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.