Ishita Sengupta

TEHRAN is the latest John Abraham film, where the actor is out to avenge. For a while, it was the country (Parmanu, Satyameva Jayate); then it became more pointed (in both Vedaa and The Diplomat, he saves a girl). A less obvious, but more definite, shift has been his heroism, which has shapeshifted from a combative force to inner resilience. It has become less showy and more nuanced, more cerebral and less extraneous, much like the nationalism in his filmography. In that sense, Tehran is an able extension of this humanity that props up the ideas of protection without losing sight of the cost. In Delhi, 2012, an Israeli diplomat’s car was bombed. Similar blasts occurred in Georgia and Thailand. But the one which we see in the capital (designed in a sleek shot; Evgeniy Gubrenko and Andre Menezes are the cinematographers) results in an unwitting casualty. A young girl on the street, not much older than the daughter of ACP Rajeev Kumar (Abraham), suffers injury. This pulls him into the case even when he was hesitant initially.

There is such a thing as a Festival Discovery. When you walk into a theatre blind and watch in awe a film taking shape and culminating into everything you wanted to see but did not know. There is such a thing as a film seeing you in a crowd, acknowledging you for what you are and smoothening the jagged edges of what has become of you. Like offering a handshake in the dark. Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was that film for me. The description on the festival website was vague: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least.” It said something and nothing. Something bad happened to Agnes (Victor), the tall, awkward protagonist of the film who lives in a quaint house and is overjoyed every time her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie) visits her from New York. They sit on a couch and collapse into a lived-in comfort of years. You look around and see no one else around. When they meet their other friends from college, Agnes is asked, “Do you still live there?” Her gaze falls and Lydie holds her hand beneath the table. But even she has her own apprehensions. “Don’t kill yourself,” she urges. “I won’t,” Agnes reassures with a certitude that implies that she had considered it.

SHAZIA IQBAL’S Dhadak 2 stands on dented shoulders. Like its spiritual predecessor, Dhadak (2018) — adapted from Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) — it too borrows the contours from another language film, Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018). This baffling practice of sharing genesis with acclaimed sources renders the franchise open to closer scrutiny and resistant to unbiased engagement. Observations are accompanied by comparisons, and every question heads in a similar direction: did it improve on the primary material? With the first film, the query was easy to resolve. Shashank Khaitan’s Dhadak reduced Sairat’s caste struggle to a homegrown class difference, making even the impending tragedy feel facile. Iqbal’s film, however, puts forth a more complicated proposition. Hers is a more faithful rendition of the original and by virtue of that, a rare mainstream Hindi film to tackle caste politics with central force. Dhadak 2’s distinction then is reiteration — an audacious task still, reflected in the 19 cuts the film accrued from the CBFC, ranging from blurring of casteist slurs to references to caste. The certification board’s cageyness has the most strident representation in the opening disclaimer that claims everything in the film to be fictional — the city it is based in, the depicted violence, mentions of suicide, etc; the denial is no different from Hindi cinema’s long-standing propensity of looking away from caste-based issues. Emerging from this darkness, Iqbal’s film offers a course-correction.

Kayoze Irani’s Sarzameen, comes in the long line of films that sacrifice a decent idea at the altar of inept filmmaking. It is one of those political films that props itself up to make a statement but lacks both the spine and the bite to articulate its politics. Kannan Iyer’s Ae Watan Mere Watan (2024) is a recent example, also backed by Dharma Productions, where the voice of the maker got lost in the chaos of commentary. But if Sarzameen is to be believed, Irani has no voice. This, of course, is not wholly true. Before directing his feature debut, Irani helmed one of the better shorts in the uneven Netflix anthology Ajeeb Daastaans (2021). There was genuine sensitivity on display even when aided by a persuasive cast. Four years since, nothing of that remains. Sarzameen could have been directed by a tree, and I still wouldn’t be surprised. Every frame of the film is dunked in staleness, and the dialogues are woefully clunky, like an AI is talking to another AI.

Great loves look ordinary in close-ups. A man having black coffee because someone he loved liked it; a woman keeping the other side of her bed empty for days. A boy abandoning his future to take care of someone he loves; a girl refusing care to protect the person she loves. These are familiar stories of regular people, more common than one imagines. But there is greatness still, less in the falling and more in the telling, and few filmmakers do it like Mohit Suri. This is not to say that he has always been successful. If anything, the opposite is true. Suri’s filmography is dotted with variations of a similar kind of love story, and in the last couple of years, the balance has been scattered. It has been either too bizarre (Ek Villain Returns), too outlandish (Half Girlfriend) or too morose (Hamari Adhuri Kahani). Individually, these are peak attributes of a Mohit Suri film, and yet it took a while (more than a decade since Aashiqui 2) for things to fall into place, and then — rejoice!

ZERO SE RESTART, the documentary on the making of 12th Fail (2023), opens with a scene from the film. Manoj Kumar Sharma (Vikrant Massey), the UPSC aspirant, is sitting in a closed room. It is the final leg of his gruelling journey, and the interviewer is irked. We don’t hear Sharma speak, but the formidable face of the examiner fills the frame, so do the two words he chews out: “What arrogance!”. For those familiar with Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s last work, the context is evident. And for those familiar with Chopra, the text is. Little about the filmmaker is unknown. His early career, National Award winning short film, struggle in distributing Parinda (1989; distributors had offered Chopra money not to kill the leads — Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit, but instead Jackie Shroff’s character), losing temper either with actors (he had infamously bitten Shabana Raza’s hand during Kareeb because she was making a mistake) or journalists (Chopra screaming during 3 Idiots’ screening is as well known as the film). When these are coupled with his filmmaking verve and producer-ambition, a tangled portrait of a man surfaces, one so incautious in dealing with others for the sake of art that it makes one wonder about the hubris of his artistry in private. Jaskunwar Kohli’s Zero Se Restart springs from that curiosity.

Success improves most things except Hindi cinema. Past proves that acceptance of a certain kind of film often spawns inferior versions of the same. Many are guilty, but perhaps none more than Dharma, the production company that has made a business model out of a single premise: youth sparring with age. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), filmmaker Karan Johar, also the co-owner of Dharma, played with traditional trappings as a young man resisted parental pressure without standing up against it. Success followed, and so did similar iterations; in 2023, he fortified the defiance of young love in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) and two years later, his banner has bankrolled Aap Jaisa Koi, a shell of a film that is all framing. The point of contention remains the same: tradition holds the sword to love. But Vivek Soni’s film is also generously influenced by Rocky Rani, and as a result, the discord comprises as much old order stacked against new as the new carrying the vestige of the old. And, yet again, women and the Bengali community (I will circle back to this) shoulder the responsibility for the moral rehabilitation of the men.

Most films use metaphors. Santosh Singh’s Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is a metaphor. It is a metaphor for a privileged person, born with cultural capital, going an extra mile to convince themself of having earned the privilege. It is a metaphor for a nepo baby making her debut and holding the hand of a gifted outsider in the journey. And finally, it is a metaphor for the collective blindness of the Hindi film industry to quality, resulting in a film like Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan. Before one calls me out for ridiculing blindness, let me just put it out there: it is the film which is insensitive. Written by Mansi Bagla (also the writer of the 2022 film, Forensic— a forewarning), Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is supposedly an adaptation of Ruskin Bond’s short story, The Eyes Have It. I exercise caution because what we have here is a butchered version of Bond’s three-page stirring short story that, characteristically, marries emotional nuance with light-heartedness. On the contrary, Singh’s film is anchored by delusion and bogged down by incompetence. It is designed as a sweeping love story (characters talk like they are play-acting Laila Majnu in real life), scored like a magnum opus lite (Vishal Mishra is the composer and singer) and unfolds like multiple disconnected reels. Actors speak in the same pitch for different emotions, as if each scene exists in isolation. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It is difficult to tell with Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan.