Sanon as Jassi, complete with leather suit and motorcycle. Blind martial arts master Shiva (Rashin Rahman) is a Morpheus of sorts, whom Guddu is told to seek out when he’s expelled from the city for reasons as contrived as the ones he’s later brought back for. Shiva is running a secret resistance in the mountains. Guddu is taught to be a fighter and learn some humility—in one of these he’s successful.    

There’s some Hunger Games in this film, and a lot of Fury Road (so much that Guddu guiltily namechecks Mad Max). The promise of civil war is teased throughout Ganapath, but it’s difficult to care because the film has no interest in anyone other than its lead character. None of the slumdwellers have any agency of their own, they only suffer and wait for a hero. Jassi is introduced as a nunchuk-weilding badass but is soon reduced to a spectator as Guddu and the appropriately named Tabahi pound each other while insisting “My girl”. The film just sits around and waits for Shroff to get serious, which happens in the last 10 minutes. 

Making everything much worse is the awful VFX. The backdrops are so jarring and unrealistic that Shroff looks like a hologram in front of them. It’s either arrogance or delusion on the part of the makers to think that audiences today would accept bad video game graphics in a big franchise film (it's billed as ‘part one’). It’s also annoying how little care has gone into creating a credible world. When Shiva’s hideout is discovered, why don’t the city militia finish them off then and there? If Jassi can easily clear the wall on her bike, why has it been such an effective barrier?  

Even Shroff seems to know he's reached the end of his branch. “It gets tough to reinvent myself in this space,” he said in an interview this week. When he’s in full flight, he’s still in a league of his own in Hindi cinema (Vidyut Jammwal is a match, but in a lower rung of star). Shroff badly needs a change, and a challenge. A simple fix might be to pit himself against opponents of repute instead of talented, unknown stuntpersons. Bring in Iko Uwais or Scott Adkins. Make it a real fight.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Khufiya: Review

In my review of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Charlie Chopra & the Mystery of Solang Valley last week, I’d expressed a hope that his next work would prove to be more a painting than a sketch. And just like that, the first shot in Khufiya has the smeared beauty of a great watercolour. We see a street, its contours soft and indistinct, swirls of brown, yellow, the fluorescent blue of a lamp. A woman walks down it, holding an umbrella, only her silhouette visible. And we hear Tabu’s voice: “She was very strange…” We see the woman properly, in flashback, as the voice-over lists details only an intimate would know, like a mole between her collarbones. Khufiya goes in several directions after this, a lot of them promising, but nothing made me lean forward like those first few moments. 

The woman with the mole is Heena (Azmeri Haque). She’s one of several memorable ghosts in Bhardwaj’s cinema—not among the living but nevertheless guiding their actions. Heena’s relationship with Krishna Mehra (Tabu), a RAW (Research & Analysis Wing) operative who goes by ‘KM’, is the bruised centre of the film. Heena is recruited by Krishna to spy on a Bangladeshi minister sympathetic to the ISI (Shataf Figar). She’s competent and driven, and it’s not long before the electricity between the two is directly addressed—in Heena’s words, “what you refuse to accept about yourself”. But after the mission goes off the rails, KM retreats into a shell of hurt and self-recrimination. 

It takes another mission, framed as revenge, to shake her out of it. Her boss at RAW, Jeev (Ashish Vidyarthi), tells her there’s a mole in the organization, who may have leaked the Dhaka plan. They suspect Ravi (Ali Fazal), an operative whose lifestyle is a little too flashy for his government salary. Ravi’s family—homemaker wife Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi), satsang-attending mother (Navnindra Behl) and young boy—are placed under surveillance. It’s a procedural, but with a Bhardwaj bent, with a mission codenamed ‘Operation Ghalib’ and a target being spied upon singing a melancholy ghazal. There are nods to other spy films, Indian and foreign. There’s a kill that’s much like one in Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi (2018). In the scene after Heena is recruited, KM’s colleague is admiring a miniature drummer boy. 

In Khufiya, co-written by Bhardwaj and Rohan Narula and based on Amar Bhushan’s novel Escape to Nowhere, people are watching all the time, through long-lens cameras, on surveillance footage, on CCTV. Charu performs a striptease to ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’ for her own amusement—though the way she addresses “chal jhoothi” to the hidden camera makes you wonder if she somehow senses the frank gaze of KM and the embarrassed one of her colleague. The boisterous sexiness of this scene has a voyeuristic dilemma: KM likes to watch but it gets her in trouble. A more repressed erotic charge suffuses the scene where KM interrogates Heena as they sit in a car in the rain. 

Shakespeare is usually lurking somewhere in a Bhardwaj creation; here he's in the codenames. Ravi is Brutus, the betrayer and murderer but also “an honourable man” (“I’m a bloody patriot,” Ravi yells at one point, justifying his acts of treason). Charu is Portia, who in Julius Caesar defines herself in relation to Brutus, her husband, and Cato, her father. Charu too sees herself in large part as Ravi’s wife, but she invokes her army father in a critical scene (a third relationship—motherhood—is at the character’s core). The other codenames are also smartly chosen. Heena is Octopus, mysterious creature of the deep, master of camouflage. KM is Cactus, prickly, solitary, a survivor. 

Khufiya is only peripherally about the lofty values its characters are fighting to preserve. Unusually for an Indian spy film, there’s little talk of patriotism or serving one’s country. The Indian state in the film acts as everyone else does—to gain geopolitical ground. Nearly all the principals have intensely personal reasons guiding their actions, which they rationalize in the context of their job. Tellingly, the word ‘khufiya’ is used by KM to describe her semi-closeted life—she’s yet to come out to her son—and not her job as a covert agent. 

There’s a decision taken a little past midpoint that’s so farfetched I wondered if the film would fold under its weight. It doesn’t collapse but it doesn’t recover fully either. The last hour or so, which takes place in the US, is marked by uneven acting (mostly by those playing the Americans) and story contrivances. There are other stumbles. Rahul Ram turns up for two long, boring songs. The diplomatic tussles involving Jeev, his superiors and the US ambassador aren’t as compelling as the spy stuff. Most damagingly, the scenes with KM and her neglected son feel awkward and underlined.

Smoothing over the cracks is Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi’s cinematography, all concise framing and noir lighting. Haque, so arresting as the lead in the Bangladeshi film Rehana Maryam Noor (2021), is excellent here in a very different kind of role: impudent, sexy, unable to keep a lid on her emotions. And there’s Tabu. KM reminded me of another watcher with headphones—the unforgettable Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others (2006). Tabu’s face remains impassive, yet carries all the weariness and wariness of a life led in the shadows. It’s a beautiful, minutely calibrated performance. When one of her colleagues, posing as a milkman outside Ravi’s house, briefly smiles at the camera they’ve set up, her answering smile is so warm, so encouraging, it’s like a window to a completely different person. It takes a great actor to play a great actor.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Tora's Husband: Review

"We always say that there is one world but that’s not true. Each of us are a world of our own." The speaker is sitting with a companion by the side of a road, his back to us, so we can’t see his face. But we can hear the resignation in his voice; understandable, given that Jaan (Abhijit Das in a deeply moving turn) has been pushed by fate to breaking point over the course of Tora’s Husband (2022). His words also suggest a way of thinking about Rima Das’ cinema, her interest in human relations over plot and spectacle, and the way her camera regards everything before it with a clear-eyed curiosity.

Tora (Tarali Kalita Das) and her husband Abhay—whom everyone calls Jaan—are at the film’s centre but there are so many other worlds we get glimpses of. The baker at Jaan’s restaurant, who turns up drunk not because he hates the place but because he’s so much better at his job than his co-workers that it depresses him. The domestic worker curious about the species of plant she’s watering. The troubled young man standing in peak traffic, dispensing doomsday advice to the world. Jaan’s mother, whose morning routine is captured in a few deft strokes: singing while fanning herself, scaring off monkeys, lovingly feeding the cow (Jaan watches her do this, and, though he’s unhappy with her for leaving home after a tiff with Tora, in the next scene he stops his car to pick up a calf that has strayed on to the road).

This isn’t the only time we see Jaan’s protective instinct. When a customer at his restaurant is rude to a waiter, he asks him to be more civil and ends up fighting. He refuses to let go of any of his staff, even though business is tepid since reopening after the covid-19 lockdown. He buys footballs for the local children. He’s an involved, loving, if erratic, father to his own kids. But Jaan can’t begin to fix his relationship with his wife, which has deteriorated because of his drinking. Every night he leaves Tora and the kids at home and gets wasted with his friends. He says he needs it—maybe he feels he deserves it. But Tora isn’t under any such illusions. She explains to a friend: “He’s a good man but a bad husband.”

This is the fourth film from Das, who broke through with her second film, Village Rockstars (2017), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the National Award for best feature. Unlike that film and Bulbul Can Sing (2018), Tora’s Husband has an urban setting and focuses on adults rather than children or adolescents (though Tora and Jaan’s young son and toddler daughter are frequent comic relief). Das felt a responsibility to make a film that captured both the reality and the tenor of covid times. “Since the wounds of the pandemic are still fresh, we are keen to move forward,” she said in an interview to Platform. “But there will be a time when we will make pandemic films based on our imagination. I wanted to tell the story of a global pandemic in real locations, natural conditions, in real time.”

Tora’s Husband joins Joji (2021), Aarkkariyam (2021), Bheed (2022) and a handful of other depictions of Indian life in the covid years. Das shot it over two years, between lockdowns, with a small crew. During that time, she lost her father; the film is dedicated to him. Though in the film the lockdown has lifted and normal life has resumed, the visual evidence of the pandemic is still part of the landscape: masks, hazmat suits, ambulances ferrying covid-positive patients to makeshift wards.

Das allows the viewer to join dots. We can assume, for instance, that Jaan’s drinking has picked up during lockdown, just as it did in many households across the country—his friends comment on the weight he has put on, and Tora’s complaints about how their relationship has changed indicate that alcohol is a recent problem. The mental strain of living through covid informs the film. Everyone seems on edge. Tora often appears on the brink of exploding (Das cuts several scenes at the moment when something dramatic seems about to happen). Jaan mentions that he has thought of ending his life. “I am desperate and I feel useless,” another man says. A domestic worker delivers a public rebuke to everyone who’s shunning her after she returns from a covid ward.

Indie directors often start out wearing multiple hats, but retain only a couple once they have had some success. In her last three films, Das has been writer, cinematographer, editor and producer. She has perhaps the most unforced film-making style of any Indian director working today. Her camera will wander, linger on a cloud, a sleepy cat, a blind singer. Towards the end of the film, husband and wife exchange a series of texts. Relations have frayed to the point that falling sick with covid is actually a blessing, a chance to get away and reflect. With this distance comes tenderness. “I’ll bake you a cake once you’re back,” he texts. Then, more poetically, “Both of us are under the same sky.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.