The globetrotting stars of modern arthouse film

There are moments in The Lighthouse where, if I squinted a bit, I could have sworn the part of Ephraim Winslow was being played by Daniel Day-Lewis and not Robert Pattinson. The Maine lobster fisherman accent adopted by Pattinson for Robert Eggers’ 2019 film about two lighthouse operators in the 1890s somehow brought to mind the menacing oratory of Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood. And Pattinson seems to disappear, as Day-Lewis would, into the hulking physicality of his character, grunting, cussing, farting, pleasuring himself and reacting to an aggressive seagull with a panicked decisiveness worthy of Buster Keaton.

It has been an astonishing few years for Pattinson. He broke out as a teen star, first as Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films, then as Edward Cullen, the vampire lead of the Twilight trilogy. But as the last of the Twilight films rolled out in 2012, he headed on an unexpected path, starring in David Cronenberg’s sleek, disturbing Cosmopolis. He began working with directors from all over, eschewing anything even marginally mainstream. He also showed a keenness to bury his matinee-idol looks—he spends The Lost City Of Z in a bushy beard and glasses, and ends The Childhood Of A Leader as a skinhead Hitler of sorts. And there were his accents; his Dauphin in the recent Shakespeare adaptation The King has a French accent so extreme, it’s almost a mockery of the lugubrious film it’s in.

What sets post-Twilight Pattinson apart from his peers is the way he has single-mindedly sought out the indie/arthouse space (though Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Tenet and his casting as Batman should mark some kind of return to the mainstream). Pattinson has also—unusually for an American actor—shown a keenness to work in, and with directors from, other countries. He auditioned for Claire Denis’ High Life, was told he was too young, but persevered until the French auteur cast him four years later. He has worked with directors from Colombia (Ciro Guerra, Waiting For The Barbarians), Germany (Werner Herzog, Queen Of The Desert), the Netherlands (Anton Corbijn, Life) and Australia (David Michôd, The Rover), and even when he is working with American directors like Brady Corbet on The Childhood Of A Leader, the film has a European setting and feel.

Around the time Pattinson was making the jump from mainstream to arthouse cinema, his Twilight co-star, Kristen Stewart, was also headed in a similar direction. First, she worked with Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles on his adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s cult novel On The Road. Then she headed to Europe, collaborating with French director Olivier Assayas. Her performances in their two films together—Clouds Of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper—were revelatory: brittle, original and subtly devastating. It’s altogether fitting that she was cast as Jean Seberg—an American actor who made her most inedible film, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, in Paris—in Benedict Andrews’ Seberg.

Who are the other globetrotting world cinema stars today, actors who work across industries and oceans? The first name on such a list must be Juliette Binoche, whose longevity and fearlessness as a performer has rendered her almost without peer. In the 30-plus years of her career, she has worked with masters from Taiwan (Hou Hsiao-hsien), Iran (Abbas Kiarostami, twice), Japan (Naomi Kawase), several from America and Britain (most memorably in The English Patient and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being), Germany (Michael Haneke, twice), Poland (Krzysztof Kieślowski), and just about every major modern French director. It’s not surprising that both Pattinson and Stewart have found themselves playing opposite her, in High Life and Clouds Of Sils Maria, respectively.

Spanish and Latin American actors have proved particularly good travellers in recent years: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Maribel Verdú, Diego Luna, Édgar Ramírez. But if there’s one name that brings together different strands of world and popular cinema, it’s the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. He shot to fame in thrilling, volatile films by then-emerging Mexican directors—Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Alejandro Iñárritu’s Amores Perros. Since then, he has worked all over the arthouse world, with idiosyncratic talents like Jim Jarmusch and Michel Gondry and titans like Herzog and Pedro Almodóvar. His partnership with Chilean director Pablo Larraín in No, Neruda and Ema might be the most rewarding actor-director team-up of the decade. He also managed five seasons of sublime comedy as orchestra conductor Rodrigo De Souza in the American series Mozart In The Jungle.

Acting talent moving across international borders isn’t a recent phenomenon: few working in film today have ranged as far and wide as Michel Piccoli or Max von Sydow. Still, such cross-pollination has been gathering steam since the internet started radically expanding people’s exposure to each other’s cinemas. Golshifteh Farahani’s fame in Iranian cinema has led to her finding work in France (Eden), India (The Song Of Scorpions) and the US (Paterson). Actors like Vincent Cassel, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe and Viggo Mortensen have shown similar exploratory instincts. When Maggie Cheung starred in Assayas’ Irma Vep in 1996, her otherness was at the heart of the film. Today, South Korea’s Kim Min-hee acts alongside France’s Isabelle Huppert in Claire’s Camera, Hong Sang-soo’s Cannes comedy, and it seems like business as usual in the arthouse world.

This World View column appeared in Mint Lounge.

Ford v Ferrari: Review

He may not churn them out like Michael Curtiz, but James Mangold has range to match the Casablanca director. He’s bounced from shadowy crime film (Copland) to nervy indie (Girl, Interrupted), romantic comedy (Kate & Leopold) to big-budget nonsense (Knight and Day). The general consensus was that his last feature, the dour X-Men standalone Logan, was excellent (it was – for a comic book franchise film). His latest, Ford v Ferrari, finds him in a much happier mood.

In the early 1960s, Ford was in a slump and Lee Iacocca, then an up-and-comer in the marketing division, had a radical solution. To get the kids buying your cars again, he told Henry Ford II, you need to make one that can win a race: not dusty NASCAR, but shiny Le Mans in France. Ford agreed, and Iacocca drafted in designer Carroll Shelby to come up with a machine that could compete with reigning champion Ferrari. Shelby, in turn, brought in English race car driver Ken Miles, known for his brilliance inside the car and his short fuse outside it.

This much is fact, but it’s the shading within the lines that makes this an unexpectedly light-footed and pleasurable experience. Mangold dresses everything up in Jacques Demy colors. Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography has a sun-kissed glint. And there’s a fantastic ‘60s pop soundtrack: the Kingsmen's version of "Money (That's What I Want)", the lesser-known Byrds instrumental “Stranger in a Strange Land", James Burton’s supercharged “Polk Salad Annie".

Casting Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as Miles is a canny decision for the contrast it offers up. Damon is one of the least demonstrative performers out there; it’s not often you catch him 'acting'. And you’ll rarely catch Bale not acting—he does everything he can to make sure you’re not looking at anyone else when he’s onscreen (Mangold had used him similarly in 3:10 To Yuma, opposite the introverted Russell Crowe). He seems to relish being able to speak in his native accent here and generally play the fool. Damon holds the film steady, Bale does everything but address the camera.

There’s another matchup, not as apparent but just as effective. In a wonderful, almost silent cameo, Remo Girone plays Enzo Ferrari, racing car designer supreme. Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) goes to him with Ford’s offer to partner up on a car; the master’s response, delivered in halting English, is devastating: “Tell him he’s not Henry Ford." The reserved, European artistry of Girone’s Ferrari is contrasted with the all-American force of Tracy Letts’ Henry Ford II. Letts is so blustery and god-like that the scene where he breaks down after enduring a high-speed lap in his own racecar lands perfectly. “I had no idea," he tells Shelby repeatedly.

In 2013's Rush, Ron Howard – like Mangold, another metteur en scène – made a racing movie that people who don’t care for the sport could watch. Ford v Ferrari has a similar quality, though it delves deeper into the mechanics of the sport. The valves-and-engines talk flew past me, but when Miles is strapped in and driving, it doesn’t matter. As an F1 non-watcher, I’ve never had occasion to appreciate the high-risk game of chicken that is two drivers, neck and neck, accelerating as they approach a turn. Mangold achieves this through sound design and rapid cutting – a concise example of action cinema problem-solving.

Ford v Ferrari isn’t the wittiest film, or inventive in its narrative strategies. It is, instead, what used to pass for a Hollywood tentpole offering before franchises took over everything: just clever enough, and satisfying in its bigness. It’s the sort of film you can enter at any point when it comes on TV and would probably see through to the end.

This review appeared in Mint. 

Bala: Review

Ayushmann Khurrana has steadily been making his way up the body in his efforts to expose the frailties of the modern Indian male. He started below the waist with Vicky Donor, reached the heart in Meri Pyaari Bindu and Bareilly Ki Barfi, down again for Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, before heading back up, all the way to the vocal chords, in Dream Girl. Now, with Bala, he’s reached the northernmost bastion of male insecurity.

Hair – in particular, its absence – is the unusual subject of Amar Kaushik’s film. Khurrana plays Balmukund Shukla, a fairness products sales agent in Kanpur, whose fortunes in the follicle department have taken a tragic turn. Once he had floppy, wavy hair that made him a school favourite. At 25, it’s down to a few wispy strands and Bala is desperate for a solution, his litany of home remedies starting with herbal oil massages and getting progressively disgusting from there.

When it all fails, Bala takes the extreme step of wearing a wig. This turns him from an irritable nebbish into a confident charmer – a funny transformation, though without the comic punch of Rajkummar Rao breaking bad, under Khurrana’s tutelage, in Bareilly Ki Barfi. He uses his talent for movie star mimicry to win the affections of Tik-Tok star Pari (Yami Gautam). Soon, they’re talking about getting married, even as he wonders how he’ll tell his supermodel fiancée the truth.

Kaushik draws parallels between the difficulties faced by balding men and dark-complexioned women in India. It’s not the most equal of comparisons – there are, after all, solutions to hair loss, even if they don’t work for Bala – but the film does well to show the straightforward cruelty and discrimination that society sanctions in both cases. Latika (Bhumi Pednekar), a tough-minded lawyer, has been hearing jibes about her skin colour (from classmate Bala as well) since she was a child. It’s limiting her marriage prospects now (not that she cares), just as Bala’s baldness is hampering his.

Latika is a strong-willed person, comfortable in her skin and fiercely dismissive of efforts to hurt her self-esteem. The problem, though, is that Pednekar is playing her practically in blackface. It’s a weirdly self-defeating move for a film to say all skin tones are beautiful and then cast an actor who everyone knows is significantly fairer than what she's shown to be. It’s the perennial Hindi film problem: they want the issue, not the actual representation. The cherry on top: in 2012, Yami Gautam featured in a fairness cream ad.

Gautam is excellent, though, turning her character’s straightforward shallowness into something appealing. Pari places a huge premium of outward appearances – my looks are all I have, she tells Bala – which is why it’s such a huge betrayal when her husband’s true face is laid bare before her. Gautam’s reaction in that moment is masterful, a mixture of comic incomprehension, creeping horror, hurt and anger.

Khurrana continues to be one of the few Hindi actors willing to play unlikable losers. He mixes that up with wig-wearing hero here, but it’s Bala's insecurities that make for the best scenes, like when he explodes at his father (a tremendous Saurabh Shukla) for passing on baldness and diabetes to him. It’s a pity his films are turning preachy – he has a knack for moral confusion and weakness that’s at odds with the bland certitude expected of movie leads.

In his first film as director, last year’s surprise hit Stree, Kaushik showed he had an ear for sonorous writing and the rhythms of life in Tier II towns. His delight in language continues here – ‘lolup’ gives him such a kick it turns up again in the next line (the screenplay is by Niren Bhatt). Like Stree, this is a strong comic ensemble, Khurrana and Gautam supported by Shukla, Seema Pawha (sporting a moustache for some reason), Abhishek Banerjee (so adept he almost slips the breathtakingly racist “Malinga cut" line past you), and Javed Jaffrey, coming out tops in a scene with duelling Bachchan imitations. But whenever Pednekar is onscreen, things fall apart. The central quandary is that Bala would have seemed skewed and farcical with only male baldness to concentrate on. It needs the skin colour scenes – but it really didn’t need the blackface.

This review appeared in Mint.

Drive: Review

The studio behind Dhadak, Kesari and Student of the Year 2 has finally found a film that isn’t worth releasing in theatres. Dharma Productions’ Drive has apparently been ready since 2018. It’s out now, exclusively on Netflix, and while it’s tough to make a case for Tarun Mansukhani’s film being released anywhere, at least theatre audiences have been spared. You can’t get a ticket to ride – and you shouldn’t care. As for those of you who blunder into its headlights online, it’s between you and your conscience and the left-facing arrow which is all that separates you from the BoJack Horseman episodes you’ve been meaning to catch up on.

You can see why Dharma would want to dump Drive online. I don’t know if it’s tougher to buy Jacqueline Fernandez as the high-heels-wearing winner of a drag race or as the leader of a criminal gang, but it’s not a decision I want to have to make in the first five minutes of a film. Tara and her cohorts are planning a major heist – at Rashtrapati Bhavan, no less. The government gets wind of this and sends its man to infiltrate the gang. An hour later, Sushant Singh Rajput is giving Fernandez a foot massage (they’re barely friends at this point) while laying out his master plan (it involves rats).

Even by the low standards of Bollywood heist films, Drive is supremely lazy filmmaking. Most everything that happens is patently ridiculous – my personal breaking point was the scene in which the gang stands perfectly still so that the security team of (I assume) one of the most secure buildings in the country thinks the system has frozen. The Dhamaal-meets-Italian-Job aesthetic is a monument to bad taste. Everyone looks exhausted, from Pankaj Tripathi, who can barely keep his eyes open, to the extras in the background who can’t be bothered to cheer properly.

Rajput has the fixed plastic smile of an actor who wishes his career were in another gear. Fernandez struggles with simple actions like striking a steering wheel in anger. The only thing I can get behind is the relatively trim running time – just under two hours – though I’d have been happier if the film was 90 minutes of Fernandez outtakes of lines like “Yeh hai woh Formula One driver jo kehta hai ki humein street race mein hara sakta hai". In the 1980s, films deemed too poor for theatrical release went straight to video. Drive seems like straight to digital: a film which might have once been destined for movie screens, but wasn’t worth the bother.

This review appeared in Mint.

River deep, garbage high

The night before my first beach clean-up, I looked up the shared document that was pinned to Afroz Shah’s Twitter page. Along with information for Week 206 (Devachi Wadi, Versova beach, 8am on 29 September), there was a short primer on the movement’s goals, and an exhortation to join the “constant work every Saturday and Sunday for past three and a half years"—work which has drawn hundreds of thousands of volunteers to Shah’s cause and seen the 37-year-old counsel with the Bombay high court named a UN Champion of the Earth in December 2016.

I reached early the following morning, expecting to be among the first volunteers. The beach was swarming. There must have been 400 people. Unlike me, they seemed to know what to do, donning disposable gloves, picking up plastic and other waste, shaking them free of sand, depositing them in large tubs. A couple of earth-movers roved around, digging up garbage that had settled too deep for human hands to pry out. Completed piles were added to the hill-like deposit away from the water, which would later be taken away by a Brihanmumbai municipal corporation (BMC) truck. This has been the scene on Versova beach ever since Shah started picking up garbage on his own, in 2015.

I caught up with Shah. We were both wearing gloves, so he offered a fist-bump instead of a handshake. He put the number of volunteers at 700. “This is too many people," he admitted. “One hundred would be better."

The following Sunday, I reached Filter Pada, a slum near Aarey Colony in Powai, for Shah’s Mithi River Rejuvenation drive (the same week, there were drives at Versova, Dana Pani beach in Malad and Sanjay Gandhi National Park, as well as in Goa, Kolkata and Meghalaya). It took a while for Shah’s team to reach. On the night of 4 October, 29 people protesting the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation’s tree felling in Aarey had been arrested. Several volunteers arrived on the morning of 6 October, only to find the police had cordoned off the area—and had to head back home.

The Versova clean-ups often draw over a thousand volunteers. On 2 October, a public holiday, 4,500 people turned out, volunteer Punit Punamiya tells me as we stand in a corner of Filter Pada’s Shiv temple waiting for the team to arrive. The turnout for a Mithi clean-up is usually between 50-400. There were around 40 volunteers the day I went. “Right now you can’t get inside the river," Punamiya says. “After November, we will start calling kids."

After his success at Versova—23 million kilograms of garbage cleared and, in 2018, the return of Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings to the beach—Shah had turned his attention to the Mithi. The river originates around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in north Mumbai, is fed with the overflow of the Vihar and Powai lakes, and flows into Mahim Bay and the Arabian Sea. This roughly 18km stretch runs through residential and industrial areas, its path diverted over the years by construction for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, the upscale Bandra Kurla Complex and other projects.

Once upon a time, the story goes, Mithi’s water was extremely clean. “I have met people who told me they would do wuzu (ritual cleaning) with that water before saying their prayers," says Murtaza Sadriwala of the Dawoodi Bohra community, which teamed up with Shah a year ago (they had been one of the larger groups on Versova beach the previous week). But years of sewage, chemical pollutants and garbage have choked the river.

In 2005, in the midst of an exceptionally heavy monsoon, the Mithi overflowed its banks, exacerbating a flood situation which claimed over 500 lives. This drew attention to the levels of pollution but matters haven’t improved since. This September, after heavy rain, the Mithi again broke its banks, submerging railway tracks, and forcing the evacuation of more than a thousand people who were living it.

The day I visited Filter Pada, the Mithi’s waters were too high for a proper clean-up. As a dozen or so volunteers picked and bagged whatever waste they could find on the banks, Ranveer, a long-time volunteer, showed me a bioremediation method they had set up earlier this year: activated charcoal placed in the soil which intercepts the sewage emerging from Filter Pada and releases relatively clean flow into the river. It worked until the rains started in earnest and it got choked, but Shah says they will get it running again, this time with a cover that will keep the mud out.

From its inception in November last year, community outreach has been a big part of the Mithi clean-up drive. “They used to burn the plastic before we got them to stop," Ranveer says. Sadriwala adds: “We would wear masks. Now we don’t have to do that." Shah realized that convincing people living along the river to not dump or burn their plastic was as crucial as the actual cleaning, if not more. So he and his team started knocking on Filter Pada’s doors, asking the people to store their solid waste, with the assurance that they would come by every weekend and pick it up.

Initially, they were ignored. Some assumed they were workers with a political party. Aaqib Shaikh, a third-year college student and resident of Filter Pada who now volunteers with Shah, says: “We had seen a few cleanliness drives before, so we didn’t pay much attention. But when they kept coming back week after week, we took them seriously." The volunteers would also cook food for about 50-100 people, and take it with them to the colony. They began by canvassing with 1,500 houses, Punamiya says, and now cover 3,000 houses every week.

I walked through the narrow lanes behind Ranveer, a gunny sack in my hand. He stopped at each door, knocked once if it was closed, and shouted cheerily: “Sookha kachra (dry waste)." Someone—generally a woman or a child—would emerge and empty a pile of plastic into his sack. If a household told them they didn’t have anything, he would ask them to collect and keep the following week. A couple of the rooms had already hung the dry waste outside in a packet.

All this was happening at almost a running pace, with volunteers in multiple lanes. The colony is divided among them, with individuals taking responsibility for collection and education in their assigned territories.

I was walking down a gully behind a young volunteer, Dinesh Awari, who was stressing the importance of turning up week after week, so that “his" houses eventually tired of reminders and started saving their plastic. Midway, he turned and said we could head back. The families up ahead hadn’t been explained how to segregate yet; he would get to them in the coming weeks.

As we stood in a clearing, waiting for empty sacks to arrive, three boys from the chawl, likely between the ages of 7-10, came up to us. A volunteer took the opportunity to impart a quick lesson—don’t throw your chips packet away, it makes its way to sea and fish eat it. One of the boys seemed worried that we were going to skip his house, reminding me twice to come by. Another ran off, singing “Plastic, apun ka plastic."

It’s no wonder Shah’s efforts have increasingly focused on capturing the minds of younger volunteers. He does speaking engagements in schools on a regular basis, and has a dedicated team just for outreach with this demographic.

After the collection is done, a tempo carries the waste to Andheri, where it is first segregated and then sent for recycling. In a few weeks, the river cleaning will start in earnest as well. “It’s not as exotic as a beach clean-up," Punamiya says drily. It’s also less likely to show encouraging results, at least in the short term—in a year, they have cleaned 1.25km of the river. Shah estimates it will take them at least five years to cover the Mithi’s 18km. “It will take much more until we hasten. We have over 20 million people. The whole city seems to be sleeping."

This piece, part of a giving back Diwali special issue, appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Laal Kaptaan: Review

For the second time this year, Hindi cinema takes a run at a revisionist Western. Laal Kaptaan doesn't come together as satisfyingly as Sonchiriya, perhaps the best theatrical release of 2019. But that film still had the broad framework of the daaku film to play with, whereas Navdeep Singh heads into largely unmapped territory with some hunting dogs and a history book for company.

Laal Kaptaan is set in the late-1700s, a time of fantastic tumult in India. The Battle of Buxar has taken place, the Mughals are losing their grip and the British are on their way to taking control of the country. North India is a mess of competing interests: Afghans, Marathas, assorted tribes and clans. Into this bubbling stew, Singh drops a naga sadhu, played by Saif Ali Khan, who has unfinished business with a warlord named Rahmat Khan (Manav Vij).

The Western is strong in this one: there are Moriccone bells and choruses, and the sadhu is a nod to both the Lone Ranger (in that he looks like Tonto) and the Man With No Name (everyone just calls him “gosain", the term for Shiva-worshipping ascetics). But Laal Kaptaan is also a chase film, a genre Singh experimented with in NH10. Gosain has been pursuing Khan for 20 years and is finally within striking distance. Also pursuing Khan are the Marathas, whose money he’s run off with. And there’s a tracker played by Deepak Dobriyal, who’ll hunt down anyone, Gosain or Khan, for a fee.

There are shades of Aamir Khan’s trickster from Thugs of Hindostan in the tracker, but thankfully there’s more that separates than unites these two films, even though both are set in north India in the late 1700s. This is a more convincing snapshot of what the region must have been like, with everyone looking out for themselves and national identity barely a gleam in anyone’s eye. There's a wealth of eccentric period detail: for instance, the Pindaris – plunderers and foragers of the time – who set off after Rahmat Khan are presented as the film’s equivalent of commedia dell'arte or a nautanki troupe.

Singh and co-writer Deepak Venkatesha create a gritty, unstable world; even the most sympathetic character, a widow, played by Zoya Hussain, acts decisively and without mercy when she has to. The use of incremental flashbacks, though, doesn’t work as well as they might have hoped. Every 30 minutes or so, we’re shown fragments of events that went down in Buxar: rain, a boy and his father, prisoners, British soldiers, a hanging. We get a little more information with each one, so by the time we learn why the gosain is after Khan, it’s not that much of a revelation, unlike that expertly deployed, heart-stopping flashback in Sonchiriya.

The film is held back in other ways. You wish someone had given Singh and cinematographer Shanker Raman a bit of a budget for the set-pieces – there are a couple of good ideas (the Afghan ambush, for example) but little cohesion or fluidity. The performances are a strange collection of accents and attitudes. Saif Ali Khan, buried under dreadlocks, a beard and sacred ash, seethes and grimaces a lot. Vij seems to be trying to channel Pankaj Kapur in Maqbool; there’s a scene when I genuinely couldn’t make out if the source of a loud grunt was Vij or the horse or camel standing nearby. And while it’s nice to see Dobriyal get prominent billing, his clowning is one-note and his part underwritten.

And yet, Laal Kaptaan is the sort of film I wish there were more of – an exploration of the richness and weirdness of old India, one which doesn’t try to smooth the edges or create a Disney-esque franchise. Recent films have used our nation’s distant past as a reflecting pool of orthodoxy (Padmaavat) and proto-nationalism (Manikarnika). Singh, on the other hand, admits that we’ve always been a complicated, fractured country, and that entire lives can be defined by nothing more than a desire for revenge.

This review appeared in Mint.

The Sky Is Pink: Review

A film about the impending death of a terminally ill child, narrated by the dead child from beyond the grave. You can’t lose with a setup like that: even a strictly competent director could push the required buttons and reduce viewers to a sniffly mess. But you can’t win either. No matter how much you pare it down, there’ll always be someone accusing you of manipulating tears from the spectacle of a dying kid. Shonali Bose’s The Sky Is Pink errs on the side of caution, keeping the impending tragedy in view at all times, but wrapping everything in good vibes and the kind of courage you have no option but to admire.

On the roof of an Old Delhi house, Aditi (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) wakes up her husband, Niren (Farhan Akhtar), to the news that she’s pregnant. After a quick spell of blaming each other – something that’ll recur through the film – they’re faced with the question: what next? Aditi wants to keep the baby. Niren wants to abort – with good reason. They’d once had a daughter, who died soon after she was born. They found out she had severe combined immunodeficiency, a condition which leaves its victims extremely vulnerable to infections. Any child of theirs would have a one in four chance of being born with the same.

Aisha – whose voiceover breezily informs us that “the end" has already happened for her – does, indeed, have SCID, which requires her to be in London for treatment. She grows up there, alone with her mother at first as Niren heads back to India to earn a living; then with both of them and her older brother, Ishaan (Rohit Suresh Saraf), on the outskirts of London; and finally back in a farmhouse in Delhi. Her condition makes normal life almost impossible, but she still manages to go to school (for one scene at least), paint, write, fall in love, and allay parental concerns with dry comic barbs.

Bose worked with similarly heart-tugging material in 2014’s Margarita With A Straw, about a young woman with cerebral palsy. Her new film (screenplay by Bose and Nilesh Maniyar; dialogue by Maniyar and Juhi Chaturvedi) is comfier, less jagged. The reaction shots of baby Aisha yawning and gurgling are an early indication that there will be plenty of sugar to help the grim premise go down. The long goodbye is eased by the good life, with teens lounging by the pool and domestic staff bringing them double espressos, and a bit of Zoya Akhtar-esque deep-sea diving (having Aisha come face to face with a sea turtle, a creature known for its long life-span, is a neat idea). Mikey McCleary’s score is the shiniest object of all, its jauntiness mostly at odds with the delicate emotions in play.

Zaira Wasim is a rare young actor who doesn’t go hunting for the audience’s sympathy; she plays Aisha as calm and funny instead of angry or tragic. The focus, though, remains on her parents – which is just as well, since it would have taken a different sort of film to explore the psyche of a dying teenager. In its best moments, The Sky is Pink is a perceptive look at the pressures that descend on a marriage when there’s a seriously ill child involved. The scenes with Niren and Aditi laying into each other are emotionally volatile in a way the rest of the film isn’t. Both actors respond beautifully, especially Chopra, who is believably fraught, determined and frayed by turn.

Bose’s film is based on a real-life story: there really was an Aisha Chaudhary, born to Niren and Aditi, who died at 18. This is a touching tribute to a life cut short, even if the experience is less wrenching than what one might expect. After Aisha dies, the next scene is her funeral, with loud country music trampling over the goodbyes we’ve just witnessed. It reminded me of the ending to The Broken Circle Breakdown, a 2012 Belgian film about a couple who lose their young daughter to cancer. It ends with the wife on her deathbed, the husband and their bluegrass band playing her on her way out. It’s a desperately sad scene to begin with, but as the music picks up the band members start to smile and whoop. The Sky Is Pink has similar reserves of emotion, but nothing breaks through its manicured surface in so electrifying a manner.

This review appeared in Mint.