Anuj Kumar

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.

Coming at a time when the debate about the original inhabitant and the migrant/trespasser is raging across the world, young filmmaker Raam Reddy mounts a fable that fascinates with its subversive tone and veritable voice. The atmospheric visuals and magic realism remind one of Marquez and Manoj Night Shyamalan, but Raam sets up his own leela in the hills of the Himalayas. In Jugnuma, Dev (Manoj Bajpayee) lords over the orchards that once belonged to the British masters. He has inherited the colonial privilege that he delegates to the locals to nurture his sprawling estate. Mundane meets the magical, as Raam opens a window to the Dev’s introspective nature. Suggesting the misplaced pride of being self-made, the genial master makes his own wings and glides over the hills to keep a check on the locals who work on his estate, look for possible trespassers, and perhaps test his boundaries.

During the pan-Indian wave, one thing that has reached Bollywood shores from the South is the toolkit of the Iron Age. Armed with cleavers, these days our heroes are slashing and slashing hard. It is not always when the stakes or tempers run high. It is just for the hack of it. Bored of firing gunshots from a distance, now they wield an axe and a hammer to grind the opposition to pulp. With an adult certificate becoming a sign of misplaced maturity, the makers can play with as much blood as they want. There is nothing like excess anymore. If Ranbir Kapoor can do it, how can Tiger Shroff be far behind? In this fourth installment of the action franchise, Ronny (Tiger) is madly in love with a girl named Alisha (debutante Harnaaz Sandhu), who the world feels doesn’t exist.

During the pandemic, a booster dose of the vaccine became a common term. It was intended to boost the immune system’s response to the virus. This week, Vivek Agnihotri injects a booster dose of cinematic virus that he unleashed with The Kashmir Files lest people develop immunity against communal politics. Once again, blending a discriminating version of the past with a myopic vision of the present, The Bengal Files not only scratches the wounds of the Partition but also punctures them to manipulate emotions. Soaked in blood and hate against one community and religion, the film uses cinema as a tool to divide. Juxtaposing the present State of affairs in West Bengal with the Calcutta riots of August 1946 in the wake of the Muslim League’s call for Direct Action Day, followed by the Noakhali riots, the film says that Partition is an unfinished business, instigating majoritarian fear about demographic change and illegal migration.