Bollywood


Whether one admires it or not, it is hard to deny that Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is unlike anything being made in Mumbai right now. The array of trailers that preceded my screening of the film offers a good sample of where Bollywood is otherwise right now: Bhaiyya Ji (a Southern-inspired actioner), Srikanth (an underdog biopic) and The Sabarmati Report (a rabblerousing right-wing political drama), the latter produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, the same company that has issued Banerjee’s film. Like its 2010 predecessor, LSD 2 positions itself consciously at the margin of the industry, drawing its energies from both new media environments and independent filmmaking while at the same time profiting from the mechanisms of professional production and distribution.

The original LSD was a three-part morality play that probed the unsavoury intersection of salacious sex, burgeoning media and cheap digital image-making. The new film retains the structure and the stridency of the original, but goes further by removing the last remaining guardrails that assured us that there may be a way to steer clear of this impending dystopia. Expanding the earlier film’s scope to newer forms of mediation, LSD 2 informs us that we are now fully living in a technocratic nightmare and the only way out is further inside; that delulu is the only solulu.

The opening part of LSD 2 is set entirely inside a Big-Brother-like online reality TV show titled Truth Ya Naach (Truth or Dance), where viewers with smartphones can tune into the camera of any of the participants as well as bet on them in each episode. Participants, in turn, can choose to turn off their cameras at the risk of audience disengagement. At the end of each episode, one participant is eliminated by the panel of judges, played by Anu Malik, Sophie Choudry and Tusshar Kapoor. Banerjee amplifies the self-cannibalizing nature of this ecosystem by mixing show footage with viewer reactions to each episode in the form of vlogs, podcasts and memes.

The nominal protagonist of the section is Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), a transwoman participant whose ratings skyrocket once her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) is invited on to the show. However, a change in sponsors of Truth Ya Naach has meant that the show has to pivot to family friendly audiences, forcing the showrunners to evict Noor within the logic of the show. The show’s progressive veneer of inclusion makes way for mother sentiment, both thrown out once they are milked to their limits. Within this totalizing simulacrum, the mother’s sceptical outsider perspective is first presented as a point of identification for us, the viewers of the film who are invited to look at everything on display with contempt, but it is jettisoned when mother herself internalizes the rules of the game.

This kind of narrative rug pulling continues in the second (and possibly the weakest) segment of the film, albeit on a less ironic and more realistic register. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgirl working as a janitor at the metro station, is assaulted in a park. Kullu’s boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) helps her file a case, but when compromising details emerge from the police investigation, she finds a PR disaster on her hands. No more a perfect victim, Kullu is a timebomb for the company whether she withdraws the case or pursues it, and Lovina, like the showrunners of Truth Ya Naach, is forced to orchestrate Kullu’s exit by other means. Unfolding through video calls and Zoom conferences, this segment immerses us into the disintegrating mind of Lovina, a single mother whose motives are obscured by her constant frustrations. Things are further complicated with the introduction of other plot elements, such as a housing crisis and an extra-marital affair.

But the film really piles it on in the third segment. An influencer named Game Paapi (Abhinav Singh) is on the verge of internet legend when doctored sex pictures of him are leaked during a live stream by a bad actor. As a reputation management firm tries to put a positive spin on this, Game Paapi himself takes flight in shame and denial, rejecting the iniquities of the real world to establish a cult in the metaverse. Or something. A ChatGPT-level rehash of half-informed boomer techno-prophesies, this section throws in everything you’ve heard about the dangers of artificial intelligence and cyberbullying and then some. Things veer further into incomprehensibility thanks to some aggressive mumbling by the actors, esoteric internet speak and a good dose of enthusiastic censorship.

Each segment of the film is inspired by a specific video medium — live television, video conference and webcasting respectively — and the colours, editing, camera movement, the choice of lenses and the production design are all determined in accordance with these devices. Banerjee’s impressive attention to the specific visual texture and syntax of each medium is superseded only by his incredible ear for language and speech patterns. The third section performs an accelerationist sensory assault, employing a bone-rattling synthesis of webcam footage, recreated memes, AI-generated poop, cable news blight and some queasy-making animation. The film’s sound, on the other hand, is uniformly dull, dousing all the amateur visual spice in a professionally mixed sonic soup.

Throughout, Banerjee takes pains to remind us that everything we are seeing is mediated by a camera with a vested interest. To this end, he even uses points-of-view shots in sequences where a diegetic camera is absent — a blunt tactic normalized half way into the film. LSD 2 foregrounds the inescapability of these media environments, moving from traditional television’s self-rejuvenating search for total reality to Web 3.0’s rejection of reality in favour of an alternate, synthetic universe. This absolute, conspiratorial conception is offset by characteristically dry humour, such as the sight of Game Paapi’s mother bringing lunch to the desk of her YouTuber son, or Noor’s mother on Truth Ya Naach belting out a number titled “Gandi Taal” (Dirty Beat) with the decorum of a ghazal singer.

One of the most striking things about LSD 2 is how unprovocative it is despite handling sensational material and hot-button issues. (As an aside, this film is a good example of how to cinematically engage with bigotry and discrimination without recreating it in the name of realism.) Banerjee is not a provocateur, but a moralist at heart, and for all its bleak cynicism and psychological murkiness, the film is remarkably single-minded in its critique. LSD 2 puts its finger on a historical moment when public-facing corporate capitalism, social movements around marginalized sexual identities and a rapidly changing media landscape run up against two-faced middle-class values. Each of these forces is now an ally, now an enemy to the other, each one interacting with the other with a view to self-perpetuate. It is pertinent that the film ends with an interview between a traditional television anchor and a multiverse personality, both connected to pliant viewers on one end and corporate sponsors on the other. In LSD 2, you can check out of late capitalism any time you like, but you can never leave.

Each passing year seems objectively, measurably worse than the one before, at least on a world-historical level, unveiling new lows for evil, stupidity, hypocrisy and tyranny across the globe. I’ve done nothing to change any of it, but I’m glad that, unlike me, there are people who aren’t desensitized, wilfully blind or paralyzed by analysis fighting the good fight. More power to them.

The blog hasn’t been terribly active this year. In February, I started a curatorial section on the site to showcase work from up-and-coming filmmakers, but I haven’t been able to keep it up at a rate I would like. I hope I can resume the section in 2024, even if at irregular intervals.

The primary reason for the inactivity is that I made my first foray into festival programming this year. I was on the South Asia selection committee for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October-November 2023) as well as the upcoming Berlin Critics Week (February 2024). Both assignments meant six months of intense, non-stop film viewing. A revelation from my time on the MAMI committee is that South Asian cinema is absolutely exploding, with crazy, ambitious works emanating from unlikely corners of the subcontinent, made by passionate individuals with little institutional or industry connections, with private resources unrelated to traditional channels of funding. It was truly an eye-opening discovery. Exciting times ahead for South Asian cinema.

For the first few months, however, I had a voluntary, almost systematic immersion into the history of avant-garde film, especially works from North America. I watched over 700 titles, long and short, canonical and lesser-known. I complemented this with reading books on the subject: Sheldon Renan, Amos Vogel, P. Adams Sitney, A.L. Rees, Stephen Dwoskin, William C. Wees, Jonathan Rosenbaum. But the single most instructive source was Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema (1988-2005), five volumes of magnificently detailed interviews with avant-garde filmmakers from across generations and geographies. These exhilarating, demanding months of watching and reading truly felt like a substantial phase of my cinephile education.

It was also the year I published by second book, Moving Images, Still Lives, a lavishly illustrated monograph on Amit Dutta’s film Nainsukh (2010), published by Artibus Asiae of the Museum Rietberg Zurich. (Readers in India may consider buying a copy off Amazon, where a very, very limited number is on sale.) This book was an opportunity for me to undertake a different kind of writing — less spontaneous but more scholarly, with arguments propelled more by citations than passion. Also, until now, my references in visual arts were almost entirely European and American. Writing on Nainsukh meant researching into Pahari miniature painting and the world it issues from — an exposure I’m really grateful to have gotten.

I had no greater experience this year than watching Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (2022), a work I would without hesitation count among the ten or so finest films ever made in India. Heck, had I seen it a few months earlier, it would’ve made it to my ballot for Sight & Sound’s all-time poll. With age, I encounter fewer and fewer films capable of shaking me up the way Pellissery’s masterpiece has. It is one of the great spiritual works of the cinema.

I didn’t see as many commercial releases as I would’ve liked, and the ones I did weren’t too inspiring. I’ve consistently had problems with Martin Scorsese’s films set in cultures foreign to him, and despite the thrilling opening hour, Killers of the Flower Moon felt crippled by the same respectful distance that hamper Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016). I found Oppenheimer and Barbie equally tedious, both movies arriving with their own halo. Among Indian releases, I found things to like in several works, such as Thankam, Maaveeran, Kaadhal: The Core, Chithha, Jigarthanda DoubleX, Animal, Viduthalai Part 1 and Haddi, but few were convincing in their entirety. So the list below is entirely composed of titles I saw at festivals or as part of my programming work. They all had their world premieres in 2023 at the festivals mentioned. Needless to say, this is a somewhat arbitrary list, and I can count about seventy other films that could be here instead. But I’ll spare you the hand-wringing. Happy new year.

 

1. Kayo Kayo Colour? (Shahrukhkhan Chavada, India)

Rare are Indian films centred on marked Muslim characters, and rarer are those that don’t employ these characters primarily as objects of violence and social injustice. In Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s tender, trailblazing Kayo Kayo Colour?, Muslim bodies exist in an existential autonomy, untouched by dramatic aggression and capable of accessing a whole range of human experience. Chavada’s film depicts the everyday life of an extended working-class family in a Muslim quarter in the outskirts of Ahmedabad on a historic day. We see a woman waking up early to do household chores, her husband trying to procure funds to buy an autorickshaw, their children playing gender-segregated games. Public spaces come alive with shrieking middle-schoolers, a mother folds clothes with a daughter who has made it out of the ghetto, a girl sleeps over at her grandparents’ place—routines that become electrifying expressions of communal life. With striking passages of dead time and non-narrative digressions, the film creates space for its characters to breathe freely, to simply be. This is a work that opens up a new way of looking at life in India. In its wonderous gaze at the world, in its incredible generosity, in its profound humanity, there’s little I’ve seen of late that comes close. [World Premiere: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

2. Mr. Junjun (Niu Niu, China)

In a masterpiece the world is sleeping on, Niu Niu forges a simmering, Dardennes-style character study of a middle-aged taxi driver on the brink of explosion. A fifty-year-old single man responsible for a recalcitrant, semi-paralyzed father, Mr. Junjun must recover his debts to get out of a deep financial hole, but every effort he makes in this direction pushes him further towards the point of no return. The cruel pleasure the film offers is in prolonging Junjun’s moment of rupture through a series of secondary errands that he must run order just to stay afloat: the picture of life passing by even before you can get a hold on it. And yet, this is no mean neorealist melodrama. We have very little access to the inner universe of the bespectacled Junjun, who is a pure man of action, filmed from behind, moving purposefully through the world if only in order to stay where he is. You sense that this man will break down any minute, yet there is tremendous tenderness and grace in him — and in the film, for him. Prepare to be knocked down by the most sublime ending of the year. [WP: Pingyao International Film Festival]

 

3. Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, India-USA)

The work of Shambhavi Kaul, which has a knack for transforming real landscapes into otherworldly vistas, finds its perfect subject in the medieval city of Hampi in Southern India. The seat of the Vijayanagara Empire in the fourteenth century, Hampi is today a World Heritage Site attracting tourists from across the globe. In Slow Shift, Kaul crafts a spectral, non-narrative travelogue of the site that unearths its historical, mythical, geological, ecological and cultural layers. Weaving together images of stately rock-cut monuments, precariously posed stone clusters and an army of langurs taking over the depopulated site, the film forges a post-human space eerily resonant with the barren cityscapes that became common during the pandemic years. In a manner reminiscent of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures, Slow Shift strikes a precarious balance between majestic stasis and imminent collapse. By combining moments of instantaneous change in the landscape with more long-term transformations as evidenced by Hampi’s weatherworn structures, the film evokes the different time scales simultaneously at work in nature, reminding us that even the mightiest empire will turn to rubble one day. It’s truly a planet of the apes, and we’re only squatters. [WP: Toronto International Film Festival]

 

4. Fauna (Pau Faus, Spain)

Aging shepherd Valeriano lives with his herd on the outskirts of Barcelona. With his children away and with a debilitating orthopaedic problem that requires him to hang his boots, he struggles to keep his profession alive. He supplies sheep to a high-tech laboratory next door, which runs tests on them as part of its research to develop a vaccine for the Covid19 virus. Except for animals brought in through carefully controlled doorways, the lab is hermetically sealed from all biological intrusions, while Valeriano makes periodic visits to the city hospital for his therapy. From this incredibly rich scenario, Pau Faus’ Fauna weaves an extraordinary, complex examination of the ways in which science, ecology and tradition prove inextricably linked in contemporary life. “I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction,” these words from Georges Bataille form the epigraph to Faus’ deeply moving, frequently heartrending observational documentary. With equanimity and wit, the film shines a light on humankind’s curious tendency to accelerate change while also fighting it, to master nature and technology while also being overwhelmed by them. Fauna creates ample space for reflection and critique, but supplies no easy answers. [WP: Visions du Réel, Nyon]

 

5. The Film You Are About to See (Maxime Martinot, France)

Maxime Martinot’s short essay is a brilliant investigation into the ways in which cinema exhibition and spectatorship are mediated by paratexts within and outside the films. Repurposing a range of verbal material intended to set context for viewing — disclaimers, introductory warnings, fourth-wall breaking intertitles, notices from theatre management — the film examines the fraught, slippery nature of the relationship between text and image in cinema. Systematically interspersed with these title cards are excerpts from across the history of moving images, arranged more or less in chronology. The Film You Are About to See cogently demonstrates the extent to which such title cards serve to fix the meaning and affect of images, and to counter, as Roland Barthes put it, “the terror of uncertain signs.” The disclaimers we see in the film have a striking resemblance to modern-day trigger warnings that seek to shield viewers from presumed psychic assaults. However, in its savvy assembly of ambiguous movie clips, Martinot’s film suggests that this is an ultimately futile enterprise, for images will always find a way to escape domestication and remain polysemous in the face of texts that seek to pin them down. [WP: Cinéma du Réel, Paris]

 

6. Valli (Manoj Shinde, India)

Valli is a man forced to be a Jogta, a living deity with a female form, believed to be capable of blessing those who worship and honour her. When he isn’t in his Jogta form, though, Valli is bullied by the village men for his feminine ways. The premise prepares you for an overwrought, sentimentalist work, yet Valli is anything but. Manoj Shinde’s stellar film is less about an individual trapped in a body than about a body trapped in a role, deified and debased, outcast and central to the social fabric at once. Valli takes an ultra-melodramatic subject and drains it off all excess, at times with the grace and wisdom of Hou-hsiao Hsien. The lead character is subjected to abuse and insult, but what we see as his reaction is defiance, contempt, indifference, anger, humour — everything that assures us that his dignity and integrity can’t be taken away. Vast passages of non-dramatic action allow the individual to just be. Delivering what is for me the screen performance of the year, Deva Gadekar is phenomenal as Valli, infusing every frame he is in with astounding bits of non-narrative magic, his androgynous body and its gratuitous gestures becoming transfixing without being fetishized. [WP: Singapore International Film Festival]

 

7. Camping du Lac (Éléonore Saintagnan, Belgium-France)

“I’d like to tell you an odd thing that happened.” So begins Éléonore Saintagnan’s gentle shape-shifting epic that metamorphoses from an understated fable to an absorbing myth to an startlingly immediate ecological parable. There will be no shortage of odd things in this one-of-a-kind film that revels in the power of invention and storytelling. Éléonore, played by the director herself, is stranded in Brittany, France, after her car breaks down on the way to the ocean. With little choice, she decides to lodge at a camping site by the Lake Guerlédan while her car is repaired. As she observes a host of characters at the camp, the film itself embarks on strange and beautiful narrative excursions. Together, these quaint detours, whose significance remains tantalizingly elusive, impart a starkly spiritual dimension to Saintagnan’s film, a sense of wonder at the various realities around us, visible and invisible. A gorgeously shot exploration of isolation and community, Camping du Lac may ultimately be about the ways we are (or fail to be) in communion with the mysteries of the world, and in that regard, this is a work wholly in tune with our times. [WP: Locarno International Film Festival]

 

8. Mithya (Sumanth Bhat, India)

After the sudden death of their parents, eleven-year-old Mithya and his young sister are taken by their aunt and uncle to their home in Udupi, much to the exasperation of the boy’s paternal relatives back in Mumbai. While the two clans fight for custody, Mithya struggles to find his moorings in a new environment, his growing sense of security undermined by a creeping feeling of re-living his original tragedy. Engineer-turned-filmmaker Sumanth Bhat’s supremely assured first feature makes us intimate with the experience of its young protagonist while also keeping us at a critical remove from his thoughts. A work that trusts the audience’s capacity for imagination and empathy, Mithya equally respects the complexity of a bereaved child’s inner world, never giving into facile poetry or genre convention. The adults, too, are invested with great dignity even when they are flawed individuals; Mithya’s uncle gets possibly the most piercing line of dialogue I heard this year, one that reveals an entire childhood. With its magnificent child performances in long shots, bold sense of ellipsis, delicately sketched character motivations and unnerving editing associations, Mithya is a virtuoso work end-to-end, an exemplar of honest, personal filmmaking. [WP: MAMI Mumbai Film Festival]

 

9. Dreams About Putin (Nastia Korkia & Vlad Fishez, Russia)

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the widely reported phenomenon of people dreaming about Vladmir Putin found a new life, with Russian citizens turning to social media to describe their nocturnal encounters with their dear leader. In Dreams About Putin, Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez put together a hypnotic anthology of such dreams, recounted by interviewees to the camera and subsequently rendered as oneiric mindscapes in a 3D video-game engine. Periodically woven between these animated passages are archival clips of the real Putin delivering a Christmas address, atop a glider or going on a hike. Are the interviewees dreaming, or are they being dreamt? A work perfectly reflective of a world of tinpot dictators, lopsided wars and generative AI, Dreams About Putin presents a stunning look into the deliriums of those in power and the powerlessness of those who can only be witnesses to it. Korkia and Fishez concoct a bleak vision of a Russia trapped in a megalomaniac’s nightmare in which even live-action footage of Putin’s macho outings acquires a thoroughly surreal quality. Simple, funny, entrancing, with an end sequence that is the most glorious dream of all. [WP: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam]

 

10. Berlin (Atul Sabharwal, India)

Few Indian filmmakers have a firmer command over vernacular genre filmmaking than Atul Sabharwal, who is at the top of his game in Berlin, a scintillating spy thriller revolving around sign language (!) in which we become, as one character puts it, outsiders who feel like insiders. 1993, New Delhi. The Indian Intelligence Bureau has arrested a deaf-mute man suspected of plotting the assassination of Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who is in the country to renew diplomatic ties after the fall of the Soviet Union. They recruit Pushkin, a sign-language instructor, to help them with their interrogation, but the translator is soon nudged out of his neutrality by a rival governmental organization. Berlin, named after a café that was a safe trading post for spies of all stripes, finds Pushkin, as well as India, at a moment of swaying allegiances. A masterclass in staging what is essentially an extended, talky interrogation, Sabharwal’s super-smart, giddily plotted film sweeps us into a treacherous terrain of self-preserving intelligence agencies competing for legitimacy in a new world order. Come for the spectacle of Rahul Bose chewing scenery, stay for an exquisite treatise on the slow demise of the Non-Alignment Movement. [WP: Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles]

 

Special Mention: The Other Profile (Armel Hostiou, France-DRC)

 

Favourite Films of

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At the heart of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s new film Animal is unrequited love: that between an uncaring construction magnate Balbir (Anil Kapoor) and his hopelessly obsessed, perennially teenage son Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor, who seems drawn to the subject of one-sided romance). Ranvijay’s obsession with his father metastasizes into world-burning psychosis when there’s an attempt on Balbir’s life. Animal is a sprawling rampage by an inconsolable character at war with the world and himself, filled with ultraviolent set pieces, but one that pushes past the formulas of contemporary pan-Indian actioners to get into sticky territories of its own making. Since I watched the film after it had made so much noise, I wasn’t shocked or unsettled by any of its provocations or excesses. I rather admired its passionate bravado, its stunningly abrupt detours, its taste for self-sabotage. I’ve seen nothing quite like it in Indian cinema.

Vanga seems to have responded to the criticisms levelled against his first film, Arjun Reddy (2017), not by digging in his heels, as several commentators have suggested, but by taking a step back. Where Arjun Reddy positioned its lead character as a textbook stud whose appeal is evident if qualified, Animal takes pains to mark out Ranvijay as an exception, a pathological example to be gawked at like a train wreck. Rarely has a Hindi film been so nakedly, laughably Freudian, with every action of Ranvijay’s — his murderous outbursts to his solicitousness towards his sisters to even his marital infidelity — explained away as symptoms of his unresolved daddy fixation. Not even the most ardent admirer of Arjun Reddy will come out of Animal wanting to emulate Ranvijay.

Like Arjun, Ranvijay is a Capital-R Romantic, a guy who knows his girl will break off her engagement to another man and return to him running, one who will make love to her on a private plane and marry her the following day on a hill temple. I choked on my saliva when a teenage Ranvijay brings in a machine gun to a classroom to threaten his sister’s bullies. But after Animal reaches a paroxysm of alpha-male fantasy in a gala mid-movie shootout, it turns itself inside out. Vanga’s film heads off in a new direction no less than three times after its interval. In the first of these restarts, it catapults us from the adrenaline rush of all the bloody mayhem into the sedate sordidness of Ranvijay’s domestic life. Sporting a paunch, Ranvijay is now the source as well as the butt of awkward jokes about his semi-vegetative state.

It is in this section that the film anthologizes most of the outrageous behaviour that has been taken apart by critics: Ranvijay snapping his wife’s bra strap as a twisted come-on (but the film hardly shows the gesture itself), having her remove her clothes in the living room (but the camera shifts focus to the maid in the background, complicating our response), giving her solemn lectures about his incontinence (but filmed from above the staircase under the gaze of his men, Ranvijay cuts but a sorry figure) and so on. Commentators have repeatedly enumerated these actions, presenting them as self-evident proofs of the film’s depravation, short-circuiting the necessary hierarchy between content, intent and effect.

But the film presents these seedy episodes as the exact obverse of Ranvijay’s brash individualism, his capital-R Romanticism. In Animal, the impulsiveness that makes a man love a woman among the clouds or on an airstrip is the same one that prompts him to make weird underwear jokes or commission a Rolls Royce the colour of his lover’s hickeys or strangle an enemy with his bare hands. As much as Bollywood likes to present a sanitized myth of the soft romantic hero, all this behaviour, Vanga’s film advances, is of a piece. In doing so, Animal clears any remaining ambiguity around Arjun Reddy, deconstructing alpha-male existence as being motored by beta-male insecurities. This is a film that introduces his hero, like Arjun Reddy, through wisps of glamorous smoke, but leaves him a crying mess.

Not that there is a shortage of calculated provocations or queasy writing choices. The prelude is a gratuitous come-get-me, and the film doesn’t seem to be sure where to end exactly, chaining together half-a-dozen scenes, serious and funny, corny and thrilling, before the lights come up. Geetanjali, the character played by Rashmika Mandanna, gets one of the meatiest scenes in the film, but in all others, she is a two-bit character switching moods at the drop of a hat, or a top. Tripti Dimri is the star of the film’s most tedious detour, from which it takes a while to recover. But for the most part, the film remains true to the character of Ranvijay, played with a ferocious intensity by Ranbir Kapoor, who keeps the film together even with a host of tentative secondary performances.

Although its analysis may be simplistic, it perhaps needed Animal for Hindi cinema to show up Northern India’s “baap baap hota hai” obsession as the sign of a foundational corruption. There have been dysfunctional dads galore in Bollywood, but I can’t think of many films in which filial veneration is framed as a chronic disease, as something less than an unqualified virtue. Like Arjun Reddy, Ranvijay embodies certain attractive modern ideals, at least to the degree that he can be empathized with: a kind of brute gender equality that belies his primitivism, caste blindness, religious scepticism and a pervasive non-conformism. And like him, the film is volatile and unpredictable, refusing to conform to the norms of mainstream storytelling, or doing so in its own particular way, or failing on its own terms while attempting to do so. Imitation is perhaps the last thing the film can be charged with. I’m reminded of a joke about a minister and a monkey.

Lips don’t touch when you say Gehraiyaan (“Depths”), the title of Shakun Batra’s third film. But they are always sealed in this story of cheating, subterfuge and long-kept secrets. Deepika Padukone plays Alisha, a yoga instructor living with adman-turned-aspiring-writer Karan (Dhairya Karwa). She is estranged from her father (Naseeruddin Shah), whom she holds responsible for her mother’s suicide. She meets her affluent cousin Tia (Ananya Pandey), who is in town to meet her social climbing fiancé Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), a property developer beholden to her money. The four set sail on a yacht to Tia’s swanky beach house outside the city. Tia and Karan are long-time friends, and in their shared feeling of being outsiders, Zain and Alisha fall for each other and begin an affair. Matters are complicated as Karan proposes marriage to Alisha and as Zain gets into financial issues, finding himself increasingly dependent on Tia’s wealth. The narrative proceeds like milk on a low flame.

Besides its plot-level similarities to Match Point (2005) or even Cassandra’s Dream (2007), there is possibly another reason why the film recalls Woody Allen. Gehraiyaan is written like a Greek tragedy in the way it moves ahead with a sense of inevitability. I can think of no event in the film that could been removed without bringing the whole edifice down. Like Oedipus, Alisha thinks she is breaking out of her preordained fate by making choices, but all of it only seems to lead her to the ultimate punishment of forbidden knowledge. (She believes she is unlucky in life, but it is precisely a stroke of luck that saves her from death.) It is, however, not a divine law that she transgresses by her actions. If Woody Allen’s universe is a morally neutral place where goodness is a pose, justice a matter of chance, the world of Gehraiyaan is ruled by a moral law governing the family, which revisits the characters in tautological forms and holds terrible sway over their lives. In the most touching moment of the film, Alisha’s father looks at a pair of bloody scissors that Alisha, her world shattered, has used to try and cut herself with. He grits his teeth and quietly withdraws into his room. It’s that he has seen this before.

Gehraiyaan is about the inheritance of malady, and its tight writing sets up a domino chain of personal choices that wreck other people’s lives: Alisha’s mother’s mistake estranges her husband, whose aloofness upsets Alisha, who, not wanting to end up like her mother, forces the issue with her fiancé. Differently put: Tia’s father’s mistake estranges his wife, whose inability to trust carries over to Tia, who, not wanting to end up like her mother, forces the issue with her fiancé. It is uncanny how Alisha’s self-image, her idea of where she is in life, is poised on her perception of her parents’ relationship — a self-image that could have been completely different had she read the relationship differently. In spite of the social bubble that they live in, the characters of Gehraiyaan are anchored, imprisoned in their personal past. Because of the film’s artful dodging, I was first led to believe that the writers are giving Alisha the same raw deal that they gave Ratna Pathak Shah’s character in Batra’s earlier work Kapoor & Sons (2016), a sense that she is ascribing her misery to her partner’s lack of material progress. Thankfully, this turns out to be not (entirely) true.

Gehraiyaan attests to a marked leap in Shakun Batra’s directorial capabilities, and I get the feeling that he aspires to an invisible style that can adapt itself to different kinds of material. The director’s hand that was a little too palpable in Kapoor & Sons retreats into the background in the new film. There is, to be sure, the Woody Allen-like treatment to bickering characters, with the Steadicam trailing behind actors walking in and out of room. But for the most part, the film displays the anonymous slickness that characterizes the work of several Hollywood auteurs. On the other hand, it is also clear now what kind of situations that get Batra’s juices flowing: sequences turning around withheld information set in partitioned spaces, of which there are multiple in Gehraiyaan. The night-time set-piece on the yacht with Alisha and Zain is superbly directed; despite the literal quality of its lyrics, the score is genuinely ambiguous and Padukone perfectly conveys the drowsy sickliness that hits the stomach following a revelation like that. This scene alone is a calling card to Hollywood.

Another unusual aspect of Gehraiyaan is how much of its story is actually conveyed by actors talking to each other. Where a more traditional filmmaker might have staged the episodes from the characters’ past as flashbacks, Batra has them delivered to us largely in words. So we have Tia telling Zain about Alisha’s father, Alisha telling Zain about Tia’s relation to Karan, Zain telling Alisha of his abusive father, and so on. This disregard for the golden principle of “show, don’t tell” has two effects. It brings the characters closer to one another, and not just the ones talking. But more importantly, it allows the film to remain with just these handful of characters for almost its full runtime. What struck me about Gehraiyaan is how little excursion it makes away from its central figures. We don’t see Tia’s father, her mother only appears in video calls, Alisha’s mother is unseen except in Lynne Ramsay-like flash inserts and Karan’s parents barely register. Scenes are centred, instead, on interactions between any two of the four protagonists (the film is a repository of two-shots). The result of this economy is that the world is whittled down to these figures, the movie turning into a kind of chamber drama scattered across the city.

Which city, though? Gehraiyaan is nominally set in Mumbai, but it is starkly different from the Mumbai we usually see on screen. This was already the case with the de-Coonoored Coonoor of Kapoor & Sons, but it appears that Batra doesn’t even want to use the city for local colour here. The bulk of his new film takes place in private (or privatized) spaces: apartments, holiday homes, upscale restaurants, hotel rooms, yachts, corporate offices. Except for a carefully curated section of the Marine Drive, there are no crowded public spaces, and public transport is limited to taxis at best: no teeming locals, no quaint BEST rides as you’d see in a Mani Ratnam movie. The sight of unwashed masses is kept out of the frame just like intense tints are kept out of the sober, matte colours of the visual palette. The most jarring shot in the film is perhaps the one where we see Zain stop at a corner store carrying a flashy hoarding. Even the Indian tricolour on top of Zain’s yacht seems out of place.

So would an American flag for that matter, for these people don’t seem to belong to any particular place. Gehraiyaan produces the impression that it could have taken place anywhere in the world (and I don’t mean this as a put-down). It seems like a deliberate decision on Batra’s part to de-familiarize the city, to renew its iconography. His solution is to turn it into a kind of Los Angeles outside of Los Angeles. Its title notwithstanding, Gehraiyaan is a film of surfaces, its imagery of Mumbai closer to David Hockney’s LA than anything closer home: pools and skylines, glass and reflection. It is a work that would be at home in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).

Despite the cloistered quality of its narrative, despite the characters’ writerly laments that they feel stuck, the feeling I got from Gehraiyaan is a sense of openness. A large part of it has to do with the film’s extremely wide aspect ratio (2.39:1), which is able to fit not only Zain’s rented yacht, but also Padukone’s long legs, which determine the composition in many shots. The skyline, the sea, the beach, the yacht all establish Gehraiyaan as a strongly horizontal film and redouble the sense that it is an LA movie superimposed on Mumbai, like Tia’s accent which, to my ears, straddles Valleyspeak and South Bombay talk.

Given Zain is a property developer, it is understandable that the film has an interest in horizontality. Gehraiyaan may be a middling movie about relationships, but it is a very good movie about real estate. Even within the privileged cocoon of the story, there are finer class stratifications: Tia the rich, Zain the arriviste, middle class Alisha and the bohemian Karan. But more crucially, their relationships are all mediated by private property. “I need some fucking space,” Karan cries out, but it is more than just mental space. He and Alisha live in a tastefully decorated (and tastefully dishevelled) 2-BHK (or 3?), but they are trying to move to a new apartment — a fact that Alisha sheepishly tells Tia when the latter comes slumming. To write his novel, Karan moves into Tia’s beach house in Alibaug, which Tia lets Zain mortgage following business trouble. Zain sets up a studio for Alisha, using it as address for a shell company. Relationships in this film sour because real estate deals sour. No money, no honey. There you have it: Gehraiyaan, Marxist movie.

Kapoor & Sons

[Spoilers ahead]

When their grandfather (Rishi Kapoor) falls ill, Rahul (Fawad Khan), successful novelist, and Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), struggling novelist, return home to parents Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) and Sunita (Ratna Pathak Shah). Arjun believes that Rahul’s perfect life is built at his cost and resents that his parents like his brother more. While supportive of Arjun, Rahul believes he has his head in the clouds and is unwilling to grow up. Harsh is sitting atop a failed enterprise and is annoyed with his wife’s desire to start her own food business. Sunita complains about Harsh’s financial incapacity and dependence on his brother. Another bone of contention between the brothers is the presence of Tia (Alia Bhatt), who is romantically attracted to both of them. This interpersonal algebra is further complicated as the film unfolds, to a point that the entire family is held in tense suspension by mutual grudge.

If the Kapoor family seems out of place in this Bollywood version of Coonoor, here emptied of its local population or landmarks, it’s partly because they are exceptional. Exceptional not only because they are upper class, but because they are unhappy in their own way. Kapoor & Sons stands out in the way it puts its hand into sticky areas of familial life not generally broached by Indian cinema, where moral centres are clearly defined when the family unit is threatened. Everyone in Kapoor & Sons has their reason, and no one’s really right or wrong. (That this detail registers as revolutionary speaks of the industry’s general compulsion to infantilize its audience.) The misery of the Kapoors is spontaneous, independent of external factors. To the world, it’s a happy family, but as the shiny wrappers come off, each member confronts the image the others have of them, confirming their suspicions of not having been truly loved.

The film is centred around grandfather Kapoor’s final wish of having the whole family convened for a photograph. This conceit makes for the film’s most effective set-piece: director Batra intercuts shots of the characters finding out truths about each other with the photo-shoot taking shape under the threat of rain. It’s thrilling and low-key tragic the way this quotidian inconvenience imposes a time pressure over the intense drama: the photograph can’t be made if the characters keep talking, but it won’t be made precisely because the characters haven’t talked enough. When they do assemble for the abortive photo-shoot, we realize that the crux of the problem lies not in the existence of secrets but the in lack of time for the characters in which to explain themselves to each other. Lack of time is what the photograph is about too: the photo purports to hold memories, but constantly lies, picking out a moment in time and stripping away its history. And the lie of the photogenic happy family is what the old patriarch wants to go down with.

Kapoor & Sons is located at the twilight of Bollywood’s old vision of family (community, filial respect, hierarchy, role-playing), now being fast replaced by an occidental vision informed by disruptive liberation narratives (romantic individualism, liberalism, free enterprise, feminism). It’s curious that, despite taking place in a Westernized upper-class milieu, the film looks backwards, dealing with old familial and civilizational sentiments: the guilt parents experience over their children’s perceived faults, the obligation children feel to fix their parents’ lives, the childhood hurt siblings preserve and nurture even as grownups. While Harsh’s and Sunita’s disillusionment with the familial institution is gradual and protracted, Rahul and Arjun face a rude awakening, having to confront primal truths: finding the father at the house of a lover, learning that the mother truly loved one child more than the other.

Commendably written and directed, Kapoor & Sons is constructed out of long, fleshed-out scenes, all of them conversations of some kind – a noteworthy quality in itself. While the effort to crank up the temperature is apparent (a pipe leakage, a dog entering a clean house, a tiff at a card game always at hand to heighten tempers), there’s a clear-cut evolution to every scene. As the film proceeds and the drama reaches a fever pitch, you sense that an expiatory sacrifice in order to appease the narrative gods: it’s not the old man as you’d expect, but his son, and this sudden hole in the family fabric creates a dual perspective of the tragedy, the grandfather’s and grandchildren’s. At the same time, the film treats its material preciously and often forces the issue, spending too much time reinforcing this sibling rivalry and verbalizing that which the actors already convey without words. Rajat Kapoor stands out, but Ratna Pathak Shah’s character is somewhat hollowed out. A more austere, improvisational approach, letting the actors define the contours of their characters themselves, would have helped in a more rounded picture, and made the cruelty family members are capable of towards each other all the more personal.

Bhavesh Joshi Superhero

Bhavesh Joshi Superhero confirms Vikramaditya Motwane’s status as a reliable metteur en scène, a filmmaker capable of mounting effective entertainment in various genres without much personality. He’s made four films so far: a coming-of-age drama, a literary romance, a lone man survival saga and, now, a social-minded superhero movie. All films with specific pleasures and specific ideas, but without any connecting theme. That Motwane isn’t an auteur is a moot proposition and, in the era of instant canonization, perhaps not even worth arguing about. What is of pertinence is that Bhavesh Joshi is his weakest film by far. The failure is instructive in its own way. His films, it now appears, are only as good as their material, and when the latter is uninspired, the films aren’t either.

Motivated by the nationwide anti-corruption movement of 2011-12, two young men from Mumbai, Bhavesh Joshi (Priyanshu Painyuli) and Sikandar Khanna (Harshvardhan Kapoor), launch an activist YouTube channel. Wearing black jackets, paper bags over their heads and carrying a smiley-faced LED panel, they confront various misdoings around them with a camera, uploading the videos online and garnering public support. The project is only half-serious, and, for Sikandar, a means to impress girls. Bhavesh is revolted when Sikandar bribes to get his passport issued and so punches him in rage. In revenge, Sikandar outs Bhavesh’s identity on the channel, just when he’s exposing the water mafia headed by the local MLA and enabled by the police.

Motwane treats the pair’s activism with irony, but when they move from policing individuals to confronting institutions, the film shifts to a serious tone and eventually into full-blown melodrama replete with a strawman villain spouting parables from Greek mythology. Casting relatively unknown actors allows for a surprising protagonist swap midway. For a film that intends to be topical – several reproachful references to the current government, the true-blue Gujarati name of the vigilante protagonist being an insurance against backlash – the characters are oddly unrooted, their familial and social situation not even getting a passing mention. This tendency for topicality is complemented by a desire for legend-building. When Bhavesh Joshi Superhero completes his first foray, we only see him as a silhouette against a burning background.

The compulsion to create a legend clashes with the work’s realist moorings to create a totalitarian vigilante story that pits one man against the entire universe. The film’s distrust of all state and public institutions results in one implausible plot point after another: because everyone is corrupt, the bad guys can get away with anything, anywhere. The opposition party has no voice, the police is rotten to the core, the media is manipulated by the powerful, and the public is swayed by the media. It’s Bhavesh Joshi (and YouTube) vs the World. Yet, it’s the media and the judiciary the script eventually looks to for resolving its plot and bringing the villains to account. For a film that started with the acknowledgement that justice is not a question of setting the crooked straight, but a long-drawn, institutionalized process of negotiation and influence, Bhavesh Joshi takes a quick U-turn.

Motwane and team imagine Mumbai like Gotham City, made and unmade over and over. The film’s best passage is a chase sequence in which the superhero on bike snakes in and out of not just the city’s roads, but impossible locations such as its local railway as well – a parody of a regular day for many residents of Mumbai. The film accentuates the home-made quality of its super-hero, he might as well be called Jugaad-man: we see him buy electronic parts from the black market, stitch together his own attire, customize his bike with makeshift power boosters. The action sequences, likewise, are shot with an improvisational, low-budget aesthetic to look like local variations on Soderbergh. The film tempers its seriousness with touches of humour: after a botch-up, the hero makes for the exit limping, his undercover identity consists of thick-rimmed glasses and an absurd, off-the-shelf bald patch he puts on with the help of a Chinese instructional manual. The final fight sequence takes place on a pipeline and Motwane shoots it like a video game – scattered grace notes in an otherwise ordinary venture.

Gully Boy

My issues with what I’d seen of Zoya Akhtar’s work so far were related to the question of perspective. The outlook of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Bombay Talkies revealed an overprivileged life out of touch with the rest of the country, a personality entirely shaped by Western liberal notions having little empirical grounding. The works came across to me as unwieldy transpositions of popular ideas – McPhilosophy – onto Indian narratives. So, when I heard that her latest film, Gully Boy, was about a youth from Dharavi rising to stardom as a hip-hop idol, I had my prejudices: another Bollywood-Hollywood crossbreed, an underdog rap movie embodying a bourgeois ideology of making your own life, middle-class attitudes to poverty and shop-worn wisdom about following one’s passion, tailored to Western tastes with suitable amount of local colour added. While these tendencies are still discernible in Gully Boy, Akhtar and her co-writer Reema Kagti mount a powerful rebuttal to these prejudices. With great intelligence and feeling, they pre-empt the objection that wanting to transplant a musical phenomenon rooted in the African-American experience onto the slums of Mumbai is false consciousness. Their magnificent film demonstrates to us that, at this particular juncture in Indian history, it’s this very objection that’s reactionary, a product of false beliefs about what our society is and isn’t, that the image of a boy recording his voice on an iPad through a tea strainer is not the figment of an uprooted imagination.

Gully Boy is a portrait of “young India”, the dreamers as a recent book put it, a pan-social generation that is still embedded in old traditions, but takes its behavioural and aspirational cues from a wider international community. All they need is food, clothing, shelter and internet. When Murad (Ranveer Singh) writes his first rap lines in Hindi/Urdu, it’s in the roman script, a hybrid form just like the film’s bilingual titles. He sleeps, works and rolls cigarettes in the attic of his matchbox house in Dharavi. Murad goes to the mosque on Fridays and is answerable to the strict codes of the family hierarchy. He dreams of becoming not a movie icon or a ghazal singer – enticements that his immediate surroundings offer – but a hip-hop star, a notion foreign to his milieu. Words surround him all the time; he lives in a noisy environment and wakes up to the creeping sound of his parents quarrelling. He desires peace and privacy, also concepts foreign to his milieu, but the attic can only offer so much. As his father (Vijay Raaz) brings home a second wife less than his age, Murad plugs in the earphones to drown out the Shehnai and the sorrow. Akhtar cuts to his perspective. We hear a rap track as we see the newly-wed being welcome by the first wife. This escape from reality through music from another world, later amended by a return to reality through the same music, is dissonant and incongruent. Incongruence, however, is the point.

All through the film, Akhtar and Kagti emphasize the outsider perspective to the story and foreground their own foreignness. They populate their film with outsider figures: slum tourists whom Murad surprises with his knowledge of hip-hop, a European traveller who decides to stay back with Murad’s friend and guide MC Sher (Siddhant Chaturvedi), the rich family that Murad chauffeurs and, most notably, a Berklee student Sky (Kalki Koechlin) who produces music with Murad and Sher as part of her project. An alter ego of Akhtar’s, Sky brings to Murad’s universe an undiscriminating perspective, new social codes and modes of thought. She takes Murad on a night crawl to spray paint at construction sites, bus stops and shopping malls – artistic interventions which, in Murad’s world, are acts of vandalism. The kitchen of her quiet, spacious apartment is bigger than Murad’s house.  “I can’t believe I’m doing a music video” says Murad to her, to which she responds, “I can’t believe you were going to take up a job.” Gully Boy recognizes that change can come neither from within nor from outside but from a dialectical interaction of the two. Thanks to her material, Akhtar is able to refuse looking at Dharavi as a self-contained ecosystem isolated from the rest of the globe. The residents of her Dharavi are not poor-but-happy fatalists content with their everyday victories and limited social mobility. They dream big, they form their self-image from the outsider’s gaze. Murad derives his worth from the feedback he gets online. In a climactic showdown with his father, he points to the number of likes and comments on his videos and claims that he won’t let someone else tell him what he should aspire for. In doing so, the film throws a loaded challenge: a viewer tempted to judge Murad’s internationalist consciousness and ambition as shallow and false falls in line with the father’s point of view.

If it’s hip-hop that promises a ticket out of poverty for Murad, it’s the safer route of education for his long-time girlfriend Safeena (Alia Bhatt). Higher up on the economic ladder, Safeena is determined to become a surgeon and lead a life with Murad – in that order – whatever that takes. When she learns that a friend of hers is flirting with her boyfriend, she goes to the girl’s workplace and beats her up. This scene of two women fighting over a man seems overreactive and questionably comical, but it soon is revealed to be part of Safeena’s pathological jealousy: when she breaks a bottle over Sky’s head for courting Murad, it isn’t funny anymore. Safeena articulates her reason: she has one life and she will not let anyone run roughshod over it, even her boyfriend. Safeena is the counterpoint to Murad’s mother, who must resign herself to a life she didn’t choose. (In a nice bit of mirroring, Murad finds his temperament and muted masculinity echoed in Safeena’s father.) If Murad runs up against tradition in direct, confrontational ways, the headscarf-sporting Safeena fights it from within. She constantly lies and uses her perceived vulnerability to get what she wants. She will even weaponize the system of arranged marriage to suit her ends. In an astute bit of writing, the threat that she faces as a woman – of being withdrawn from the economic ladder and getting married off – is opposed to the threat that Murad faces as a man: the thread of being chained to the workforce. The freedom she desires she had? To be able to put on lipstick, go to parties with friends and stay out late – another loaded challenge to the audience to judge these as petty and shallow.

Every time we think a characterization, an event or a turn of phrase seems out of place in the film’s milieu, the film turns the suspicion back on to us, asking us why not. Why shouldn’t, in a film full of failed father figures, Murad’s masculinity be untouched by his circumstances? Why shouldn’t the words (“mazboot” to mean solid, “awaaz karo” to mean make some noise) sound translated from English? There’s a monologue towards the end questioning the 9-to-5 life, which sounds like the product of middle-class professional anxiety. But, the film repeatedly asks, why shouldn’t Murad question it, why shouldn’t he rap to a different beat? Why should this heightened consciousness about life necessarily be the prerogative of those higher up the social ladder? If the film characterizes this YOLO wisdom as being typical of a generation, it doesn’t skirt questions of class. Murad is forced to briefly take over his father’s job as a chauffeur to an upper-class, strawberries-for-breakfast family. In a heavy-handed scene saved by Ranveer’s lack of reaction, the man of the family urges his daughter to do her post-graduation, pointing to Murad’s status as a graduate. A while later, in the film’s best sequence, the girl storms out of a party back to the car. Murad observes her crying on the rear-view mirror. He doesn’t say a word and, as they drive home together, yellow lights from Mumbai’s street lamps washing down their faces, a voice-over begins: Murad has converted his inability to console her into a verse. Akhtar throws into relief their physical proximity and social distance with a shot of the car from the side. The voice-over provides Murad a liberty he doesn’t have in the diegesis.

Akhtar is responsive to the class-coded nature of the various spaces in the film. Murad’s presence in the recording studio, at upscale pubs or at Sky’s gated community have a friction matched by Sky’s decision to shoot her video in Dharavi. The austere warehouse where the rappers meet, on the other hand, promises a utopian space free of class distinctions. Several scenes take place at a playground in Dharavi, a zone of horizontal male bonding outside of community strictures, and Murad’s success story is one of being accepted into and assimilated by traditionally exclusionary spaces. In one scene on a New Year’s Eve, Murad is turned away by a bouncer from the vicinity of a rap concert. He shuts himself in the car in rage and shame and raps a verse. This response to being excluded from a public space by turning the private space of someone else’s car into a personal space for creation is part of Murad’s innate adeptness with space, his constant slipping from his attic to the terrace, to the bridge, to the round or to Safeena’s house. There’s an endearing romantic scene between the two, a spin-off of Romeo and Juliet, where Murad calls Safeena on the phone from outside her house. They speak to each other over phone but looking at each other: she’s on the balcony, he’s down below. This culturally-defined but entirely-comfortable distance is to be contrasted with the scene in the car with Murad and the rich girl.

Akhtar’s keen sense of space is coupled to an equally-sharp attention to behavioural detail. She observes the (predominantly male) hip-hop subculture with an ethnographer’s eyes, touching upon the various rituals, rites of initiation and social codes involved: the head-banging and arm waving, the animalistic circling around before a faceoff, the “bohot hard, bohot hard” (“hardcore, hardcore”) chants of encouragement, the spontaneous recruitment of groupies, the putdowns hinged on perceived lack of masculinity, and the class anger sublimated in performance. The attire, accessories and hairstyles of the participants, their body language, and even their choice to play the Dozens are derived from Black hip-hop culture and Akhtar makes no effort to disguise or attenuate this. She recognizes that this whole space is an opportunity for youth, marginalized and privileged, to leave behind their given identities and play out ones they have chosen for themselves from a sea of internationally available sub-cultural identities. These gestures and behaviours don’t exist outside the space of the warehouse and the concert hall: their being unrelated to the real world is their reason to exist. Hip-hop here is an external agent of change – like Sky, like Akhtar – offering an alternate mode of life, a parallel community outside of family, work, mosque, free of judgment and hierarchies. Notice the scene when Murad walks into the warehouse for the first time. He starts rocking to the music as soon as he hears it. It’s an instant recognition of one’s lot, a spontaneous initiation into a brotherhood forged on a beat.

The terrific rap is written by a battalion of hip-hop artists and music producers on whom the film is partially based: Divine, Naezy, Kaam Bhari, Spitfire, Ace, Dub Sharma, MC Altaf, MC TodFod, Desi Ma, the list is long. The verses are top rate and so are the roasts. But as pleasant is how Akhtar and her dialogue writer Vijay Maurya, who plays Murad’s uncle, show a great sense of prosody. The words they pick and the way the actors deliver them have a cadence and vitality rivalling the rap tracks. When Murad is christened ‘Gully Boy’, his friends repeat the name like an incantation. A moment earlier, the word ‘export’ was brilliantly rhymed with ‘visfot’ (explosion). One of the quarrels between Murad’s parents yields this bit of verse: “Baccha hai?/Haan/Baccha hai yeh?/Haan/Saala saand ki tarah chhati pe baitha hai baccha hai yeh?” (“A kid?/Yes/He’s a kid?/Yes/He’s sitting on my chest like a goddamn bull and he’s a kid?”). An exchange in Marathi between MC Sher and his father sounds straight out of a rap battle. Akhtar’s knack for picking up rhythms from Murad’s environment – the sound of door knocking, a passing train, the footsteps of Murad coming down the attic, the ubiquitous “bhai” (“brother”), the vowel-dominated Mumbai Hindi slang that ends imperative sentences with ‘ka’ (“pyaz katne ka, cooker mein dalne ka, teen seeti ke baad nikalne ka”) – hints at the source of his gravitation towards hip-hop, just as the factory noise of industrial Britain is said to be responsible for the blossoming of heavy metal music in the country.

Ranveer Singh is extraordinary as Murad and it’s one of the great Hindi cinema performances. Several scenes in the film would’ve simply collapsed had he interpreted his role differently. When you see him first as the unwilling participant in a carjacking, he is in the background of the shot, out of focus. Even when he is in focus, he’s barely conspicuous. Donning sweat shirts and jackets over a kurta or a loose shirt left untucked, a backpack, a talisman on his neck, mascara under the eyes, he cuts an awkward figure. There’s a constant softness to his voice, even when he becomes increasingly comfortable with the rap scene, that is in contrast with the coarser textures of his peers’. In his first open mic session, Murad is pushed by MC Sher to rap out his own writing. Ranveer reads the text out from his notebook to an “old-school” beat in metre, without any deviation or improvisation, like a primary-schooler forced to recite a poem for a competition. He misses the beat once: a calculated amateurishness worthy of Gary Cooper. This apparent innocence gives his tracks a moral power and rounds off the rough edges of the roasts. Notice the pitch drop in the final battle when he goes from “Tere kaale noton ki raid lag gayi” (“your black notes have been raided”) to “ab yeh sikka mera bolega” (“let my coin do the talking now”). The shifts in his tone when he speaks to Safeena, to his friends or to characters outside of Dharavi go hand in hand with his changing body language in different spaces. Just looking at him you could figure out the kind of location he’s in.

There’s a distinct lack of a feeling of bruised masculinity in Ranveer’s Murad – no rage or resentment – contrary to Vijay Raaz’s rather flat characterization. Unlike Safeena, Murad is not irreverent or calculating. His verses aren’t controversial or especially provocative, nor is his rhetorical style. They’re inward-looking, less about societal evils than about self-realization. With an unassuming Mumbai accent, Ranveer minimizes Murad’s own experience in front of others. He thanks MC Sher for the warm reception on the first day. When Sher tells him not to pay heed to rich kids dissing his provenance, he gently replies “no, brother, they’ve seen the world.” The first meeting with Sky at a pub is a lesson in modest cordiality. He will later thank Sky for not insisting on sleeping with him, innocent of the power dynamic at hand and of the etiquette of class relations. Look at Ranveer’s reaction to the recording of his first appearance: a toothy grin with his thumb on his lower lip, followed by a half-suppressed Charlie Chaplin laughter when a peer compliments him on a line. Or his first gig at a studio, where he measures his distance from the microphone with a trembling hand.

Ranveer’s self-subtraction is made more striking by being pitted against three remarkable performances. We first see Alia Bhatt’s Safeena, ironically, in a wordless scene with Murad, where the two, showing obvious signs of familiarity and comfort with each other, share a pair of headphones at the back of a bus. Safeena is diminutive and, her hair wrapped up under a colourful scarf, has the air of a soft-spoken schoolgirl. But her pluck and self-determination, bordering on hysteria when she gets violent, are in stark contrast with Murad’s timidity and constant doubt. She shouts and wails if necessary and segues from her standard-accent Urdu to Mumbai slang when needed. In her breakup call with Murad, a scene that is the conceptual reverse of their first romantic call, she sits on the bathroom floor with her hair untied, grilling her boyfriend at the top of her voice, her nose all red. Murad and Safeena’s complementing temperaments and command of space is also reflected in Murad’s relation with Siddhant Chaturvedi’s MC Sher and Vijay Varma’s Moeen. Chaturvedi’s is a patently star-making turn. In the scene at MC Sher’s tenement house with his alcoholic father, the simmering resentment and violence in Chaturvedi’s eyes is evident as glances at his father or when he says his mother ran away. The thrill and success of Murad’s first open mic session hangs entirely on approving reaction shots of Chaturvedi. Varma’s Moeen is a street fighter, residing in moral twilight, more rooted in the reality of Dharavi. He’s always in Murad’s orbit, supportive, but won’t share any of his lofty moralizing. Varma is always doing something interesting with his hair, hands and mouth, and his funny, moving performance, like Chaturvedi’s, seals a claim for a long haul in Bollywood.

Gully Boy is kinetically shot with a shoulder cam, as is par for many action movies, and it puts the audience on stage with the rappers. The rough yellow light of Mumbai outdoors is complemented by soft, bounced light of the interiors and the subdued colour palette. While the big dinner scene with the family is disorienting in its vague spatial relations, two particular scenes are lucidly edited with fine economy: the sequence at the hospital where Murad’s father promises his employer that his son will take over his job conveys the rigid chain of command through a fluid series of glances, and the scene at the party where Safeena assaults Sky superbly triangulates between Safeena, Murad and Sky’s points of view conveying their mutual jealousy and grudge. There are moments where the screenwriters pull the strings a little too hard and, I think, there are a handful of directorial missteps too. Sky’s video starring Murad and Sher is shot in Dharavi and features a questionable montage of workers posing for the camera. It’s an employment of the poor as wallpaper that Akhtar avoids elsewhere in the film. But Gully Boy is almost a unique phenomenon in that it manages to scoop out a piece of reality that brings into perfect harmony a social-historical analysis, the needs of the genre, and Zoya Akhtar’s position as a privileged artist. I doubt she can surpass this work. I also hope I’m wrong.

Article 15

[Spoilers ahead, maybe]

Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 takes as its subject the rape and murder of Dalit girls in a village in Uttar Pradesh. Rookie IPS officer Ayan (Ayushmann Khurrana) is posted to the wintry village of Lalgaon as punishment for an inappropriate exchange with his superior. He’s foreign-educated and comes with certain ideas about the country, only to be faced with sordid details about the murder. Encouraged by his estranged activist wife (Isha Talwar) and against the exhortations of his cynical, casteist subordinate Brahmadatt (Manoj Pahwa), Ayan decides to pursue the case, refusing to shut it as an instance of honour killing. He finds out that it’s not just the village outside, but his own police station that has a deep caste hierarchy defining relations between the men. Simmering in the background are an election, where an upper-caste politician forms an alliance with the local Dalit leader, and the threat of the case being handed over to a puppet CBI team headed by Panikar (Nasser).

Ayushmann Khurrana plays Ayan like a Western hero riding into an unknown town, with a combination of caution and authority. Continuing his established metro-masculine image, he portrays the character with a studied calm punctuated by bursts of rage. His hands are passive and generally kept close to his body. Outdoors or at the window of his car, he’s often seen in three-quarters profile, looking beyond the left edge of the screen. He maintains this skewed, cautious posture even as he walks and the off-centre framing of the actor accentuates the sense of instability. Despite being a police officer on a hunt, he never runs in the film. There’s a shot of him tiptoeing on bricks to avoid stepping into the water – an unusual sight in a crime thriller. Khurrana’s self-effacing presence is thrown into relief by being pitted against the expressivity of the rotund Manoj Pahwa, whose mind the viewer can read even before his lips move. When Pahwa’s Brahmadatt smugly asks Ayan if he can close a case now that the minister’s vetoed it, the latter just walks out the room without outburst or repartee. Later, Ayan’s phone buzzes as he grills a suspect. It’s the minister on line to pressurize him. Instead of smashing the phone, he simply picks it up and leaves.

Ayan’s primary challenge is to understand whom to trust in this extremely-codified ecosystem where every man introduces himself with his second name. The cordial-but-distant façade Khurrana puts up as a bulwark also distances the audience from his thoughts. The film takes a convenient way out to address this, using the conversations between Ayan and his wife to let us know what’s in his mind as well as to convey us the film’s intentions. Clearly, the film wants the (urban) audience to identify with the out-of-sync Ayan, to discover the country as he discovers it, but there’s hardly anything in the film that anyone who’s lived in this country for long enough isn’t aware of. The script foists an unfair naivete onto Ayan, an IPS officer, just in order to make his observations sound like revelations. So much so that the audience frequently has an advance on Ayan on the turn of events. This naïve streak undercuts the intelligent aura Khurrana cultivates for Ayan and makes it hard for the audience to trust his authority when he finally gets his grand showdown with the CBI officer, who is also given a short shrift in order to make Ayan look righteous.

To be sure, Ayan is given his naivete because Article 15 also wants to problematize Ayan’s (and the audience’s) deracinated, urban perspective. The character’s status as an outsider, a pseudo-firang, is repeatedly underscored from beginning to end. In the second scene of the film, Ayan drives to the village he’s supposed to take charge of. Next to him is a copy of Nehru’s The Discovery of India, not the Indian constitution. On the soundtrack is Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, not an old Hindi song. The driver of the car tells him a blunt parable about a village whose lights were out when Rama returned from his long exile. Ayan looks at a construction site in the countryside and wonders if it’s a mall. On phone a while later, he tells his wife that the place looks like the wild west, and his wife replies that he’s in “page 7 India” (meaning the India that doesn’t show up in the front page). In contrast to the unkempt faces and conveniently-worn mufflers of his peers, throughout the film, Ayan is clean-shaven, impeccably groomed and sports a blazer and a tie even though he has to run around in the muck. He’s advised not to “upset the balance” of the village with his meddling and to stay in line. Even the Malayalee CBI officer prompts him to speak in Hindi in place of English.

Article 15 traces the dissolution of Ayan’s faith in law and order and his disillusionment with the constitution. Ayan is a Brahmin whose privilege makes him unaware of his own caste. His wife points out the stranglehold of caste in “page 7 India” even as she turns down a boy selling trinkets at a signal. An admonishing remark about keeping Dalits in check in order to ensure water services is neatly cut to a shot of Ayan opening a tap. However, this criticism of Ayan’s outlook doesn’t have any force because it takes the final form of a general, post-emergency mistrust of politics so pervasive in Indian cinema: justice cannot be served because politicians on top are corrupt. This easy explanation of continued caste discrimination lets both Ayan and the audience off the hook. Compare this with Newton, another film where a protagonist representing the ideals of democracy comes up against a cynical feudal establishment. By the time the film ends, Newton’s unwavering belief in suffrage as a noble value in itself, so reflective of the audience’s, is upended and the unexamined beliefs underlying empty voting advocacy questioned.

There’s something else that erodes the dramatic quality of the film. By design or accident, Article 15 is not constructed like traditional thriller, which is what it’s marketed as. All the key information about the story is given to us early on in the film. In the very first scene, we know that two girls have been abducted, raped in a bus and murdered. In a couple of scenes later, Ayan notices both their bodies hanging next to each other off a tree. It’s obviously not a suicide – there’s not even an effort to make it appear as one – and the audience doesn’t mind since it already knows it’s a murder. A more conventional approach would have Ayan learn of missing girls and the plot would be the quest to retrieve them. Barely half an hour into the film, Brahmadatt is revealed to be a reprehensible character. So, a plot twist later in the film has no impact outside of a two-second shock. The dramatic progression of the film is flat because we learn things before Ayan does, and because Ayan doesn’t have any real obstacles in his investigation. Several story threads turn out to be stubs and characters are conveniently disposed of to wrap things up. The search for a third missing girl, which is the concluding passage of the film, has no emotional weight not because it succeeds the resolution of the plot but because there are no moral stakes in the discovery.

What does carry the film through despite these shortcomings is its ominous atmosphere. Director Anubhav Sinha and cinematographer Ewan Mulligan work out specific visual ideas for the film. Most of Article 15 is lit dramatically with angular light sources that produce strong shadows on actors’ faces. One of the scenes takes place under the flashing red-blue lights of police sirens. All the outdoor scenes are shot either at dawn or at golden hour to a point of self-parody. The crimson sky, the mist and the open fields of the countryside form a vast horizontal triptych against which actors are filmed in American shots. Many times, the camera glides down roads or marshlands and the actors walk towards it looking off-screen. The slow-burning sound design, with its low-frequency drones and intermittent percussion, constantly portends revelations that never come. This transposition of horror movie tropes on a social-realist film – and not the edgy name-dropping of castes and political parties – is what in the end gives the film its visceral quality.

Super 30

In a face-off marking the film’s intermission, the local IIT coaching business head Lallan (Aditya Shrivastava) comes to warn a renegade star professor Anand Kumar (Hrithik Roshan) of dire consequences if he continues running his free coaching centre for the poor. Pockets of sunlight trickling through the makeshift roof creates dramatic zones of shadow and light on the character’s faces. As Lallan cranks up his challenge using colourful metaphors of a horse derby, music swells and a wind from nowhere sweeps across the room, making the asbestos walls rumble. Lest we miss the cues, Anand asks Lallan to brace for a storm.

Multiplying signifiers is part of all melodramatic expression, but Vikas Bahl, the director of Super 30, uses it exclusively as a crutch to prop up an uninspired material bordering on formula. The strings are pulled even before the first shot, violins and choruses preparing us for a soundscape that will be set to 11 through the remainder of the film. The film opens in London in 2017 at a gathering to felicitate a successful student of Anand’s. After a brief rollcall of Indian-headed corporations, he pays tribute to his professor, who, even before the flashback, is presented as a genius educator to be lionized. The second scene is a gathering too, this time in Patna twenty years ago, and sets up a lazy opposition between education and politics that characterizes the film: a slimy education minister (Pankaj Tripathi) makes false promises to Anand, who has just won a top medal.

He goes to show the medal to his romantic interest Ritu (Mrunal Thakur). In the first scene of a gratuitous romantic track, shoehorned as in all biopics of men to show that these men have Feelings, Ritu sits wearing the medal looking sideways at Anand, who crouches on the floor, talking about PhD while playing pittu. The scene, like all others in the film, plays out exactly as you imagine; a romantic interlude between a math geek and a plain Jane: she expects him to declare his love while he, in a parody of 60s Hindi cinema bholas, holds forth on phi, the golden ratio. A first meeting with the girl’s father, Anand’s appointment with the minister seeking financial help, all the exchanges with Lallan, the minister’s rude dismissals of Lallan, a scene at the police station seeking protection, Anand’s pep talk as he shuttles between students standing around him in the room, they all proceed with the predictability of the Fibonacci series. The villains recognize themselves as villains, the amir log address themselves as amir log. A story’s dramatic value is already diminished when its antagonists themselves are convinced of the hero’s moral superiority.

This bloodless quality of the script might have been made up for with a dynamic style, but Super 30 is so formally inert and conservative that the sole visceral impact that Anand’s victories provide comes from its booming soundtrack. Outside of a few ominous close-ups of a cycle chain (whose delicious ambiguity is soon dispelled by the turn of events) and three meal scenes, none of which the film seems to be really invested in, there’s hardly an organizational principle at sight. The visual culture of IIT coaching institutes, with its fatigue-inducing self-promotional ads and banners, is dispensed in a single second-unit montage. The better part of the film is given a burnished DI look to evoke some vague sense of the rustic while once florescent-lit scene at a hospital, with stroboscopic effects on cue, sticks out like Hrithik’s grey eyes in the hinterlands of Bihar.

What does hold the attention and ground the film is, however, the figure of Hrithik Roshan himself. Successively outfitted in old sneakers, half-sweaters (= innocent man, per Bollywood), pilled T-shirts, checked shirts, oversized kurtas, his top button always open making his neck crane out even further in the frame, a pen in the shirt pocket, a large-dial wristwatch on the right hand and sometimes a red towel on the shoulder to signify his modest means, Hrithik is always interesting to watch here, despite the raw deal the script offers him. Like Gary Cooper, he effaces himself in the early part of the film, blending into the crowd and sticking to the edge of the frame. He squats twice in the film to indicate overwhelming joy – one when he gets an admit at Cambridge and again when his students clear IIT – he pulls up his belt that wraps around a too-tucked-in shirt when he meets the girl’s father (borrowing from his man-child repertoire from Koi Mil Gaya), he uses his middle finger to point at objects and stands in the classroom against the table leaning on his right elbow or with his right foot on a chair, looking like a pretty hieroglyphic. And, of course, he swallows his saliva to show that he is overcome with emotion. His Adam’s apple is a compositional element of its own.

Does Super 30 take on feudal forces as it repeatedly claims in its punchline? I believe not. The film inscribes itself into a Hollywood tradition of individual triumph in which the nominal social problem (the exclusion of the poor from the social ladder) becomes a wallpaper to the protagonist’s journey of self-realization (the success of Anand’s academy). Think Dances with Wolves, Schindler’s List, Amistad. Like the heroes of these films, Hrithik’s Anand is a paternal figure who not only must do his professional duty as a teacher, but also prepare his children to face life’s challenges. In an extended set piece – perhaps the film’s most inspired moment, pulling off with a straight face what is otherwise unintentionally funny – he orders his students to put up a play entirely in English in order to help them find self-respect and overcome their complexes of not being able to speak in English. The play, set at the town square on Holi day with coaching institute posters all around, starts out as a funny skit around Sholay, but soon becomes a resistance song against the hegemony of English. While Anand’s prowess as a life coach are amply demonstrated, the cognitive challenges in teaching and learning advanced mathematical concepts, themselves, are side stepped. Turning abstract physical problems into real world questions or pretty animations doesn’t, despite what the film thinks, make them any more pertinent, leave alone solvable.

The event the entire film prepares us for – the IIT entrance exam – is placed right after a shootout worthy of Anu Club, in which the students employ various scientific concepts to ward off gun-toting henchmen sent by the minister. The exam itself is not depicted and the day of the exam results becomes an excuse for the camera to linger long on Hrithik’s expression of relief and vindication. The film’s end credits present a list of international laurels for Anand’s programme, not what it did to its participants or what IIT means to its aspirants today. It reads no differently than the promotional banners of other coaching institutes.

Part of the problem stems from the film’s wholesale purchase of the bourgeois myth of Education as a ticket out of poverty. Not only will education help you get a job, but you can build slide projectors with rubber bands and fend off a criminal outfit with solenoids and lenses. Pervading the film is the idea that were the children allowed a shot at the IIT, all the systemic problems facing them for generations would vanish. No matter the lack of institutional support once you get into top-tier colleges as an underprivileged student or the continuation of inequalities in performance through accrued academic capital. The notion of education as panacea and an ultimate goal to be pursued reverberates throughout Super 30, with its thundering Sanskrit chorus about education, its unironic reverence of the IITs and its belief that education lies somewhere beyond the corrupting realms of business and politics. These are talking points that you will invariably find echoed in middle-class living rooms and corporate offices.

“A king’s son will no longer become the king. Only he who deserves it will become the king,” a line that’s uttered a handful of times in the film. This seeming rebuttal to zamindari era is actually a cover for the belief in pure meritocracy the film embodies. Super 30’s dodging of the question of reservation is not simply a curiosity, but essential to its functioning. It has to pit rich kids who have all the means at their disposal to prepare for the exam and poor but gifted kids who have to fight for everything. In a sequence depicting competition between the two camps, the former group turns out to be winners by a couple of marks, and the film plays it out as a defeat for Anand. It would not sit well within the moral fabric of the film for an underprivileged student with lower marks passing the exam over a rich student with higher marks. In an early scene at a university library, Anand Kumar is thrown out for not giving out his full name. What first appears to be a rebellious gesture to withhold caste name is extended to every character in the film, who are all to be read only as tropes such as evil politician, corrupt businessman, doting father, helpful reporter etc. I hope this objection to the film for trying to remap caste-class inequalities solely along class lines doesn’t seem like an unfair or irrelevant criticism. What I intend to point out is that, in doing so, the film falls in line with the same outlook it rebukes. Super 30, however, is not special offender. This narrative of the triumph of merit over mediocrity, talent over entitlement is part of the enduring myth that culture industries such as Hollywood and Bollywood – without a hint of irony – tell us, if not themselves.

Shuddh Desi Romance - Hunterrr

Two recent Hindi films – Shuddh Desi Romance (2013), directed by Maneesh Sharma and written by Jaideep Sahni, and Hunterrr (2015), directed and written by Harshavardhan Kulkarni – try to trace the different contours of modern Indian romance with interesting results. The first film is produced by Yash Raj Films – not just a pillar of the Bollywood establishment, but the very face of the brand of idealist romanticism generally associated with the industry – in a spirit of keeping up with changing social norms. The latter is partly produced by Phantom Films, the self-styled outsider institution that’s building an impressive repertoire primarily targeting cosmopolitan audiences. Varied though they might be in their origin and temperament, they converse well with each other and, I believe, together provide a very good window into the evolution of both culture and the Hindi film industry.

Hunterrr, the more provocative of the two and understandably so, follows Mandar (Gulshan Devaiah), a handsome, middle-class urban man in his 30s. Mandar is a ‘player’, constantly in pursuit of flings, who dreads being tied down by marriage but who acknowledges nonetheless that he isn’t getting any younger (which means not that he needs to get married, but that his chances of scoring are diminishing). In Shuddh Desi Romance, Sushant Singh plays Raghu, a street smart man-child working odd jobs, who gets cold feet every time he tries to get hitched. Raghu’s aversion to marriage could only be taken at face value – a fear of the finality of the institution and its increased stakes – because it finds its exact echo in the female protagonist Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra), whose failed pregnancy seems to have made her skeptical of all long-term relationships. Mandar’s marriage-phobia, in contrast, stems for a multiplicity of polarizing forces he is caught amidst. For one, he juggles in vain modern and traditional belief systems, trading in libertarian values while shouldering the weight of tradition in the form of societal expectations of ‘settling down’.

In other words, Mandar leads a double life – one of a socially atomized womanizer and the other of a member of a family with specific duties towards father, mother and fiancée; one driven by testosterone and the other by conscious suppression of it. This, of course, is the Madonna-whore complex turned inside out, to show that such a dual perspective demands role-playing from the person who holds it as well. These two parallel words come crashing into each other in the airport sequence of the film, where Mandar tries to move in on a family member by mistake and gets caught. And this collapse is what the entire film is structured around, cuts as it does between Mandar’s imminent present-day crisis and his formative years. (More on this cross-cutting later.)

Furthermore, the film presents his refusal to get married as his inability to accept the responsibilities that a patriarchal setup requires of him (to earn, to drive, to support a family) while enjoying the privileges that it offers (of unproblematic mobility, of freedom from moral judgment, of unquestioned predation). It is as though he realizes his status as a gendered-being only when standing at the gates of matrimony. To be sure, Mandar’s conquests aren’t as much fodder for male ego-polishing as responses to genuine carnal urge, free of social-programming (as is evidenced by the freedom of the men surrounding him from such a perennial urge). But the ease with which he can go about these making these conquests is what I think is invoked here as privilege.

Hunterrr

This privilege, in Hunterrr, manifests in Mandar’s relationship with the space he moves in. He sexualizes the zone around him wherever he goes. The hunter, one might say, examines his space carefully and prowls before making his move. Quotidian gestures by women become triggers for him, while the same gestures retain their banality when the men do it. The film partakes in this sexualization in such a way that we always know when we are to share Mandar’s perspective (and, at times, when we are to break away from it). On the other hand, he senses his mastery of space thwarted in the closely knit residential complex he lives in during his university days in Pune. He finds himself always under scrutiny, continuously challenged to carve out a judgment-free space where he can maintain his love life. The anonymity offered by city life is undone by the closed nature of the residential complex.

Space in Shuddh Desi Romance, on the contrary, is more clearly demarcated. The two leads who refuse marriage almost literally live in an ivory tower. They occupy a penthouse on one of the tallest buildings in a mixed-use neighbourhood in Jaipur. This apartment of non-marital coupledom, cloistered from the prying eyes on the ground and free from traces of the characters’ past, stands in direct contrast to the horizontal sprawl and constant scrutiny of the wedding parties the two attend frequently. The bathroom, which figures prominently throughout the film, is a transitional zone of no-morality that links these two kinds of spaces that function according to their own value systems. But these separate spaces, in themselves, are free of gender hierarchy, unlike the masculine spaces of Hunterrr. Shuddh Desi Romance keeps emphasizing the equivalence between its characters, who physically and figuratively take each others’ positions throughout the film. Raghu, moreover, is only too glad to share responsibility with Gayatri.

But then all is not egalitarian in the film’s trajectory. Early in the movie, Raghu runs away from his wedding, leaving his fiancée Tara (Vaani Kapoor) stranded. Later, Gayatri deserts him in their wedding. Tara tells Raghu that Gayatri left him because she just wouldn’t have been able to imagine life with a man who fled his wedding. Raghu is, by this logic, guilty not just for what he did to Tara, but also for what happened to himself. Raghu buys into this twisted rationale and carries the double-guilt for the rest of the film, not knowing really how to comprehend his status as a victim-aggressor. This, in other words, is the famous blame-the-victim manoeuvre used on a man for his failure to ‘man up’. It is no wonder that Raghu is passively held hostage by both women in the end where he ends up the guilty party no matter what he does.

The film’s view of marriage is decidedly reductive, compares as it does the institution to a house locked from outside. In Shuddh Desi Romance, weddings are literally simulacrums – Goyal saab’s (Rishi Kapoor) firm provides fake invitees for hire for brides or grooms whose parents have deserted them because of their choice of partners – in which, we are told, the double standards of Indian culture come to the fore. The film, it needs to be said, pats itself on the back now and then for its radical stance and there is some amount of vain posturing at work here. Nevertheless, Jaideep Sahni, who is growing from strength to strength with every movie he writes, populates the film with sharp observations about the role of ego in non-committal romance and with characters capable of casual cruelty.

Shuddh Desi Romance

Shuddh Desi Romance is, without question, the more accomplished of the two films. Its fine-grained structuring that relies on repetitions, doublings, mirroring and minor variations on major motifs – reminiscent of the work of Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo – renders the film very robust. Its use of extra-diegetic talking heads, where characters tell the viewers in direct address what’s going through their head, is never too clever, as it typically is when the device is employed. Actors are capable and personal enough to hold interest even in long takes. More importantly, the film unfolds as a string of fully fleshed-out scenes, instead of vignettes or impressions as is too common nowadays, and this greatly cuts down the possibility of narrative flab.

This, unfortunately, cannot be said of Hunterrr, whose scattershot structuring and juvenile inserts of fake scenes cry frivolity. It’s a film that wears its wide-ranged cinephilia on its sleeve and belongs alongside the movies of Anurag Kashyap (who must hold some sort of record for the amount of second-unit material he uses in his films). The early sequences portraying Mandar’s childhood are vivid and refreshing, but its shuffling of narrative timeline tries to build a dramatic causality where none exists. Few films swing so wildly between honesty and disingenuousness as Hunterrr. A spate of genuine notes lie scattered amidst false ones. The conversations, evidently, have the frankness of lived experience. So does Mandar’s conflicted view of himself as an everyman to be treated ordinarily and a pathological exception to be specially understood. On the other hand, there is a completely unwarranted death that is thrown in simply to add gravity to the flighty proceedings and which is immediately undermined by a cut back to flippancy.

That said, the film also contains what must count as one of the most graceful portrayals of romance in all of Hindi cinema, in the affair between Mandar and Jyotsna (Sai Tamhankar), the housewife next door. There is a nobility and tenderness in this segment that is very, very rare to come by in movies. The liaison is, of course, transgressive but is devoid of the cynicism and sleaze that it usually accompanies it. In their relationship, Hunterrr captures an intimacy that can be evident to no one in the world but the two involved. The scene where Jyotsna tries out the saree that Mandar buys for her radiates an image all too familiar of a personality rubbed down and dissolved by the weight of the mundane. When she confronts him for the last time and he tries to convince her, a little too forcefully, that something can be worked out, she tells him “You ran away, but where will I run?”. It’s the one point where Mandar realizes, despite looking eye-to-eye with Jyotsna, the insuperable gulf of tradition and culture that separates the two; a moment so personal that, as Baradwaj Rangan put it once, that you want to look away.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) (You Don’t Get Life A Second Time)
Zoya Akhtar
Hindi

 

Zindagi Na Milegi DobaraThe deal with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is not bad; for the price of one ticket you get a 150-minute Tourist’s Guide to Spain, a parade of supernaturally-beautiful bodies and a good amount of dime-store philosophy. It’s a bit like window-shopping in malls – you know you can’t afford these things, you know they are not good for you, but you just can’t take your eyes off them. Zoya Akhtar’s second feature film revolves around three well-off bachelors each of whom is battling some sort of repression and who would liberate themselves over a three-week European road trip. It would be crude to attack this film – or any other – on the basis that it talks about the problems of the rich, isolated from the existence of the overwhelming majority. Sorrow, after all, knows no class. As long as such a work doesn’t become blind to values beyond its immediate context, I think there is little reason to object to its existence. Akhtar makes it amply clear at the outset that this is a film of, by and, most importantly, for the privileged and that all the wisdom it offers applies to those who have the luxury to indulge in them. So, at least, this is not an entirely dishonest or misguided project. Yes, it’s woven around the stereotype that men have trouble articulating their emotions and that it takes a Manic Pixie Dream Girl no less attractive than Katrina Kaif to snap them out of their hang-ups. And a trip to Spain. Nonetheless, the director takes pains to point out that the adventure sports that the three men play to overcome their inhibition is not an expression of masculine reassertion, accompanied nearly always as they are by at least one woman, but a contact with their vulnerable side. Like her brother’s debut film, Akhtar’s is a “guys’ movie”, but it regularly teases out values that are generally absent in this kind of cinema. Awkward moments that are typically dissolved by man-child humour are allowed to play out freely. On the other hand, despite the impressive sport sequences and the instantly beautifying quality of continental light, ZNMD has an impoverished visual vocabulary consisting of an endless series of close-ups, two-shots and three-shots that is ultimately rather exhausting. Oh, and what Thom Andersen said about personal filmmaking.

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