Anuj Kumar

Those who remember the tumultuous eighties would attest that the landmark Shah Bano case reshaped Indian secularism and the fault lines of identity politics for decades. But beyond the courtrooms, objections from clerics and political outrage, a story of faith, human dignity, and a woman’s rights unfolded within the four walls. Cast within the realm of fiction and point of view, this week director Suparn Varma reimagines the story of a devoted wife abandoned post-remarriage, her husband’s instant triple talaq, a brutal severance of support, and a fierce battle for maintenance that ripples a domestic dispute into a national debate, with deep socio-political ramifications.

At a time when taking umbrage is a national pastime, horror comedy is an imaginative form of creating an entertaining social commentary. With Stree and Bhediya, Maddock Films gave the genre a new life and carried the mood and message forward with Munjya. However, this meeting of natural and supernatural almost hits a dead end this week as the banner seems to be ‘marvelling’ at sustaining a desi multiverse rather than telling a compelling story. Inspired by blood sucking vampires from Hindu mythology, Munjya director Aditya Sarpotdar and his troika of writers have created a fascinating world based on the co-existence between humans and betaals and how the self-seeking creatures in both species are destroying this balance. However, both the text and the subtext remain undercooked, and what we get tastes like an adulterated Deepavali delicacy.

In Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, Anshuman Jha, known for his role as a lover boy in twisted love stories, tells the story of one eventful night, weaving it with mystery, history, and dollops of dark humour. A classic chamber film with crime at its vortex, Lord Curzon Ki Haveli unfolds in a summer home in the UK, where two couples gather for dinner. Rohit (Arjun Mathur) tells Dr Basuki (Paresh Pahuja) and Ira (Rasika Dugal), the guests of his wife, Sanya (Zoha Rahman), that there is a dead body in the large trunk in the drawing room. What seems like an innocuous joke, ignites a heated conversation, revealing the cracks in the relationship between Dr. Basuki and Ira. Gradually, we get a taste of the true menu of the dinner.

Out of Karan Johar’s young proteges, I find Shashank Khaitan’s voice the most influential in taking the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai conversation forward. Film after film, he creates the portrait of the young upper-middle-class Punjabi/ Marwari youth caught between the values inherited from the family and what the Internet defines as modern.

In May 2020, the newspaper image of a wiry Saiyub holding an unconscious Amrit in his lap on a scorched highway in Madhya Pradesh came across as an antidote to the raging virus. Fate has its own destiny. It was not just a melancholic picture of abiding friendship, Saiyub took Amrit home when a section of the media was projecting Muslims as super spreaders. Journalist Basharat Peer tracked the story of two friends to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh for The New York Times.

Social media might have bridged the distance between Bollywood stars and the common man, but the curiosity of fans and trolls to look at the view behind the camera remains unsatiated. Over the years, directors Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Karan Johar have used their access to inside stories to whet this appetite by creating pieces of entertaining cinema and peeping talk shows. Taking this ‘silsila’ forward, debutant Aryan Khan pulls back the curtains and brews an intoxicating concoction of gossip, news, and salacious details in between to mount a sharp take on the movie mafia, as Karan describes Bollywood biggies in the series, and their shenanigans and hypocrisy. Aryan uses his access to his father’s friends and colleagues not to paint a tribute, but to create subversive graffiti. He roasts his father’s friends, plays with their image, spoofs his detractors, and in the end gives the series a climactic twist, a quirk of fate that would make Manmohan Desai proud. The self-awareness of the insider doesn’t become frictional in the rollercoaster ride, and it is what separates Ba***ds of Bollywood from Tees Maar Khan of yore, giving it more heft than Om Shanti Om and more colour than Luck By Chance. When the asterisks in Ba***ds give way to the letters, the spirit of the series shines through.

When the invisible claws of censorship begin to throttle creativity, filmmakers either conform or subvert. This week, Subhash Kapoor, who has mastered the art of sugar coating the bitter pill with satire, rewinds to the farmer agitation against land acquisition in Greater Noida’s Bhatta Parsaul in 2011 that changed the course of discourse of politics of development to drive his Jolly LLB franchise forward. Kapoor relocates the source of the story from Uttar Pradesh to Rajasthan, but its soul echoes with the farmer’s distress across the region. Here is a film that puts the farmer at the centre of the narrative; here is a story that prioritises the spirit of the law over its letter, delivering a message that underscores the need for an equitable distribution of wealth.

Noted French filmmaker and screenwriter Jean Renoir once said, a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again. A decade back, I related to this famous quote while watching movies of Mahesh Bhatt and Ram Gopal Varma when their graphs were coming down. This week, Renoir’s words echoed in my ears while watching Anurag Kashyap’s Nishaanchi. One of the most original voices of our times, Anurag seems to have cut down his cult of Gangs of Wasseypur (GOW) into fragments and then casually stitched them into a fresh screenplay around crime, revenge, and sibling rivalry. Laced with potent social commentary on patriarchy and the politician-criminal nexus in the Hindi heartland, the idea is not new; some of his expressions of the human condition have become stock. However, like GOW, Anurag subverts Bollywood tropes and titles to create a tantalising experience that works in spurts and disappoints in chunks. The best is the limerick made out of Andha Kanoon, Sarkar, and Baghban.