Anuj Kumar

It is heartening that, in the pan-Indian wave, once in a while, a socially conscious story from the south also lands on Bollywood’s shores. In Dhadak 2, a remake of the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, where caste becomes the villain in a young romance, debutant director Shazia Iqbal struggles to strike a balance between retaining the voice of the original and applying a Dharma polish to a social reality that has been mainly out of the syllabus for Bollywood biggies. The result is a mixed bag. While it is brave for Bollywood standards, the storytelling fails to provide a lived-in experience and becomes a kind of explainer on how Dalit lives matter for the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai audience.

After watching Dhadak, one finds a serious layer in this infantile sequel to Ajay Devgn’s tribute to his Punjabi roots as well. The writing plays on the Bollywood Sardar stereotype, one who is innocent, stands his ground, and doesn’t show his back in a battle. Lest we forget, the makers ensure the word Punjabi keeps popping up in the dhol-centric background score as well. After a long wait for a visa, when the simpleton Jassi (Ajay) comes to London, he discovers that his wife Dimple (Neeru Bajwa) has decided to ditch her. Lost, he strikes a chord with Rabia (Mrunal Thakur), a Pakistani musician who runs a wedding band with a transgender musician, Gul (Deepak Dobriyal), and Mehwish (Kubra Sait), as well as her foster daughter, Saba (Roshni Walia), after being ditched by her philandering husband, Danish (Chunkey Panday).

While the tastemakers of Bollywood have shifted their focus to love and romance in the darkness of theatres, they continue to serve slices of the dark ages in the brightness of living rooms. What started as an avenue for experimentation, OTT content is increasingly becoming predictable and phoney. With self-censorship limiting the options for subversion, long-form content with decorative layers is becoming tiresome to watch. The latest is Yash Raj Entertainment’s largely incoherent iteration of a cult’s commitment to recreate its god out of the flesh and blood of a select group of residents in the quaint area. Someone’s murder is someone’s sacrifice. Someone’s god is someone’s demon. We get the gist, but the mood, mystery, and message take a long time to align. Created by Gopi Puthran, who, having made the chilling Mardani universe, knows more than a thing or two about telling stories of women surviving a violent, patriarchal world. Here, he puts them at the centre of conflict, but the chill feels cosmetic.

Sulking sons, duty-bound fathers, and suffering mothers make for engaging Hindi cinema. This week, emerging director Kayoze Irani revisits familiar daddy issues with mixed results. Sarzameen’s basic premise reminds me of Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti, where circumstances force a father in uniform (Prithivraj Sukumaran) to choose between his son (Ibrahim Ali Khan) and his duty. Set in the picturesque political cauldron of Kashmir, the stakes get higher here when the neglected son stutters his way into the enemy camp led by dreaded militant Kabil (K.C. Shankar). As expected, the mother (Kajol) tries to be the connecting link, but a past that needs to be addressed remains unhealed, leaving wounds unresolved.

After delivering logs of deadwood, Mohit Suri, who loves to paint doomed romance on celluloid, returns to his Aashiqui roots with a fresh coat of mush whose ebbs and flows make one feel volatile and vulnerable in equal measure. An uplifting tale of unalloyed love whose pathos leaves its soot on the young souls, Saiyaaracarries the brooding intensity of a Mahesh Bhatt romance in the body of a maudlin Yash Raj love story. With mental health as the villain of the piece, the story echoes the times when love is reduced to a lollipop by market forces. In the digital age, Mohit dials back to the pre-rom-com era, when heartache travelled through the screen on the wings of melodies, sacrifice was considered a virtue, and selfless love was celebrated. Led by Irshad Kamil’s Saiyaara mera badla nahin hai, Mausam thoda badla hua hai (My love, you are the same, only the time has turned its back on us), the tripping soundtrack, put together by five composers, grows on your senses.

About an autistic girl struggling to find her way in a judgmental world, with a spring in her gingerly steps, Tanvi The Great carries the soul of Anupam Kher’s popular play, Kuchh Bhi Ho Sakta Hai (Anything can happen). It cocks a snook at the cynics and naysayers who question the flight of the dreamers. Surrounded by a supportive mother Vidya (Pallavi Joshi), an autism expert, and a grumpy grandfather, Pratap Raina (Kher), who doesn’t understand her condition, the socially awkward Tanvi Raina (debutante Shubhangi Dutt) finds the purpose of her life when she discovers that her soldier father, Samar (Karan Tacker), made the supreme sacrifice for the country. She steps out of the poetic space that her grandfather envisaged for her under the shadow of his friend Raja Sahab (Boman Irani) and resolves to fulfil her father’s wish by joining the armed forces. But the rules don’t allow an autistic person to enter the troops. Baffled by her guts, the grandfather, who also served in the army, tries to dissuade her but gradually finds that she is different but no less, and is fit to carry forward the family tradition when Major Srinivasan (Arvind Swamy makes a stock character functional) agrees to give shape to Tanvi’s dream. Nursing a guilt, in Tanvi’s dream, Srinivasan sees an opportunity to redeem himself.

Rajkummar Rao is going through a purple patch. Taking a break from his comic capers, this week, the actor dons the cape of an outlaw, a product of social injustice who ends up becoming the mirror image of what he sets out to wipe off. Maalik sounds like a spiritual cousin of Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhaiyya Ji, which was released last year. Both films posit masters of understatement who revel in realistic space in a bombastic, mainstream atmosphere. While Bhaiyya Ji went completely off-key after setting up the conflict, Maalik has its moments as writer-director Pulkit manages to create the mood that we associate with Tigmanshu Dhulia’s kind of cinema. The film is set in the feudal Allahabad of the late 1980s, where Deepak (Rajkummar), the son of a farm worker (a solid Rajendra Gupta), rebels against the landlords to become a ganglord and assumes the title of ‘Maalik.’ The police stations of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are full of case files of history sheeters like Deepak, who picked up a gun because of caste or class struggle, and were adopted by politicians to maintain the balance of power. Raj lends the flawed character flesh and blood, and adds sparks to the predictable character arc.

Early in Metro… In Dino, a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road Monty Sisodia (Pankaj Tripathi), desperate to press the refresh button in his married life, blurts out infertility, infidelity, and morality in one sentence to his nagging wife, Kajol (Konkona Sen Sharma), who seems caught between the ideals of today and the values of the past. In one comic flourish, director Anurag Basu reveals what his kaleidoscope holds, keeping us invested for almost three hours. A child born when Life in a Metro hit the theaters must be 18 now. Not much has changed in relationships, apart from the fact that now we have a teenager in the film who is grappling with her sexuality, and she is in no hurry. Meanwhile, technology and therapy have alleviated the issues faced by the individualistic generation and the concerns of people who missed the bus because they prioritised their family over themselves. Our films often tilt one way or the other. Critics bracket them as progressive, regressive, or somewhere in between. Anurag and his co-writers once again break the brackets and jettison algorithmic screenplays to craft a heart-warming tale of people falling in and out of love. There are echoes of the original, but Metro…in Dino has its own heart.