Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya: Review

It's such a perfectly calibrated performance there's only a hint of a robot. The glassy stare. The fixed smile. The struggle with simple sentences. But enough about Dharmendra. 

Robotics engineer Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) has been summoned to the US by his boss and doting aunt, Urmila (Dimple Kapadia), to work on a secret project. Instead of telling him what it is, she sends him to her apartment, where her manager is waiting. Sifra (Kriti Sanon) is attractive and extremely capable, organising Aryan’s wardrobe and whipping up a sushi dinner. She’s eager to please, he’s immediately smitten, and they end up in bed. The next morning, when she tells him her battery is low, he doesn’t realise she means it literally.

Urmila turns up soon after to inform her nephew he’s just slept with a robot, that this was an experiment to see how her latest creation (13 years in the making) interacts with a human. The problem is, Aryan has caught feelings. Now, this isn't the worst setup for a romantic comedy. But Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya—not a title that rolls off the tongue—is too convinced of its premise to put in the work of selling it. What might have been an agreeably silly comedy becomes a painfully unfunny one, as Aryan convinces his aunt to send Sifra to Delhi to test her out on his family. 

While an uncanny imitation of a human being, Sifra is very much a machine, with code for thoughts and no agency. But Aryan’s family is so relieved he’s finally brought a girl home, and so impressed by how she takes over the housework, that they ignore Sifra’s tics. She doesn’t actually love Aryan—it’s her programming reacting to his feelings. You’d think this would start to matter to him but he just grows more infatuated. Bear in mind, this is Shahid Kapoor, not the Joaquin Phoenix of Her. Aryan isn’t some lonely kook; he spends the whole film fending off the affections of besotted women.  

Two hours in, the stakes are exactly where they were in America. An obvious twist would be for Sifra to develop some human feeling—for the machine to start learning. But writer-directors Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah do not extend themselves beyond robot-impersonating-human gags (when they do, it’s to make fun of domestic workers). At one point, Sifra’s memory is wiped clean. Finally, I thought, a chance for Aryan to face up to the blank slate he’s fallen for. No such luck. A ‘backup memory’ is arranged and he’s back to smiling at her like a goof.   

Joshi and Sah have a handful of writing credits each, but this is their first time directing. Maybe producer Maddock Films imposed the Looney Tunes sound effects and the laboured family scenes on them, but you have to wonder if the makers thought anything through. Like how the ideal bahu syncs up so well with the ultimate Indian male fantasy: a pretty, poised and amenable cook and carer. Aryan is genuinely in love with Sifra, but he also explains to his friend that mentally “she’s like a little girl”. Do the implications of this occur to him? Or that he's drunkenly kissing her as she's updating and seemingly comatose?

In the 1975 film The Stepford Wives, a newcomer to a small town starts noticing that all the wives are strangely subservient. Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is so undercooked it misses the obvious satirical point—that Indian families wouldn’t notice a robot under their noses if it made their lives easier. Instead, we get jokes about chargers and motherboards and preset reminders. Stepford Wives is too ambitious, this film wants to be Small Wonder.  

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Time after time: ‘The Delinquents’ and ‘Sixty Minutes’

"We have to find some sort of advantage. Outside, they don’t have any. And in here we have plenty of it. Time.” Morán (Daniel Elías), glowering and bloodied, listens to Garrincha (Germán de Silva) in the prison yard. He’s lingered too long on the communal phone and earned himself a beating. Soon, he’ll be paying a tribute to the old con for the privilege of an ‘easy time’ in prison. It’s unlikely he’s paying attention to the lecture, yet this is the most direct invocation of a central theme in The Delinquents: the passage of time.

Rodrigo Moreno’s 2023 film, streaming on MUBI, goes nowhere fast, in ways that are initially surprising and then beguiling. It’s three hours long, but Moreno doesn’t use the expansive length as many directors might, to add characters and subplots. Instead, there are discursions, repetitions, reveries. Time expands gently, turning our viewing meditative.

The overarching joke is that The Delinquents is, on the face of it, a heist movie. Indeed, the first 24 minutes detail the most leisurely bank robbery you are ever likely to see. Morán, a clerk in a Buenos Aires bank, goes about his day and eventually walks out with $650,000. Later, he meets up with Roman, a colleague from the bank. He tells him about the theft and proposes a deal: he will confess and go to jail for three years, while Roman keeps the money safe and splits it with him when he’s out. Roman isn’t keen but, after some convincing and a casual threat to implicate him, he agrees.

Roman—increasingly nervous to keep the money in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend—takes Morán’s advice and heads to the remote countryside. He stashes the loot there, and on the way back comes across three friendly strangers, who invite him over to share their lunch. He’s immediately infatuated with one of the women, who’s as carefree as he’s careworn. It’s the start of his growing realisation that, with the security of money, he now has time to reflect, even waste. We see him relax, speak ramblingly about a doggerel he once heard, play a geography game.

Visually too, Moreno shows time unfolding unhurriedly. Scenes are allowed to play out as they would in life—a cigarette break, a scooter pursuing a bus. The transitions are uniquely distended, images superimposed for 10, 15 seconds. It might sound like slow cinema but strikes me as more light-footed than what that genre usually offers. There’s Rohmer in the film’s talkiness and sun-kissed photography (by Alejo Maglio and Inés Duacastella), and Rivette and Ruiz in its sense of mischief (the names of five principal characters are anagrams). A revelation kicks off the final third of the film but this is just an excuse for the narrative to loop back in time and start another cycle of gradual self-discovery.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Fighter: Review

A minute into Fighter and we already have an inshallah, an Alhamdulillah and a jihad (for Kashmir). There are more janaabs uttered in this film than in Pakeezah. A dreaded Pakistani pilot wears more kohl than Deepika Padukone has in her last three films. A Pakistani general reminisces about the time they “brought terror to the valleys of Kashmir” and admits “Jaesh is better than us, they get the job done”. The Indian defence minister says, “Sometimes the path to justice is revenge.”

So this is what a Siddharth Anand film looks like without the restraining hand of YRF. I say this with massive caveats. Pakistan is a ready and mostly caricatured villain in the YRF Spyverse. But the ongoing series has given us Zoya and Rubai, patriotic Pakistani spies as leads in Hindi action films. Tiger 3 ends with Pakistani schoolkids playing the Indian national anthem—a rather meaningless gesture, but a gesture nonetheless. Fighter, produced by Anand’s Marflix and Viacom18, has no use for such liberal weakness. Pakistani military, ISI, Jaesh, Kashmiris—they’re all the same, unruly offspring waiting to be taught a lesson by their baap, India.

At an air force base in Srinagar, a team of skilled fliers assembles. Padukone, playing chopper pilot Minal Rathore (‘Mini’), gets a proper guitars-shades-and-slomo Siddharth Anand entry. So does Hrithik Roshan’s Shamsher Pathania (‘Patty’) a minute later, though this one’s too much like Kabir’s walk across the tarmac in War and is missing a smitten Tiger Shroff. The team—which includes Bash (Akshay Oberoi), Taj (Karan Singh Grover) and a few others—is briefed by captain Rakesh ‘Rocky’ Jaisingh (Anil Kapoor), who’s visibly frosty towards Patty. Mini, though, is immediately drawn to the star pilot—you might say he takes her breath away. 

Funny you should ask, yes, there’s a lot of Top Gun in Fighter. Patty is a cocksure flier whose arrogance and propensity for risk-taking keeps getting him in trouble. If this isn’t enough, he’s haunted by the death of a fellow pilot (there’s a related subplot from Maverick thrown in, rather half-heartedly). But there’s one big difference. In both Top Gun and Maverick, the identity of the enemy is vague to the point of abstraction. The only identified adversary is Maverick's own demons.

There’s no way a Hindi film in 2024 is going to have an abstract enemy. Even so, I was struck by the film’s demonic framing of Pakistan and the trash-talk that stands in for India's foreign policy. “Unhe dikhaana padega baap kaun hai (we’ll show them who daddy is),” the prime minister (or so it appears) says. “Maalik hum hain!” Patty shouts mid-fight, referring to Kashmir. His laughable threat of ‘IOP’—Indian Occupied Pakistan—immediately after deflects from the ugliness of saying India is Kashmir’s maalik, owner. 

If I could put all this aside, I’d tell you that Fighter intermittently resembles a Siddharth Anand film in that it’s nifty-looking and fluidly sexy and somewhat daffy. Roshan looks fine in uniform and his peacocking is amusing, if overdone. Sanchit and Ankit Balhara’s score is as earwormy as their work on Pathaan. The aerial combat is a lot better than I expected (Pathaan was awful in the air), though the memory of Maverick is likely still too fresh to escape comparison. But Anand is missing Sridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala, his YRF writing partners (Ramon Chibb, Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal are the writers here). It’s not just the sledgehammer jingoism, you feel Raghavan and Tyrewala’s loss in the quieter moments too, like when Patty and Mini are flirting in his kitchen and the witless dialogue leaves the actors stranded. Or Mini meeting her estranged parents, a scene so schmaltzy even Padukone’s otherworldly crying abilities can’t salvage it.

There are plugs for Zomato and Asian Paints but what’s really being advertised is the Indian Air Force, both as a place of clubby good cheer and a chance to be the only kind of Indian worthy of absolute respect. I was amused to see thanks extended not only to the ministry of defence, the air force and a plethora of military personnel but even to the defence ministry’s review committee, through which all films made on the armed forces must pass. Let’s assume all Indian soldiers are supremely patriotic and self-sacrificing and beacons of humanity. Can we save some time in future films and put all this as a statutory warning whenever they’re on screen? 

Like all Hindi war films made after 2019, Fighter is beholden to Uri: The Surgical Strike. But there’s an interesting tonal change. Aditya Dhar’s film was deadly serious, to the extent that it made the army seem like a taxing and gloomy profession. The lines that carried an electric charge back then are, after years of imitation, less startling now. “How’s the josh?” becomes a joke over dinner in Fighter. “Ghar mein ghus ke maarenge” is also made fun of—by Pakistani terrorists. The rhetoric of eight years ago becomes the tagline of five years ago becomes the punchline of today.

Uri was released a few months before the 2019 general elections. It stressed the role of the BJP government, at the centre in 2016, in carrying out the retaliatory attacks in Uri. Fighter has a similar line about how, in the last 50 years, no government (before Modi's) had given a fitting response to Pakistan. But apart from this, the establishment is curiously absent in what is unquestionably an establishment film. As another election looms, maybe that’s the big change from five years ago. Why bother claiming victories everyone already assumes are yours? 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Merry Christmas: Review

Movies playing in the Bombay of Merry Christmas: Weekend at Dunkirk, Rebecca, The Merry Widow; 1964, 1940, 1934. Pinochhio, from the looks of the poster not the 1940 Disney one. “Albert Pinto ko gussa kyon aata hai?”, someone asks, so it’s 1980 or later. And it’s before 1995—‘When Mumbai was Bombay’. Clearly the year isn’t important. “Let’s time travel,” Maria (Katrina Kaif) tells Albert (Vijay Sethupathi), something Sriram Raghavan has always encouraged in his films, where a 1950s Hindi cabaret number and a 1970s Italian pulp novel might not just coexist but cohabitate. 

Lonely, unhappy Albert is back home in Bombay after seven years. Drinking in a restaurant on Christmas Eve, he comes across Maria and her young mute daughter. They get to talking and though both are guarded, something clicks. As he walks them home, she confides that her husband, Jerome, is cheating on her. She invites him up, puts the child to sleep, offers him a drink. The mood turns festive, then romantic. But there’s always something keeping us on edge: a mutilated doll; a record player blasting Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, the sound of crisis, of frantic action. 

Action, though, is a long time coming in Merry Christmas. Most of the first hour is Albert and Maria exchanging sad life stories (her husband is truly evil; he’s haunted by a marriage proposal that never was) and flirting and walking around festive Colaba. A surprising amount of silence punctuates their conversations—intended, perhaps, as wistful pauses, but hanging like dead air. The progress is careful and rather inert. One of the people thanked in the opening credits is Eric Rohmer: not an obvious choice for Raghavan, who seems more a Chabrol guy. It’s the Rohmer-ian aspects of this film that fall flat: the circular conversations, the forensic study of attraction.  

With the right pair of actors, this might have gone differently. But Kaif and Sethupathi, a fascinating idea on paper, never find a rhythm here. Directors are still figuring out how to use Sethupathi in Hindi films and series; he was perfect in Farzi, atrocious in Jawan. The impression is of an actor learning his lines phonetically; often he’ll hit the wrong word and it’ll deflate the humour or the poetry (his performance in the Tamil version of Merry Christmas might play differently). Kaif is professional and sometimes moving, but there’s a formality to her acting that acts as a ceiling. When more malleable performers turn up—Sanjay Kapoor, Ashwini Kalsekar—you can sense the effort in Kaif.

Raghavan, adapting pulp mainstay Frédéric Dard with Anukriti Pandey and regular co-writers Pooja Ladha Surti and Arijit Biswas, starts to build ominously around the halfway mark, leading to a flurry of twists (perhaps mimicking the gathering squall of In the Hall of the Mountain King). Maria’s apartment becomes a crime scene, though we’re not sure who the criminal is, or how many there are. It becomes clear why so much care was taken to establish details in the initial stretch; whether hindsight makes those scenes better is debatable. Albert reveals an important bit of his past—it’s shocking in a way that’s at odds with everything else, a Badlapur detail in a Andhadhun-like film.  

Sanjay Kapoor’s lecherous jollity sparks Merry Christmas alive. It gives Sethupathi and Kaif something to play off of—and Vinay Pathak’s wry detective is a welcome late addition. Still, the interrogation scenes don’t sing like the Shefali Shah-Alia Bhatt-Vijay Maurya ones in Darlings, or the Radhika Apte-Rajkummar Rao ones in Monica, O My Darling, both decidedly Raghavan-esque films. 

Some of the touches are pure joy. The film’s split-screen opening: two mixer-grinders, one filled with spices, the other with pills (the capper: a wedding ring added to the ground masala). Rajesh Khanna’s face on a paper stub with a line of encouragement—or is it a warning? All those roses: Rose mansion; another Rosie in an unhappy marriage; ‘Night Rose’, the horny scribblings of a teen; the ghost of Red Rose, a 1980 film in which Khanna plays a killer (it’s based on a Tamil film with Kamal Haasan; in the Tamil version of this film, Kamal’s face replaces Khanna’s on the stub). In these moments, Merry Christmas hits the dark comic romantic notes it’s reaching for. Yet, too often, it’s out of time, marginally off-key.

This review was published in Lounge. 

Moments in Indian cinema: 2023

A perfect murder: ‘Ponniyin Selvan: II’

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

Forgetting: ‘Three of Us’

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

Background is foreground: ‘Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam’

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

Alive: ‘Pathaan’

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

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

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

Test: ‘12th Fail’

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

Crucial commentary: ‘Maaveeran’

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

Flushed: ‘Goldfish’

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

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

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

Enter Phulo: ‘Joram’

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

Morning: ‘Thuramukham’

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

Exhumation fail: ‘Purusha Pretham’

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

Wedding song: ‘Animal’

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

Ways of fighting: ‘Lakadbaggha’

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Salaar: Part 1—Ceasefire: Review

(TW: sexual assault)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(TW: sexual violence)

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dunki: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.