Brahmastra: Part One—Shiva: Review

Brahmastra: Part One—Shiva opens with a scientist, played by Shah Rukh Khan, being paid a visit by a trio of supernatural assassins. Turns out the scientist has special powers too, and there’s an extended fight sequence, ending in his capture. We later find out his name: Mohan Bhargav. Khan had played a Mohan Bhargav in Swades (2004), also a space scientist, also driven by a sense of duty. The similarities between the two characters end there—but it’s enough, a wisp of a suggestion that nestled comfortably in my brain. 

I mention this also because Ayan Mukerji’s film is hardly this understated in its other borrowings. Early on, there’s a quick shout-out to Mr. India (1987), a rare homegrown superhero film. From there on, it’s spot-the-Hollywood-blockbuster, with narrative devices and structures nicked from a variety of franchises. At the film’s heart is the idea of a divine Brahmastra, whose pieces, when reattached, will be an all-powerful weapon in the hands of the long-dormant Deva. Infinity Stones, you say, scattered across the realm, capable of granting their wearer unimaginable powers when combined? Never heard of 'em. 

Deva is a giant statue in this, the first ‘Astraverse’ film, though sentient enough to send the witch-like Junoon (Mouni Roy) to do his bidding. It’s Junoon who subdues Mohan Bhargav and his vaanarastra at the start of the film, extracting from him the identity of another member of the secret society called the Brahmansh. This torture appears in a violent vision—not the only time the film reminded me of Harry Potter—to Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) at just the wrong time, when the carefree DJ is showing curious rich girl Isha (Alia Bhatt) his nifty-looking loft in a chawl. The dream knocks him out. When he comes to, he decides to go to Varanasi to warn the man whose name was given up (Nagarjuna), and who has a fragment of the Brahmastra. Isha, already smitten, tags along (there’s no indication she has a job or people who are worried she’s taken off with a broke DJ she just met). 

After a series of close shaves with Junoon and her two burly assassins, Isha and Shiva are cornered at the gate of an ashram in the Himalaya they’ve been told to seek out. Shiva—who's impervious to fire—produces a blast of flaming energy, blowing away the advancing henchman. They’re taken in by the ashram’s leader, Guruji (Amitabh Bachchan), who runs the place much like Professor X (guru is ‘teacher’ in Hindi) and the school for mutants in the X-Men movies, with young astra-wielders taught to harness their skills. Guruji is also head of the Brahmansh, and encourages Shiva to realize his destiny as the powerful agniastra.  

Hindi cinema has been building to a film like this for some time. Hollywood superhero films routinely open big across the country now. Kids actually want to see them; no one’s calling for their boycott. At the same time, Hindu religious and mythological iconography has become increasingly central in Hindi films. Brahmastra merges these worlds: the framework and splashy effects of a Hollywood movie retrofitted onto a story populated with Hindu gods and goddesses. Tsui Hark tried something similar when he made Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain (1983), combining wuxia and Chinese folk tales with Hollywood effects. But that film was unlike anything Hollywood was doing at the time, whereas Indian and foreign viewers alike will recognize the familiar foundations of Brahmastra, even if the construction on top is new. 

The CGI work in Brahmastra is shaky in places but better than what the trailers led me to expect. When in doubt, Mukerji fills the screen with pretty lights. I wonder how Indian audiences, fed on the hard-edged sagas of Rajamouli and the bloodfests of the southern cinemas, will react to this softer, kinder spectacle (I knew it was a matter of time before someone said “love is the greatest astra”). Good-vibe stories aren't exactly killing at the box-office lately, and Brahmastra is all soft edges and encouragement. Bhatt and Kapoor have a warm rapport, if not exactly chemistry. Their love goes straight from tiny flame to conflagration—she barely knows him at all when she declares, “Tum zindagi se shikayat nahi, mohabbat karte ho” (You don’t complain about life, you love it). Even Junoon has the comforting hamminess of a TV soap antagonist yelling at the bahu for letting the milk boil over. 

It’s ironic that right-wing trolls have been trying to ban a film that works harder than anything in recent memory to make Hinduism look cool. Both Shiva and Isha are enthusiastic temple-goers. Her explanation for why he should let her come along to Varanasi is that her name also means Parvati, the god Shiva’s wife. One dance number has a chorus of “Om deva deva, namah namho namah”. The various astras take the shape of Shiva, Brahma, Nandi, Hanuman. Every now and then, one of the five cinematographers (what’s up with that?) gives us a loving closeup of a heavenly idol, as if this were Jai Santoshi Maa. Come to think of it, that’s a decent rhyme for love storiyaan.

This review was published in Mint Lounge.

Crimes of the Future: Beautiful on the inside

There’s a scene in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), with Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh in a Chinese restaurant. The server places a large mutant amphibian of some kind in front of them. It looks vile. “I have just lost my appetite,” Law says. “A shame,” the server replies. “Mutant reptiles provide new and previously unimagined taste sensations.” And so Law starts eating, breaking off pieces, sucking at the slimy flesh. As if in a dream, he simultaneously fits the bones and exoskeleton in the shape of a gun. Once it’s assembled, he shoots the server upon Leigh’s urging.

I would recommend watching this scene on YouTube even if you don’t want to watch eXistenZ. It’s not only disgusting, it’s hilarious and difficult to dislodge from your brain. When I saw it recently, I realised the scene works only because of the frank delight Cronenberg takes in the physicality of what’s going on. As Law slurps and crunches for two minutes, the viewer has no choice but to imagine what it must taste like.

The same luxuriation in the body and its outer limits suffuses Cronenberg’s new film, Crimes Of The Future (streaming on MUBI). Much of the director’s work is lumped under “body horror” but this is an inadequate term. Cronenberg does not seem to feel horror at what bodies can do, or be. Instead, there’s a sense of delight and exploration—whether it’s the mutant amphibian on the plate in eXistenZ or the mutant organs in Crimes Of The Future. An unspecified number of years in the future, physical pain has been all but eliminated. Surgeries can be performed on people without sedation—which is what Caprice (Léa Seydoux) does on her husband, Saul (Viggo Mortensen), in front of a live audience.

Saul, however, is not without pain. When we first meet him, he’s in a special bed that resembles the hard brown shell of a crustacean, suspended from the ceiling by thick shoots. He looks like Kafka’s protagonist after the metamorphosis—or something out of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). We later see him in a chair designed to help him swallow food. These problems exist because of a condition in which Saul’s body grows vestigial organs. It is these organs that Caprice removes in their transgressive performance art shows, massaging a frog-like console attached to her midriff which controls the machine that cuts Saul open.

Their performance is witnessed by Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), bureaucrats with the national organ registry. They are toxic superfans of Saul and Caprice’s enigmatic creators. Timlin, in particular, can’t help herself, whispering “Surgery is the new sex” into Saul’s ear as his wife looks on disapprovingly. She’s right, though—Saul does seem in a sort of coital bliss when being operated on, or later, when Caprice, in the film’s most blatantly provocative scene, fellates an opening in his stomach. Saul’s reply is weary (“Does there have to be new sex?”) but Cronenberg has always been on the lookout for the new sex, which is rarely sensual, and, more often than not, linked with pain and metamorphosis.

Saul, whose condition makes him a cult hero of sorts, is sought out by radical evolutionists, who have modified their bodies to be able to digest plastic. One of them offers his dead son—whom we see eat a wastebin at the start of the film—to the couple as a subject for a live autopsy. They are conflicted—but also tempted. The evolutionists eat purple supplements made of synthetic material, a clever variation on the famous conclusion to Soylent Green (1973): Are those eating the bars even people?

Cronenberg and Mortensen are one of the underrated director-actor pairs of the last two decades, collaborating on the neo-noirs A History Of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) and the Freud-Jung film A Dangerous Method. (2011). Cronenberg always seems to unleash something in the actor which other directors don’t. Here he gives a wry, wary, physical performance, punctuating his scenes with a series of hacking coughs, throat clearing, wheezes and groans. Saul’s sardonic outlook is a nice contrast with Caprice’s more emotional way of being, Seydoux, as always, finding her way to the bruised heart of her character. But it’s Stewart’s performance that’s the boldest—and most likely to divide opinion. She takes all the nervous tics and gestures that so infuriate her critics and crams them into the few scenes she has. Her sentences emerge in a rush, like air escaping a balloon. It’s difficult to tell if the character is supposed to unnerve everyone around her, or whether it’s just everyone reacting to Stewart’s choices.

It might seem strange but Crimes Of The Future, along with being gross and provocative as advertised, is a very funny film. Cronenberg’s last two films, Cosmopolis (2012) and Maps To The Stars (2014), have their adherents but I think Crimes achieves its deadpan tone more convincingly. There’s a ‘New Vice Unit’; Wippet jokingly announces their motto as “no crime like the present”. There’s an “inner beauty pageant—for tattooed body organs. The exchanges between Saul and Timlin have the pregnant pauses and awkwardness of cringe comedy. There’s a scene where she keeps advancing towards him with her nervous fluttering energy. They end up kissing but then Saul disengages, saying, “I am not very good at the old sex.”

Crimes Of The Future, like most Cronenberg films, lends itself to all sorts of interpretations. I, however, kept losing myself in its brilliant surface: the pull and push of diverse acting styles, the brilliantly tactile beds and chairs that look like torture devices, the wincing sight of Ear Man. Meaning is not just found in metaphor. Sometimes it hides in plain sight, like a fish gun, or a young boy’s tattooed heart.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Liger: Review

Everything you need to know about Liger is there in a few seconds of the musical number ‘Aafat’. After the chorus (“jawani teri aa-fat”), Ananya Panday mimes to a sampled female voice that pleads “bhagwan ke liye chhod do mujhe”. Now, any viewer of Hindi cinema knows this is what a heroine says when she’s fighting off a rapist. Liger is well aware this will irritate critics of its gender politics, yet it inserts the line in a horny love song. As a gesture, it’s childish, it’s self-aware, it’s parody, it's provocation. 

I’d assumed that since Vijay Deverakonda plays a MMA fighter in Puri Jagannadh’s film, his ring name must be Liger. Silly me. That’s his birth name, given to him by Lion Balram (also a fighter, long deceased) and Tigress Balamani (Ramya Krishnan, who spends another film yelling at everyone about her son’s abilities). In the Shel Silverstein country number ‘A Boy Named Sue’, a father gives his son a girl’s name so people pick on him and he becomes tough. If Balamani's strategy was along these lines… well, it works. Liger grows up unbeatably tough, graduating from the streets of Karimnagar to Ronit Roy’s dojo in Mumbai, where he’s given the MMA training he barely seems to need.

As if going through life responding to 'Liger' isn’t bad enough, our hero also has a speech impediment. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except the film treats the condition like an incurable, shameful disease. Liger’s stammering is made relentless fun of. Well-wishers complete his sentences. Tanya breaks up with him because of it, telling him, “What if I give birth to someone like you?” We later find out she has other reasons, but by then the film has revealed enough of itself for the audience to know where its heart lies.

This is caveman cinema. The first words we hear, via voiceover, are: “To make man’s life hell, god created dolls called women.” Instagram celebrity Tanya (Panday) rejects Liger at first, but then finds herself hopelessly attracted after watching him beat up the entire dojo. Tanya is a collection of Telugu cinema’s worst impulses, so airheaded and shallow she doesn’t realize her boyfriend stutters until halfway into the film (she says things like “I feel like giving you a pappi”). But Balamani is worse, a smothering matriarch constantly screeching about the mini-skirted devils who will seduce her son away from his life’s purpose. 

When they first meet, Tanya gets into an argument with Liger and grabs his collar. Of course, he grabs hers’ back. She’s threatened twice with hockey sticks, first by her brother, then by a jilted Liger. It’s only right that Arjun Reddy is namechecked—it’s the fount from which this tepid stream emerges. That film made Deverakonda a star, and it’s not surprising Liger has the same template: prodigiously talented man yells a lot as women mess with his head. In fact, ‘Arjun Reddy’ has become shorthand for such a recognizable kind of jock that Jagannadh can afford to briefly send up the type. As Liger is being pulverized by female krav maga fighters, he asks them “Who will marry you?” and “Did I get you pregnant and abandon you?”. 

Liger demolishes everyone he comes up against, in marketplaces and trains and amphitheatres, and more productively, in the national and world MMA championships. The latter tournament takes him to Las Vegas (Chunky Panday turns up for a few glorious minutes), and then to a ranch where he meets hastily drawn-up villain Mark Anderson, played by Mike Tyson in a cowboy hat. Their climactic grapple is silly, but the fights that come before are largely effective, with Deverakonda a lanky, attractive brawler (the krav maga beating is a nice piece of action choreography). 

Liger's mother refers to him as a ‘crossbreed’—a weirdly derisive way to describe your son. The film, too, is crossbred: produced by Dharma and Jagannadh, shot simultaneously in Hindi and Telugu, with one Tollywood and one Bollywood lead. But the crude energy and the gleeful anti-wokeness is decidedly not-Bollywood. If the pan-India film is to grow, it won’t be by bankrolling each other’s worst tendencies. 

This review was published in Mint Lounge.

Dobaaraa: Review

I couldn’t believe my ears. Was I really watching a Hindi film whose score didn’t actively work against it? Shor Police’s wash of keyboards for Dobaaraa seemed to recall the ‘80s soundtracks of Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter. But soon a familiar dum-dum-dum-dum motif started and I realized the inspiration was more recent, a sound refracted through Stranger Things on its way to an audience that will soon see both titles on Netflix.

Like Stranger Things, Dobaaraa is initially set in a Spielbergian world, even though the film unfolds in Pune. Young Anay rides his cycle at night in a hooded jacket, as if auditioning for E.T. He wears a shirt referencing Back To The Future. Spooky things happen to TV sets, just like in Poltergeist. It’s 1996, but no one’s tired of Terminator 2 yet. We’re knee-deep in someone’s childhood nostalgia—perhaps screenwriter Nihit Bhave’s. It definitely doesn’t feel like Kashyap’s. 

For the first time, Kashyap seems like a hired gun. This is a cleverly constructed, efficiently directed film. Aarti Bajaj edits it to a brisk 135 minutes. If you’re willing to go along with a few imaginative leaps, then the pieces click together satisfyingly. So it’s not exactly a criticism to say this doesn’t feel like a Kashyap film. I don’t mean it’s an atypical film by the director—it shows no sign at all of being made by him. I haven’t loved every single film he’s made, but even the ones that don’t work for me feel unique to him. But with Dobaaraa, had another director’s name popped up at the end, I would’ve bought it.

When Anay glimpses a fight in his neighbour’s home from his bedroom window, he goes to investigate. On the floor in their house, he sees the dead body of Rujuta before he’s discovered by her husband, Raja (Saswata Chatterjee). As he flees onto the road, a passing vehicle rams into him. The film then jumps ahead 25 years. Antara (Taapsee Pannu) and Vikas (Rahul Bhat) have just moved into the house where Anay used to live. She’s a nurse who could have become a doctor. Her marriage is crumbling; she’s only hanging in there for the sake of their young daughter. It’s a life you sense she’d rather escape—and what an escape she gets. 

On a stormy night, Antara turns on Anay’s old TV. Suddenly, they can see and hear each other: she in 2021, he in 1996. She warns him not to go to investigate, because she’s learnt from a friend what happened then. It works—but something shifts in the balance of the universe. When Antara wakes up, her world is askew. She’s herself—or at least she thinks she is—but everyone else is living a different reality. Vikas isn’t her husband. Her daughter doesn’t exist. Anay is alive, somewhere. Apart from a sympathetic cop (the appealingly soft-spoken Pavail Gulati), no one believes her.

All this is mapped out patiently and carefully by Bhave and Kashyap (the source is a Spanish film called Mirage, which I haven’t seen). It might be a bit too systematic: I kept hoping for the narrative to crack open, but instead we get a serene procession of twists. Antara’s confusion is real—and Pannu does a good job of suggesting a calm person trying not to panic (Bhat is a nice bit of meta-casting, given that he played the father of the little girl in Kashyap’s acrid Ugly). Yet, I was never really afraid for Antara. This is the kind of film where another sleight of hand is always around the corner. 

I wrote earlier that this film doesn’t show any signs of coming from Kashyap. I’ll amend that slightly. Without giving anything away, I can say that Dobaaraa ends with a surge of emotion. A decade ago, Kashyap might have closed with nihilism or cleverness. But something has shifted in his recent work. Mukkabaaz, Manmarziyaan and Choked are sweeter, softer, more forgiving than his earlier films. This might be a quick sketch rather than a painting, a palate cleanser before a personal project, but it ends up in a surprisingly resonant place. In this respect, and this only, Dobaaraa feels consistent with its maker. 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Hemant Chaturvedi on 'Chhayaankan'

A century and some decades later, we can safely say that Indian cinema is terrible at documenting itself. This includes the lack of archiving, preservation and restoration of films but also the memories and wisdom of film practitioners, especially those who are not actors or directors. This makes Hemant Chaturvedi’s Chhayaankan: The Management of Shadows all the more valuable. In this 138-minute documentary, Chaturvedi, acclaimed cinematographer on films like Maqbool and Company, interviews 14 cinematographers he looked up to, from Govind Nihalani to A.K. Bir. It’s a loving tribute, the simple talking-heads format allowing space for the old pros to ramble, joke around and reminisce. The film screens at India International Centre in Delhi this week, and an extended version should be online later this year. Edited excerpts from an interview with Chaturvedi:

You said at a screening that the film arose out of unanswered questions you had when you left cinematography in 2015.

My career was petering out for reasons I couldn’t figure. I had a good body of work, yet I was waiting for a year, two years to get a feature. Advertising was starting to become more and more corrupt. Everything has gotten diluted. I felt I needed to do more meaningful things, over which I had authorship.

I intended to do this film a long time back. I always felt cinematographers here had not been given their due. Of the 14 people in my cast, only Govind Nihalani has been interviewed multiple times, though more as a director as a cinematographer. I don’t think any of the others have been interviewed, at least not on video. So it’s something I always wanted to do, and my leaving cinematography was a catalyst to get my act together.

The 14 people are chosen for a very specific reason. These are the people I approached in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s to work with. People have asked me, you didn’t include P.C. Sreeram, Goutam Ghose? I tell them, they’re not my people! The people I looked up to when I was 20 years old.

Of course, they all shooed me off and never gave me a chance to work with them. Over the years, they’ve become friends. When I told them about the documentary, they were all excited to do it.

We shot from December 2015 to January 2016. By and large, we spent a day with each of them. I also interviewed several elderly light boys, to understand how they see cinematographers. We wanted to do a 20-minute section on that, but it didn’t fit in.

When was the film completed?

I kind of lost my marbles for a couple of years in 2016 and ‘17. I wasn’t being able to come to terms with the big decision I’d taken. Finally in 2017 I got my act together. When Ishwar Bidri passed away (in December 2020) I simultaneously discovered Nadeem Khan had been in a coma for two years. When I heard of these two incidents, I thought, if my cast doesn’t get to see the film it would be quite shameful on my part.

All told, it took six years to finish. Der aaye durust aaye... I’m glad it happened when it did.

Did you have a common set of questions or ones specific to each person?

I had both. There was a series of 20-22 questions I asked everyone, and a small set of questions based on the specific work they’d done. I’d gone through their filmographies again, so I could question them on certain shots and sequences. When I sat down with Govindji (Nihalani), he said, “I have one request, don’t ask me anything in a chronological way.”

Nihalani has a great anecdote in this, about the fortune-teller who seems to predict his career in film.

Yes, and you might have noticed—everyone in the film is an accidental cinematographer. A Malaysian friend, who’s a brilliant photographer and documentary film-maker, wrote to me after seeing the film. He spoke about two things. His initial takeaway from the film was that the interviews were horizontal, by which he meant the interviewees were speaking to one of their own people, so they spoke freely. The second thing he spoke about was the Malaysian concept of ‘angin’—an inner wind that stirs inside you. S.M. Anwar talks about it in as many words—”I don’t know from where I got the energy to learn, learn, learn...”

This is also a tribute to film equipment and a kind of tactility that’s been lost. Anwar corrects you about a film he shot on a certain camera...

Talking of tactile, 50 years later he remembers the camera he shot on. I don’t think a single cinematographer today remembers which Alexa or Red One they shot on. That emotional relationship you had with your machine was something else.

Cinematographers like V.K. Murthy and K.K. Mahajan are referenced through the film, even though they aren’t in it.

Chhayaankan is also about the people who inspired the people in the film. Mahajan saab, Murthy saab and Ashok Mehta were the three people I wanted to interview but could not, because they died in the previous decade.

There’s a great quote about how film used to ask technology to come up with something new, but in the digital age it’s technology that challenges film.

Technology allows you to do a lot more, but without working harder on set. Entire skill sets used to exist for before a film started; now they exist for after a film’s over. Generations of engineers, carpenters, painters have now become three people in an air-conditioned room.

Was there ever a thought to use scenes shot by the subjects in the film?

No, never. It was always meant to be an intimate conversation. In the film, they aren’t talking about specific scenes; it’s more emotional, and I didn’t want to break that intimacy. Also, for the kind of budget we had, clips would be extremely expensive. They (rights holders) drive you up the wall, whatever hair I have would have fallen off.

I wanted to do a little sequence with my cast’s credits as assistants. I spoke to a couple of rights holders and they wanted 3,000, 5,000 rupees a second. It didn’t make any sense.

Will the film be available for people to watch online?

It’ll happen before this year is over. Each interview was at least two hours long. The film is 138 minutes; with 14 people that means each one has 7 minutes to speak. I thought, since they have given me the time, each interview should be edited into maybe a 1 hour 20 minute capsule and made into a series of separate interviews.

Indian Society of Cinematographers (ISC) is going to help me put this together. It’ll be free—we’ll probably put it on the ISC site or on YouTube.

What other projects are you working on?

I’ve been doing a lot of still photography for the past seven years. Between 2019 and 2022, I have driven in excess of 35,000 km in my jeep across the country, photo-documenting single-screen cinemas. I shot nearly 1,000 cinemas across 15 states. It’s one of the biggest documentations on the subject ever done, not just here but worldwide.

If I find old 35mm projectors, and their operators, I do portraits with them. I’ve been photographing booking office windows, seats, auditoria, posters. In the old cinemas, to differentiate between male and female loos they used to have the images of the star of the moment. My favourite ones were Sanjeev Kumar in an abandoned cinema in Gujarat, and somewhere in Punjab I found Tabu on the women’s loo door. I sent her the photograph—she was vastly amused.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Laal Singh Chaddha: Review

In Advait Chandan’s Hindi adaptation of Forrest Gump, Aamir Khan is more alien-like than he was in PK. It’s one thing to build a performance out of broad physical tics when you’re playing an extraterrestrial. But when the protagonist is human—and someone whose mental agility is a beat slower than everyone else’s—such mugging starts to seem grotesque. Laal Singh is an uncomfortable interpretation of a ‘special’ sort: eyes shining, head tilting, singsong voice, huge guileless smile. Khan is playing himself playing Tom Hanks playing the kind of savant figure that went out of fashion decades ago. It’s beyond parody.

Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar-winning film has been a constant on Indian TV since the mid-90s. Laal Singh Chaddha is the first official remake, but Hindi films have long since stripped Forrest Gump for parts. Shah Rukh Khan played an autistic man with Gumpian overtones in My Name is Khan; one of the characters was even named Jenny. Salman Khan did the same in Tubelight. Aamir Khan’s performance in PK now looks like a dry run for Laal Singh. As much as Chandan and Khan would like to count on Indian viewers’ unfamiliarity with Forrest Gump, I don't think that's the case. This is a very old box of chocolates. 

The confectionary metaphor is replaced by golgappas, but significant changes are few. Chandan and screenwriter Atul Kulkarni not only avoid major deviations, they treat Zemeckis’ film like holy writ. Young Laal loses his leg braces in dramatic fashion while being chased by bullies, the same way Forrest does. Bala (Naga Chaitanya), Laal’s friend in the army, has a prominent lower lip, like Forrest’s friend Bubba. If Forrest is shot in the buttocks, Laal must be as well… and both eat ice-cream while recuperating. 

A simple-minded, pure-hearted sort, Laal stumbles through four decades of Indian history, bouncing off epochal events without any understanding of them. A radio news broadcast announces the end of Emergency. Operation Bluestar plays out in the horrified expressions of a group of Sikhs watching from a distance. Laal and his family, posing for a photograph, turn at the sound of gunfire: Indira Gandhi has been assassinated. Sometimes Laal is a bemused bystander (watching LK Advani’s rath yatra, or running past a fasting Anna Hazare), at other times a bemused participant (he fights in the Kargil War). 

One of the delights of Forrest Gump was the way Hanks was deftly inserted into historical footage. Chandan keeps this to a minimum in his film, and limits Laal's interactions with real-life figures. It's a pity, for the one time he takes a big swing (another Khan is involved) it comes off rather well. Scenes play out beat for beat like the original. Forget watching—how boring it must be to make films this way.    

Helping Laal along are a small group of well-wishers: his determined, loving mother (Mona Singh); Rupa (Kareena Kapoor Khan), his friend since childhood and lifelong love; Bala, who teaches him how to sew undergarments and unwittingly sets him on the road to creating a business empire. A rare example of creative adaptation sees the Lt. Dan character changed into an enemy soldier saved by Laal on the battlefield. Mohammad (Manav Vij) later becomes Laal’s friend and business partner, but more importantly a vessel for the film to vaguely sermonize about the dangers of religious extremism. 

Khan, 57 years old, spends a large portion of the film playing a man in his 20s and 30s (Hanks wasn’t yet 40 when Gump filmed). His face looks unnatural, as if it’s been passed through some kind of motion capture. This is vanity tending towards delusion, and it isn’t helped by Kareena Kapoor looking the same age through the film. She’s fine as the perennially unlucky Rupa, though Mona Singh is the sole affecting presence. It's moving to see Kamini Kaushal, who was acting back in undivided India, in a bit part—talk about living through history.  

When you’re running through decades of history without commenting on it, what you choose to mention or omit becomes of great significance. Every tumultuous event of the last 40 years is included in Laal Singh Chaddha: Bluestar, Mandal, the riots of '84 and ’92-93, the war with Pakistan, 26/11. Everything, that is, except the 2002 Gujarat riots. It’s an astonishing exclusion. Was it there in an earlier draft, perhaps even filmed? Did the censors want it out? Did Khan and Chandan figure no one would notice a missing pogrom? Late in the film, there’s a lingering shot of a “Ab ki baar, Modi sarkar” election poster. An absence and an inclusion that reveal the film’s political ambivalence for what it is: moral cowardice.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Darlings: Review

Gangubai Kathiawadi is one of the better films this year, but Darlings improves upon it in at least one respect: it gives Alia Bhatt a worthy partner to spar with. Not Vijay Varma, effectively odious though he is. No, Bhatt’s real match is with Shefali Shah. They’re a formidable tag team, Shamshunissa and Badrunissa, mother and daughter—and the two actors are fantastic together. It joins a short list of memorable female pairings in recent Hindi cinema: Swara Bhasker and Ratna Pathak Shah in Nil Battey Sannata, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan and Saloni Batra in Soni, Taapsee Pannu and Dia Mirza in Thappad, Bhumi Pednekar and Seema Pahwa in Shubh Mangal Saavdhan... 

Badru (Bhatt) begins the day by cooking omelette-pav for her husband, Hamza (Varma). He then heads to work, a ticket collector with the local railways. He returns in the evening, frustrated and irritable, and start to drink. He finds an excuse to beat up Badru. In the morning he apologizes, blames the alcohol, she forgives him. We see this play out a few times, and it’s not hard to imagine how often it must have repeated itself over the three years they’ve been married.  

Darlings wastes no time in letting us know what kind of film it is. Six minutes in, Hamza has raised his hand against Badru. Five minutes later, Shamshunissa (Shah) tells her daughter that he's not the sort of man who'll listen to reason, that she must think tedha (crooked). A little later, her advice becomes more explicit—end him before he kills you. She tells Badru the story of the scorpion that stings the frog that’s transporting it across the river, even though it means both die. “Some men are scorpions,” she says. “They never change.” Since Hamza seems incapable of curbing his violence, we wait for the culling. 

But then Darlings swerves—though it’s only a swerve if you haven’t seen the trailer. Badru snaps, but not to the extent of killing her husband. Instead, she ties him up, drugs him, roughs him up like he's done to her so many times. The film, already darkly humorous, becomes a pitch-black screwball comedy, with Shamshu and Badru keeping a drugged-up Hamza hidden and battered, parrying the inquiries of Hamza’s boss and the inept but suspicious local cops. 

There’s been a steady stream of perverse neo-noir out of Bollywood lately. Earlier this year there was the dacoit noir Thar, and a little over 12 months ago we had Haseen Dillruba, another film with a messed-up marriage and torture as means of communication. But Jasmeet K. Reen’s film is altogether more successful in maintaining its tricky tone. Much of this is down to the actors. Varma is scary and doesn’t fish for a shred of audience sympathy. And Bhatt navigates with her customary serenity a role that requires her to switch from fear to love to pity to anger. She’ll sweep the awards for Gangubai, but this is her best work this year.  

If Bhatt is at ease in these surroundings—Gully Boy had a similar milieu—so is Shah. Twenty-four years ago she was unforgettable as Pyaari in Satya, no small feat in a film dedicated to men and their plans. There’s a similar force and forthrightness in Shamshunissa, and a dark undercurrent: she had an unworthy husband as well. Bhatt is usually quicker than the actors she’s paired with, but not Shah. They turn a scene at the police station into a prime double act, all half-glances and unfinished sentences and deadpan reaction shots (Vijay Maurya as the inspector is great too).

As befits a Gulzar-inflected film—he’s the lyricist—the writing, by Maurya, Reen and Parveez Sheikh, is pointy and colourful (I loved when one of the cops says he has a “confirmed doubt” about Badru). The ending might be a little too clever, but the film doesn’t stumble in the complicated run-up, deploying its supporting characters—Rajesh Sharma as a helpful butcher, spaniel-eyed Roshan Mathew as a nervous accomplice—at just the right moment (Mathew defuses one situation with an incredible confession).

This is a light-footed and often light-hearted film, which feels strange to say considering the heaviness that descends when Hamza is under the influence. It’s like Reen told her co-writers: ‘Diabolique, but funny’. Then again, noir allows you to do that. It’s the most malleable form because it isn’t really a genre but something that attaches itself to genres. It’s a tone thing—and Darlings, above all, is a tonal achievement.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.