Moments in Indian cinema: 2023

A perfect murder: ‘Ponniyin Selvan: II’

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

Forgetting: ‘Three of Us’

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

Background is foreground: ‘Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam’

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

Alive: ‘Pathaan’

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

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

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

Test: ‘12th Fail’

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

Crucial commentary: ‘Maaveeran’

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

Flushed: ‘Goldfish’

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

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

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

Enter Phulo: ‘Joram’

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

Morning: ‘Thuramukham’

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

Exhumation fail: ‘Purusha Pretham’

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

Wedding song: ‘Animal’

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

Ways of fighting: ‘Lakadbaggha’

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Salaar: Part 1—Ceasefire: Review

(TW: sexual assault)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(TW: sexual violence)

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dunki: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Joram: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The Archies: Review

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

“What just happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is she behaving like this?”

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

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

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

“Easy guys, relax, it’s all okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Animal: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

Sam Bahadur: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.