Mission Majnu: Review

The chief of RAW is advising Indira Gandhi to greenlight a covert mission to expose Pakistan’s plans to build an atomic bomb in 1974. They need intelligence, not force, he argues—“someone who can get the job done without attracting any attention”. That man is Tariq Ali—actual name Amandeep Singh—who’s already undercover in Rawalpindi, looking for work as a tailor. He’s played by Sidharth Malhotra, who’s handed the impossible task of pretending he has formidable intelligence and a forgettable face. 

The Malhotra-starrer Shershaah was such a success in 2021 that it was only a matter of time before someone reworked it. Like Shershaah, Shantanu Bagchi’s Mission Majnu is founded on India-Pakistan tensions. Malhotra is cast once again as a wholesome Punjabi patriot, a spy this time instead of a soldier. There’s another sappy love story, with Tariq falling for Nasreen (Rashmika Mandanna), a blind Pakistani girl, while keeping his true identity from her. Tanishk Bagchi is composer again; ‘Rabba Janda’ is a close cousin of Shershaah's ‘Raatan Lambiyaan’, which was also sung by Jubin Nautiyal. 

Little by little, Tariq pieces together the details of the nuclear programme, using his cover as a tailor to coax a general into saying more than he should, then tracking down the scientist who’s making the bomb (commodes are involved), and finally locating the facility. He’s helped in this by two undercover assets, Aslam (Sharib Hashmi) and the local maulvi (Kumud Mishra). Amandeep's patriotism has an edge to it; his father killed himself after he was caught selling military secrets to Pakistan. Foiling the enemy’s nuclear plans is his chance to restore his family’s name.

With a capable cast and a smarter plot, this might have been enough. But the film is hampered in too many areas—something, somewhere is always below par. Malhotra doesn't sit right as a quick-thinking spy, Mandanna says her lines like she’s afraid she’ll be fined for every intonation she gets wrong, and there’s committed hamming by most of the supporting cast (Hashmi alone amuses—his delivery of “Badi kutti cheez hoon” belongs in a better film). Sumit Batheja’s dialogue is like a first draft that never got polished; Amandeep is described as “academy ki history ka sabse number one cadet”. The film’s idea of normal Pakistani speech is to have ‘janaab’ or ‘miyan’ or ‘bhaijaan’ in every sentence. There’s no effort to include little details specific to Pakistan in the ‘70s; the only cultural references are to Indian film stars. 

I found Shershaah a simple-minded film when it released, but at least it had impressive battle scenes. Mission Majnu has only one big set piece—well-executed, despite some iffy CGI at the end—and a few shootouts and chases, all in the film's second half. For the most part, it tries to get by on its wits… which is a problem, because Mission Majnu isn’t Raazi. It doesn’t have an actor of quality at its centre. It doesn’t have a clever screenplay, or a director who can patiently build a scene. And it doesn’t have the imagination to suggest that the Pakistani armed forces might have a few decent, honest people who don't want to start a war with India. 

Mission Majnu’s biggest failing is that it has no interest in, much less love for, its setting. Pakistan is treated with a mixture of pity (for dupes like Nasreen) and contempt (for everyone in power). The military are shown to be duplicitous in their dealings with India and willing to kill their own if it gets the job done. “They’re a fanatical country, they won’t think twice about using a nuclear bomb,” a worried Gandhi remarks. You can say stuff like this in Hindi cinema in 2023 and no one even blinks. The film ends with a triumphant mention of India’s May 1998 nuclear tests. It doesn’t say anything about Pakistan’s nuclear tests later that month. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Dylan, Tarantino and artists as enthusiasts

Most great artists know a lot about their field but not all seem to love it. Even fewer show the desire to pass that love on to others. This is why I have a special fondness for directors, authors and musicians who make it a point to write or talk about works dear to them. Their enthusiasm shapes mine. Zadie Smith opened up Nabokov for me. Stephen Fry’s Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music was a push at the right time for a classical music neophyte. I discovered Powell & Pressburger through Martin Scorsese’s reverent mentions; their films are among my favourites now.

Aside from Scorsese—surely the undisputed director-as-enthusiast—it’s hard to think of another film-maker with the curiosity, breadth of interest and unflagging energy of Quentin Tarantino. He started out as a guide to cinema, working at the Videos Archives rental store in Los Angeles. And he continued recommending as a writer-director, through his reference-heavy films, his interviews, the erstwhile QT-Fest in Austin, and his current ownership of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.

As he nears his self-declared limit of 10 films, the director is leaning into his role as full-time disseminator of movie opinions. He started writing pieces on the New Beverly site a few years ago, and made marathon appearances on the affiliated Pure Cinema Podcast. In 2022, he started his own podcast with Roger Avary, a friend from his rental shop days (and co-writer of Pulp Fiction). He also wrote his first book, a novelisation of his film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. And now he has published his second, a non-fiction collection called Cinema Speculation.

Primarily a work of film criticism, Cinema Speculation is also a kind of memoir, Tarantino sifting through his memories of growing up in the 1970s, when “New Hollywood became the Hollywood”. In the sweet opening chapter, “Little Q Watching Big Movies”, he recalls how he had to rely on his single mother, her boyfriends and his relatives to keep his insatiable appetite for movies fed. They took him to the movies they were watching: The French Connection, Deliverance, Dirty Harry. “Just a list of the wild violent movies I saw from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers,” writes the director who had Beatrix Kiddo put her four-year-old to sleep with the unbelievably violent Shogun Assassin.

Most of the chapters are dedicated to single films, with Tarantino taking apart Bullitt, Taxi Driver and other '70s landmarks to see how they worked (or didn’t). His idol Pauline Kael (whose own reviews are mentioned frequently) approached criticism in a similar forensic manner—but where Kael had flowing, quotable prose, Tarantino aims to capture the excitement of speech (after listening to his podcast over the last year, I could literally hear him narrate the book). Paragraphs are kicked off with a conversational “Now…”, “Well…”, “So…”. Sometimes he will pose a series of increasingly animated questions and answer them in “yeses” and “nos”, a device he frequently uses in film-writing. In the chapter on Brian De Palma’s Sisters, in a stretch of 10 paragraphs, four begin with “But”, and one each with “Also” and “However”—an indication of the headlong momentum of Tarantino’s prose.

As is usually the case with Tarantino, it’s a lot—of information, of hypotheses, of declarations. But there’s something thrilling about him in full critic mode, reeling off names of artists and films and characters and expecting it to make sense to the reader. My two favourite chapters aren’t focused on a single film. One is a tribute to Kevin Thomas, a second-string Los Angeles Times critic whom Tarantino adored growing up. The other carries the book’s title as its headline and poses the question: “What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?” One can imagine a young Tarantino initiating debates like this at Video Archives, a nobody with thousands of movies already in his head, not least the unmade ones of his own.

Cinema Speculation released on 1 November last year. As it happens, another pop culture mainstay brought out his own book that same day. Fans of Bob Dylan might have expected his next book to be a follow-up to his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. They got another work of non-fiction, but not a memoir.

The Philosophy Of Modern Song looks at 66 tracks, new and old. Much like Tarantino, Dylan turns the songs inside-out, trying to get a measure of their power and their hold over him. They range from standards like Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ and The Clash’s ‘London Calling’' to obscure gems like Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 recording of ‘Keep My Skillet Good And Greasy’. Though there are songs from the 1920s to the 2000s, the preference is for mid-20th century music, mostly country, blues, R‘n’B, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll and vintage pop.

For each selection, Dylan writes two small essays. The first is a kind of stream-of-consciousness reckoning with the song in question (“This is Moloch, the cat’s eye pyramid, the underbelly of beauty, where you take away the bottom number and the others fall”; ‘El Paso’, Marty Robbins). Sometimes it’s Dylan talking, sometimes a character from the song. The second essay is a more straightforward assessment. Before long you realise Dylan isn’t married to this format; for some entries, he skips one or the other essay. Sometimes he throws in a list, because why not?

If Tarantino in Cinema Speculation aims for conversational zing, Dylan in Philosophy is after something more literary. As with Chronicles, his prose is a unique amalgam of hard-boiled pulp, folksy wisdom, cultural arcana and Beat flourishes. There’s a spaciness here, though, which makes several entries seem almost like prose poems—or a Dylan song. I must admit my attention wandered and waned on some of the more expansive rambles. But there are startling phrases, sentences, things that only Dylan would think of writing. The Uncle Dave Macon song is “like a silent movie… it shows what it has”, “a unified song, all things in constant motion”, “a spirit guide… an interpreter in foreign lands”, a song that will “milk the cow till it gives blood”.

When he isn’t free-associating, Dylan describes songs and singers with an exactness that can only come from love and a lifetime of close listening. “Time and again he’ll slip the first few words of a line upstairs into the end of the previous line,” he writes of Bobby Darin’s phrasing in ‘Beyond The Sea’. When Dean Martin croons, “Words dissolve into runs of vowels without the traffic lanes of consonants.” “The Clash were always the band they imagined themselves to be”—as succinct an assessment of the socially committed English punks as anyone has done. About bluesman Jimmy Reed’s use of space: “You feel like you can see the light hitting the dust as it swirls under the sway of the music.”

The Philosophy Of Modern Song is steeply priced but stunning to look at. The layout (in hardcover) is eclectic and witty—not obvious images but references of the kind Dylan is making in the text. The entry for ‘Tutti Frutti’ has three accompanying photographs: singer Little Richard, Carmen Miranda with her famous fruit hat, and one of Paul Cezanne’s paintings of apples and pears. For ‘Beyond The Sea’, it’s Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling on the beach in From Here To Eternity and a 19th century wood engraving of boats attacking whales by William James Linton.

In less direct ways than Tarantino, Dylan has been a tastemaker, both through his recent music, which has thrown light on everything from blues and folk traditions to the Great American Songbook, and the radio show he hosted for 102 episodes. The book is as much his voice as ‘Queen Jane Approximately’—and Cinema Speculation reads like Tarantino dictated it. Both are labours of love and should spur months of discovery.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Kuttey: Review

 Towards the end of Parvarish (1977), Vinod Khanna, holding a gun and looking fetching in a dark blue scuba suit with a yellow oxygen tank, turns up to rescue his dad, who’s being held on a submarine. Just as he asks “Where’s Mangal Singh?”, Amjad Khan turns up behind him and asks him to drop his gun. But then Amitabh Bachchan turns up behind him with a gun. And then Kader Khan turns up behind Bachchan, at which point they stop standing in single file.   

The same stick-em-up impulse runs through Aasmaan Bhardwaj’s directorial debut, Kuttey. Time after time, characters think they have the upper hand, only for someone to turn up from out of nowhere and make their life hell. What’s fun and mildly campy in Parvarish is presented as impossibly edgy in Kuttey—but that’s not the real problem. After a while, you start to expect the gun from behind. The film’s unpredictability becomes predictable. 

It begins in the jungles of Maharashtra, where policeman Paaji (Kumud Mishra) escapes with his life after an encounter with a Naxal outfit (there’s no reason for the Naxalites to be there in the film, except it’s convenient to have a large group with guns to chuck into the mix at a later stage). Thirteen years later, Paaji has teamed up with the thuggish Gopal (Arjun Kapoor) in Mumbai. They’re tasked by drug kingpin Bhau (Naseeruddin Shah) to wipe out one of his rivals, which leads to a poolside action scene as gratuitous as it is unimaginative. It’s also unsuccessful, a huge problem because the two are cops. Pammi (Tabu), an inspector, offers to help them reverse their suspension—but it'll cost them a crore each. Gopal finds an ATM supply vehicle to rob. One ambush later, Kuttey goes full Parvarish. 

Kuttey radiates brash first film energy. Early on, there’s an action sequence in the style of Kill Bill, with shadows against a red background; it has absolutely nothing to do with the way the rest of the film looks (more Tarantino, this time Pulp Fiction, in the story Pammi tells, of a man shot on the toilet). There’s a juvenile quality to the writing, as if getting Tabu say variations on –chod is transgressive after a decade of cussing heroines. It’s unusual to encounter a dud Vishal Bhardwaj script—he’s co-writer with Aasmaan—but Kuttey lacks both the corrosive wit and the linguistic flourish of his best work. It's even more rare to see Tabu defeated. 

Around the halfway mark, two new characters are introduced: Bhau’s daughter, Lovely (Radhika Madan), and his employee, Danny (Shardul Bhardwaj), whom she’s in love with. They’re the only ones in this ensemble with some soul, which is largely down to Madan’s no-bullshit acting style and Bhardwaj’s jumpier performance. The writing, again, does them no favours; in moments of excitement, Lovely has nothing more memorable to say than ‘bhenchoood’. There’s too much Vishal in this film, not only his writing and music ('Dhan Te Nan' from Kaminey is dusted off) but many of his past collaborators (Tabu, Gulzar, Naseeruddin Shah, A. Sreekar Prasad). A father will, of course, call in favours for his son, but here it obscures any sense of Aasmaan’s directorial personality.   

There’s an annoying tendency among Hindi directors and writers to end films with a big messy gun battle. Vishal Bhardwaj isn’t immune to this—Haider, Ishqiya and Kaminey all ended in this fashion. But even though I’d have preferred other resolutions to each of these films, at least their shootouts had characters I wanted to see come out alive. Who would that be in Kuttey? Lovely and Danny, perhaps, but I couldn’t care less about who shot whom among Paaji, Pammi, Gopal, the Naxals and assorted others. 

Bhardwaj might insist he doesn’t want us to feel for them, that they’re each worse than the other. Anurag Kashyap did this in Ugly, but that was a different kind of film, openly antagonistic to its viewers. Kuttey doesn’t want to turn off its audience, but it can’t make the personal stakes seem as high as Ugly. It all feels quite effortful. This is the sort of dark comic thriller that’s been releasing directly on streaming platforms these past few years. While it’s nice to see the genre return to theatres, I wish it wasn’t with this one. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

That's me in the corner: Aftersun in seven scenes

I think I thought I saw you try 

As Sophie (Frankie Corio) sings this line from R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’, she looks up at her father in the audience. They’re on holiday in Turkey. It’s karaoke night, the eve of his 31st birthday. Calum (Paul Mescal) refuses to duet, so she’s on stage herself, singing awfully but unselfconsciously. In between, she steals glances at her father, who looks on stonily. He really has tried, making a budget vacation as fun as possible for his daughter, but there’s a gathering darkness he's been struggling to keep at bay. The last thing he wants to do is sing something suffused with dread and indecision.

I don’t know if I can do it

Calum brushes his teeth as Sophie lounges on the bed. “Don't you ever feel like you've just done a whole amazing day, and then you come home and feel tired and down, and... feels like your bones don't work,” she says. “They're just tired and everything is tired. Like you're sinking.” Charlotte Wells shoots the scene in a series of intricate framings: Calum reflected upside down in the mirror, as seen by Sophie lying on her back, then a single shot that takes us from Sophie’s reflection to behind Calum’s head and then his face in the mirror. His expression tells us how acutely his daughter’s rambling has described his internal state. He forces himself to respond in a cheery voice, but spits at the mirror before leaving—a gesture of frustration and helplessness. 

Oh no, I’ve said too much 

A friendly scuba instructor tells Calum he’s going to be a father despite not intending to have kids before 40. “Can’t see myself at 40, to be honest,” Calum replies. “Surprised I made it to 30.” Up till this point, Calum is around the centre of the frame, but after he says this, he’s pushed to the extreme right. As he stares wordlessly towards the negative space, the camera pans left until he’s outside the frame, out of the picture. Filmmaking telling us what we already know: something revealing has been said.  

That’s me in the corner

A white wall takes up most of the screen, except for a whirring blue fan on a stand and, to its right, in the bottom corner, a mirror, in which Calum is reflected doing tai chi exercises. It’s a startling composition, at one with the insistent sawing on the soundtrack. Very little in this film puts you at ease.  

What if all these fantasies come flailing around

After Sophie finishes her karaoke performance, she returns to the audience. Calum says he could get her singing lessons if she wants—a dad remark, so badly timed. Sophie, hurt, says he needn’t offer to pay for things he can’t afford. And, like that, Calum’s image of himself as a stable provider is decimated. He wants to think of himself as someone who spends 850 pounds in a tourist trap rug shop, who can shake off his daughter losing a costly scuba mask. Instead, he’s a 30-year-old with plans that haven’t taken off (“The café? No, not anymore…”), who can only afford a vacation at a drab resort in an inexpensive country.  

That’s me in the spotlight

At various points in the film, we see snatches of Calum at a rave, watched by an adult Sophie. They’re ominous images, barely visible, lit only by strobe lights. It feels like a sequence which will ‘explain’ the film, and when it came around at the end, intercut with the young Sophie and Calum dancing in Turkey, I felt myself leaning in. But is anything revealed? Sophie appears to confront Calum, shout, push him away. They stagger. Then they’re hugging. Is it an intervention? A reunion? The last time she saw him? An answer-obsessed film culture might have met its match in this brilliantly edited sequence. 

That was just a dream

As Sophie waves bye to her dad at the airport, the video freezes. The camera pans slowly to reveal the edge of a TV and further rightwards until we see the adult Sophie, sitting on a sofa, watching her childhood unfold. Yet, what we've been watching is something more. I’m recording this in my mind camera, Sophie tells her father at one point. Aftersun is the footage of a mind camera, assembled years later—all those ill-fitting fragments, snatches of conversations, bursts of sensory overload.

In the film’s enigmatic final shot, Calum walks down an empty corridor and through a swinging door, beyond which strobe lights flash. We hear Sophie’s baby gurgle. She’s lost in a bittersweet dream, but her present is calling out to her. She’ll snap out of her reverie and tend to it, just as she was tended to all those years ago. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

The Banshees of Inisherin: Review

As the sun sets, one bird hops in the direction of another, which edges away. The bird continues its progress, until it's right up against the other. There’s an irritated flapping of wings, and the retreating bird flies away. There are any number of cutaways to nature—dogs, horses, donkeys, sky, sea, fields—in The Banshees of Inisherin. But this one seems deliberately chosen as a mirror of the central conflict: one advances, the other retreats.

On an unchanging isle, a man tries to change. His name is Colm (Brendan Gleeson); he’s a violinist, a good one, though an amateur (he doesn’t seem to have a formal job). He lives alone with his dog. He drinks in the pub every evening with his friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell)—or he used to. One day, when Pádraic goes to pick him up, he’s unresponsive. At the pub, he avoids him. When Pádraic persists, Colm tells him they’re no longer friends. “You didn’t say anything to me,” he explains flatly. “You didn’t do anything to me. I just don’t like you no more.” 

Colm has his reasons. Pádraic is too dull for him, a man of generalities, no learning or ambition or particular skill. It’s a realization friends sometimes come to; usually it happens earlier in life, an awkward but natural consequence of people discovering themselves. Colm, quite reasonably, assumes his friend will understand he’s outgrown him and move on. But Pádraic keeps coming back, unwilling to accept his friend’s rebuffs. 

You can see why Pádraic won’t back off. He can’t afford to be prideful—he really doesn’t have anything to anchor him in life besides the friendship (when Colm breaks up with him, he tries to respond but after a few seconds of mute struggle can only come up with, “You do like me”—a wonderful bit of acting by Farrell). He lives with his sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon), the only completely normal person on the isle. His only companion is Jenny, a little donkey he dotes on. He doesn’t seem to have a job either. 

Although Pádraic is like a jilted lover who won’t quit, it’s Colm who threatens self-harm, saying he'll cut his own fingers off if he isn't left alone. No one’s right in the head here, from the relentless Pádraic and the clearly depressed Colm (“How’s the despair?” the priest asks during confession) to young Dominic (Barry Keoghan), whose rantings usually have a kernel of uncomfortable truth.

Martin McDonagh had earlier directed Farrell and Gleeson in the corrosive assassin comedy In Bruges. This is a more contemplative film, and, in its simplicity, more emotionally bruising. The logline is the whole film: everything is an outcome of that seemingly inconsequential decision. Pádraic has nothing to offer except his niceness. Colm, with his newfound clarity, rejects this as transient, using his own example as someone who, in Pádraic’s words, used to be nice and no longer was. As Pádraic is led away, drunk, Colm mutters, “That’s the most interesting he’s ever been.” Somehow, this has become a cycle from which neither man can extricate himself.

Playing a gentle fool with no stop button, Farrell is more touching than he's ever been. He’s particularly good at indicating the slow workings of Pádraic’s mind, the arguments he’d like to make if only he could frame them (so much of the writing in the film is about the gaps between thoughts). He smiles easily at the start of the film, then nervously, and eventually without conviction, in false hope. When he’s punched twice, it’s like a regular person getting hit: no shaking it off, just utter devastation. The tenderness of Farrell’s performance is contrasted with the gruff existential honesty of Gleeson’s Colm—it’s difficult not to feel for Pádraic even when his overtures could cause physical harm.

“Well, there goes that dream.” This line, an immaculate reading by Keoghan, said after Siobhán kindly rebuffs Dominic’s halting proposal, seems to sum up all the interconnected eddies of disappointment that make up The Banshees of Inisherin. Some will despair at the film’s despair, but the darkness isn’t a put-on (this is, after all, Ireland in 1923, with the Civil War a pronounced offscreen presence). And it’s leavened by moments of grace and lightness. Colm slow-dancing with his dog. Pádraic saying, “I am not putting me donkey outside when I’m sad, okay?” The mix of exhilaration, relief and worry on Siobhán’s face as she regards the isle from sea. The hard natural light filtering through windows and open doors, falling on worn faces. “Some things there’s no moving on from,” Pádraic says. “And I think that’s a good thing.” The Banshees of Inisherin makes a solitary breakup seem as vast and inevitable as the ocean.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Moments in Hindi cinema: 2022

 Jhund: Sense of an ending

At the end of Nagraj Manjule’s Jhund, Don (Ankush Gedam) reaches the airport just in time to join his teammates destined for a slum football tournament. He’s spent the last few days dodging bullies and the police, but there’s another obstacle now: the airport security check. He goes through once. Beep. Removes his phone and wallet, tries again. Beep. Removes belt and shoes. Beep. Now he looks rattled. It’s his first time at an airport. He’s a petty thief with a chip on his shoulder. He’s been running all his life. And we know there’s a penknife in his pocket.

Part of the reason this scene works so well is our lingering memory of the endings of previous Manjule films, in particular the shocking finale of Sairat. We know the check shouldn’t be a big deal. The guard will locate the offending item, ask Don to toss it in the trash. But we can’t be sure.

RK/RKay: Through the looking glass

RK (Rajat Kapoor), a film director, is having a nightmare week. First, the lead character in his film, Mehboob, goes mysteriously missing in the footage. Then Mehboob (also played by Kapoor) turns up in person, with no desire to go back and face his death in the film. Seeking some respite, RK heads to the edit bay to be alone with his creation. He sits alone in the dark, as his heroine, Gulabo (Mallika Sherawat), pines silently for Mehboob on screen. He picks up his cellphone and dials a number. She picks up the receiver of her landline; RK’s film is set in the 1950s. She addresses him as Mehboob, asks why he’s being so cruel. He panics, cancels the call. The next time they speak, they don’t need a phone—it’s like they can see each other.

One thing about this scene confused me initially. How did RK know which number to dial? One explanation is that RK has imagined his film's world so completely that he has assigned Gulabo’s phone a number. No wonder he, the creator, wants to escape his life, just as Mehboob, the creation, wants to cheat his fate.

Darlings: ‘Khaala cute lagti hai’

Badru (Alia Bhatt) and her mother, Shamshu (Shefali Shah), have drugged and tied up her abusive husband, but their confidante Zulfi (Roshan Mathew), in charge of minding him, has let him go. Two cops choose this moment to visit. They accuse Zulfi and Badru of plotting together. In danger of being arrested, Zulfi suddenly blurts out, “Mere ko toh khaala cute lagti hai (but it’s Shamshu I find cute)”. Surprising as the admission is (we’d assumed Zulfi was sweet on Badru), the screwball reactions are what sell it: Bhatt gazing slack-jawed at Shah, the disgust on the female cop’s face, the male cop muttering about Chinese porn, the instant sweetening of the background music.

Qala: Fever dreams

As Qala (Triptii Dimri) looks at the dead body of Jagan (Babil Khan), her rival and the brother she never wanted, a tiny insect moves up his face. We then cut to another shot, Qala looking straight at us. The same bug flits up her face now, and onto her unblinking eye. It’s only when moves her hand up to squash it that we realize she’s standing in front of a mirror. When she looks at her hand, there’s no insect, only a glimpse of mercury—the thing that led to Jagan’s death—running down her arm. Such stream-of-consciousness imagery abounds through Anvitaa Dutt's film, an unsettling visual equivalent to the toxic psychological drama.

Gehraiyaan: Insta infidelity

The best infidelity music video of 2022. With its rapid editing and cascade of tasteful, seductive images, ‘Doobey’ is the Instagrammable heart of Gehraiyaan. Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi fall into bed and bath, drink and sail and cheat on their partners as the film tempts us (and Padukone’s character) with the high life. It’s lusty but cool—to borrow John Berger’s words, an aesthetic of sex instead of an energy of sex.

All That Breathes: Owl

Two brothers, rescuers of injured kites in Delhi, offer a prayer at their mother’s grave. A bird calls out. Without looking up, one of them says, “Spotted.” It’s a spotted owlet. Shaunak Sen’s Sundance- and Cannes-winning documentary, hands down the best Hindi film of the year, arguably the best Indian film, is full of moments like this: understated, intimate, as natural as birdsong.

Jalsa: Crossroads

Maya (Vidya Balan) is meeting a conscious Alia (Kashish Rizwan) for the first time since she inadvertently hit her with her car by accident and put her in the hospital. We wait for Alia to recoil. Instead, she extends her hands and makes a wordless sound. “She’s saying thank you,” her younger brother says, and Alia nods. She evidently didn’t see who hit her; as far as she’s concerned, Maya saved her life by paying for expensive medical treatment. Not for the first time, Suresh Triveni's Jalsa places a character at a moral crossroads. Maya, who’s covered up her crime till now, could actually get away with it. Will this meeting make her more or less determined?

Vikram Vedha: Singing, fighting

Several films this year—Chup, Bhediya, Cirkus—used classic musical numbers, but no one did it better than Pushkar-Gayathri's Hindi remake ofVikram Vedha. The lilting ‘Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe’ plays as Hrithik Roshan's gang clashes with another clash by a river. Without the song, it would be a standard slow-fast action scene. But Mukesh’s guileless voice paired the abstract beauty of bodies flying through the air turns it into a daydream.

An Action Hero: I hate you (like I love you)

Bhoora (Jaideep Ahlawat), a thuggish politician from Haryana, is choking the life out of movie star Maanav (Ayushmann Khurrana). As they struggle, Bhoora growls: “You make your living from the love we give. If we tell you to dance, you dance, you sing if we tell you to sing… We have made you stars—you will do what we tell you to.” Anirudh Iyer’s An Action Hero is a breakneck thriller, but scenes like this show how well it understands the love-hate relationship between the public and Bollywood today, millions of people desperate for a few seconds of a star’s attention, yet also wishing they would choke on their own success.

Monica, O My Darling: Love hurts

There were two knock-down-drag-out fights between lovers this year, and they couldn't be more different. The one in Gehraiyaan is deadly serious. But while Rajkummar Rao and Huma Qureshi trying to murder each other in a playroom in Monica, O My Darling is no less bruising, it's also funny as hell, with a faux-Goan folk song and an almost sweet aftermath.

Badhaai Do: The mask that reveals

In its amiable way, Badhaai Do moves mountains by the end, allowing its protagonists, a gay man and a lesbian in a marriage by convenience, hard-won freedom and happiness without ever seeming out of touch with the reality of queer lives in India. Shardul (Rajkummar Rao) is watching Sumi (Bhumi Pednekar) dance with the others at the Dehradun Pride. He’s in uniform, on the sidelines, but his lover (Gulshan Devaiah) is calling him to join in. Shardul demurs, then unexpectedly asks a reveler for a rainbow mask. He wears it and then makes mimes the action of a bird taking flight. Masks usually conceal identities but Shardul, by donning one, is finally being able to publicly state who he really is.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Talking to Park Chan-wook

In November, I unexpectedly got a chance to see Park Chan-wook’s Thirst on the big screen. It was a free screening; there must have been around 100-150 people watching. By the end, that number had dwindled. My friend and I, neither of us strangers to Park, found ourselves wincing through it. A few weeks earlier, I had seen Decision To Leave for the first time. That felt like the work of a master, whereas Thirst—a vampire story shot through with body horror and perversity—is the fever dream of a talented provocateur.

There has been a wit and smoothness to Park’s recent films that’s difficult to describe in any other terms but Hitchcockian. But unlike Hitchcock, Park is a romantic—and he has allowed that to surface more freely, giving his last few works an emotional charge that wasn’t there in Oldboy and the other provocations that he built his reputation on. In The Little Drummer Girl, a limited series adapted from John le Carré’s novel, a depth of feeling arises from the strange relationship between Charlie and her handler, Gadi. And in Decision To Leave, Park achieves something startlingly resonant, its lonely lovers turning a murder investigation into a chess game of suppressed longings.

In October, I spoke to Park over Zoom, with the help of an interpreter, about a film that's lost and found in translation from Korean to Chinese and back. I started by asking why his detective had Martin Beck books in his apartment. “He’s a regular person,” Park said about the Swedish investigator. “And he has regular problems. When he’s investigating a case, he’s influenced by it. He has vulnerabilities and that makes him more relatable and more human.” He could have been talking about Jang Hae-jun, soft-spoken insomniac, occasional chainmail-wearer, and the detective looking into the death of Ki Do Soo, a Korean immigration officer who fell from a cliff.

Ki Do Soo’s wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a recent emigrant from China, soon becomes a suspect. And almost immediately, Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) becomes obsessed with her, and she with him. An interrogation becomes a date (a confused cop asks, “Are we allowed to order the expensive sushi?”), a spot of spying the first bit of intimacy, as Hae-jun imagines himself in her apartment, holding out a bowl for her un-ashed cigarette. It’s a chaste film—at least in terms of what is shown onscreen—but with a sophisticated, teasing erotic tension. In his apartment, Seo-rae notices crime scene photographs from unsolved cases pinned up, including her own. She starts taking them down but allows him to save some of hers. She then helps the insomniac detective sleep by syncing their breathing. 

The scene at the Buddha temple is the masterful centrepoint of the film, a supremely romantic interlude which also supplies half a dozen details that find their payoff in the second half. She goes through his coat pockets. He rubs lotion on to her rough hands. They listen to a recording, one earpod each, from when he was spying on her; with an indefinable expression on her face, she corrects or confirms his assumptions. She calls him “my detective”. Jo Yeong-wook supplies an aching theme—his lush scores were always waiting for Park’s films to age into them.

Had the first half been the entirety of the film, Decision To Leave would still have been wonderful. But something happens midway—I won’t hint at what it is—that allows the film to start again. When it resumes, the ache is intensified. Park denies any influence of Vertigo—a film he’s a big fan of—on Decision To Leave’s two-part structure (he did say that Shadow Of A Doubt’s influence on Wentworth Miller’s script for Stoker was one of the things that attracted him to make the film). “If you see any Hitchcockian element in my film, it’s because it’s always in me,” he said. “His work was my textbook. If you are trying to make a thriller, or create suspense, who would be free from the influence of Hitchcock?”

Though an original screenplay instead of an adaptation like his last few films, Decision To Leave has a literary quality not unlike that of a 1940s hard-boiled novel. “You saw that correctly,” Park said when I mentioned this to him. “People tend to see (Dashiell) Hammett’s and (Raymond) Chandler’s work as the same as the film noir adaptations. But I like the original literary work that influenced those films more. It has such a great insight into the human psyche, and there’s such intricate plotting and mood-making.” He was conscious of wanting to take the genre into unexpected emotional territory. “In the second half, I wanted to go beyond the genre conventions of film noir and make a whole different type of film.”

Throughout the film, technology is ubiquitous. It incriminates: Hae-jun makes a remarkable deduction from Seo-rae’s daily steps. It shifts shape: A car morphs into a cellphone, a gasp-inducing transition (a search party seen through trees replacing the film's title produced a similar audible reaction in the crowd I saw the film a second time with). It becomes a bridge, the two lovers using a translation app when Seo-rae’s Korean falters.

Park was wary when phones started appearing in his script. “I thought, this is too much, I want to make a film that’s classical and elegant,” he said. He needn’t have worried. It is, after all, a mobile phone that gives rise to the film’s best line: “Throw it into a deeper ocean.”

Much of the film’s charge comes via a remarkable performance from Tang Wei. Much of the film is Hae-jun just trying to interpret her expressions—and we have to do the same. It’s a role tailor-made for Tang Wei, who played the unreadable mystery women in Lust, Caution and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. She was in Park’s thoughts from the beginning, as was an old song: Jung Hoon-hee’s ‘Mist’, which plays several times. “I started out wanting to make a police procedural,” Park said. “It was only after listening to the song that I wanted to combine the police drama with romance.” The lyrics are Decision To Leave in precis: Your shadow and king memories/Are my only company/I hopelessly wander around/Back into those old days. Hear the 1972 version with the wailing strings, it will conjure up the film even before you watch it.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.