Ishita Sengupta

Anshuman Jha’s Lord Curzon Ki Haveli is the kind of film that says a lot about how it was made. This, of course, is conjecture, but hear me out: a group of actors have met for a weekly hang. Conversations soon segue into discussions about mainstream cinema and how disappointing things have been. Outside, the sun has set, and inside, the room is filled with a haze of smoke and moody yellow lighting. Posters of Alfred Hitchcock and Satyajit Ray adorn the wall; the bookshelf in the corner has a section dedicated to plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Emboldened by fluids, one of them suggests a radical departure. He will make a film that will show others how it is done. The rest, equally fortified, chime in: yes. I’d like to believe that better sense has prevailed since then, but it was too late to back out. The result is Lord Curzon Ki Haveli

There are good shows and bad shows. Then, there are shows like Search: The Naina Murder Case, which resist classification not because they are too nuanced for binaries but because they are too frustrating to arrive at such conclusions. Although divided into six episodes, the Rohan Sippy-directed outing feels endless, and it is the jarring lack of ambition, that leaks into every clog, turning out to be its biggest flaw. If I still haven’t been clear, let me just say this: The Naina Murder Case makes Konkona Sen Sharma look bad, and any person worth a Letterboxd account would know, this is not good news.

Once upon a time, Varun Dhawan was an interesting actor. He experimented with promise and, later, when his choices became conventional — leaning mostly on playing a man-child oblivious to the ways of the world till told otherwise by his female counterpart — the actor managed to inject intrigue in repetition. Once upon a time, his performance was a crossbreed of the 90s’ excess and modern alertness, evoking more nostalgia than awe. Today he is unable to not just diversify but even essay the same roles with conviction; this devolution, and not lack of evolution, is a thing of wonder.

In Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, an essay is breathed into existence. For The New York Times in 2020, journalist Basharat Peer had reported on the COVID-19-infected period in India through the account of two friends’ struggle to reach home. Titled Taking Amrit Home, the piece elaborated on the government-sanctioned lockdown when migrant workers, stranded due to the indefinite closure of urban workspaces and transportation, were forced to walk back to their villages. Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, the men in Peer’s article, were part of the exodus ,and while Ghaywan’s film, based on the text, tracks what becomes of the two men, it unfolds as a more lucid adaptation of the unbecoming of a country.

Fairly early in Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), a character is instructed on how to grieve. Don’t cut your hair, don’t ask for a second helping and walk bare feet for the next couple of days. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) has just lost his father but his extended relatives have no time for feelings. The mourning ought to be communal and hence regimented, an ask which falls in line with their larger curiosity in Anand’s life: at 30 years of age, why is he still unmarried? The demand to conform and the desire to live form the crux of Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, a strikingly assured debut and the first Marathi film to be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. After Anand’s father passes away, his mother persuades him to go to his ancestral village for the stipulated 10-day mourning period. He resists suggesting that he will go to pick her up instead. A quiet telling-off changes his mind as they both journey back to a place which has more memories than people.

Bollywood is many things. The ugly, sweeping, mimicked moniker is an industry and a genre. It is a person and a personhood, a lifestyle and a livelihood. Over the years, multiple films have attempted taming the beast and dissecting, in varied ways, the mechanics of the space. If Farah Khan depicted an origin story of sorts in Om Shanti Om (2007) then Zoya Akhtar offered a more intimate portrayal of the industry through the lens of outsiders. Aryan Khan’s directorial, The Ba***ds of Bollywood lies somewhere in between. The seven-episode series has the campiness of Khan’s film and the conviction of Akhtar’s debut, culminating eventually as a show that deftly straddles emphasis with frivolity.

In India, the concept of godmen — spiritual leaders elevated to the status of demigod — has spawned a series of narratives. Fiction (Aashram ) and non-fiction (My Daughter Joined a Cult, Cult of Fear: Asaram Bapu, etc) alike have responded to the peculiarity of the culture. Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s new film, Bayaan, a loosely wound police procedural that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a frustrating reiteration of the template. To be fair, Bayaan is largely effective and well-made with slight exceptions. The plot is rooted in Rajasthan, where a godman, ‘Maharaj’ (Chandrachur Singh), runs an ashram full of young girls. When one of them tips off about his sexual abuse, a Delhi-based police officer, Roohi (Huma Qureshi), is assigned to the case. She might be a novice, but she knows the way. Her father (Sachin Khedekar) has been in the profession for a long time and is celebrated by peers. Mishra’s film outlines the way in which an anonymous tip opens a can of worms for the godman, only for Roohi to realise that she, a privileged urban woman, inhabits a world as compliant as that of the rural women.

In Anurag Kashyap’s Monkey in a Cage (Bandar), provocations arrive early. When a man held in custody is asked to sign papers, he refuses because he cannot read the document. “It’s in Marathi”. The cop’s retort flies back: “If you want to stay in Maharashtra, you have to know Marathi”. Later, there is an elaborate jail song, condemning everything from religion to caste-based divides. Kashyap has been angry for a while. The filmmaker’s rage has been so palpable that it percolates from social media posts to his films. His last couple of original works have been topical indictments — each more incensed than the other, and defined and undone by fury. At this point, his anger is a knotty glaze on his films — impossible to ignore but also distracting. The pattern has been so consistent that baiting seems to be the intent and the whole point. His latest, Monkey in a Cage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a more obvious step towards that direction.