Ishita Sengupta

Watching Zakir Khan do stand-up comedy is to reckon with the limitations of the art form and the possibilities of it. It is to witness regular observations carry the weight of a punchline and existential thoughts take flight with the lightness of humour. It is to see a man holding the audience in thrall even with his silence. Tathastu in 2022 was a genre-defying set that wrapped thoughts about his parents, concerns about mortality, and filial resentment in humour without punctuating them with gags. His latest Delulu Express does something similar without reiterating the format or style. It is a lighter arrangement imbued with excessive style and multiple characters. On paper it is more chaotic but beats with the same narrative heart that Khan has been honing since Tathastu.

A SALMAN KHAN FILM has come to mean certain things: it arrives on Eid, it abstains from intimacy, it extends the actor’s legacy of goodwill, it insists on pairing him opposite someone at least two decades younger, and resists making any demands of acting from Khan. In the last couple of years, there have been multiple renderings of this formulaic outline (Bodyguard, 2011; Radhe, 2021); a doubling down on this blueprint with Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (2023) whilst also sneaking in another rule: he will not try anymore, pushing the bar to the floor. The upshot of this is that a Salman Khan film can no longer disappoint, it can only impress. The sole way to go is up. As a result, the audience is conditioned to expect nothing and believe everything. Khan wore a jacket mid-air in Kisi Ka Bhai and lip-synced leisurely in Tiger 3 (freely skipping most words). His reluctance to strive is so deep that even an ounce of effort on his part draws cheer. He moves his body and you commend his flexibility. He cries in a scene and you compare him to Robert De Niro. Watching a Salman Khan film today has come to resemble an act of parental bias as if he were an irate child and the rest of us exist to humour him.

An angry mob vandalises a public space. The premise is ransacked, chairs are upturned, and threats are issued: “Every action has a reaction”. They are seething over a remark made by a comedian about their political leader, standing in that place. Soon, social media is crammed with more threats and conspiracy theories, each linking the said comedian to extremists and sources of his funding to illegal sponsorship; he is tipped to be the unofficial spokesperson of the rival party. As days pass, speculations get rife; one party worker comes to a news channel and says he regrets nothing. “There should be a limit to humour”. Harshad Nalawade’s Follower is about that person. This might be technically misleading, but it is spiritually accurate. Nalawade’s astute and timely film is about the faceless trolls that appear to self-multiply and clog every pore of social media. His debut film tracks the senseless way they operate, fuelled by the misguided notion that unquestionable obedience is their greatest calling. Follower is about followers.

Second time within months there is an Aurangzeb reference in a Hindi film. If the Mughal ruler was vilified in Laxman Utekar’s Chhaava then he is freshly referenced in Vikram Bhatt’s Tumko Meri Kasam. A character wickedly says he can do anything to sit in the seat of power, like Aurangzeb. But neither the man saying it is particularly odious nor is the outcome of the mention a disaster. One can argue about the overall ineffectiveness of Bhatt’s new work, but, in reality, Tumko Meri Kasam harks back to the good old time in Hindi cinema when films were made without agenda and motives, and scenes were allowed to breathe and not spliced together by furtive video-game editing. Well, one part of this is more true than the other. Scenes go on unendingly in Tumko Meri Kasam (endearing at first and grating soon after) as the narrative veers towards propaganda. Except, Bhatt’s film props up a man and not a nation. But given that it props at least something up, Anupam Kher features in a central role and does everything. He stands in court as the accused; he argues as his own lawyer and doubles up as a detective to find loopholes in the case even as police officers remain conspicuously absent like what we are watching is a figment of someone’s imagination.

LAST WEEK, a tightly wound, one-shot wonder called Adolescence dropped on Netflix. It took a couple of days and the verdict was out: this is the streamer’s breakout show of the year. Like Baby Reindeer was in the previous year and the first season of Squid Games, the Korean survival thriller, was in 2021. The list keeps expanding as one looks back but the dearth of Indian titles is conspicuous. Vikramaditya Motwane’s Sacred Games (2018) was a formidable start but the mentions have only been leaner with time. There is a distinct kind of non-commital work that is more content in occupying space than inhabiting time. They speak a lot but say too little. Except for Motwane’s Black Warrant (co-directed by Satyanshu Singh), most Netflix originals from India this year have been an assembly line of similar-looking production. Neeraj Pandey’s sprawling Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, the second part of his Khakee franchise, is the newest addition.

History is proof that the most memorable Hindi films have centred on impossible deals. I will offer some examples. In Raj Kanwar’s Judaai (1997), a wife sold her husband to another woman for a briefcase of cash. In Satish Kaushik’s Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain (1999), the two principal characters enter into a one-year marriage contract; in S. Shankar’s Nayak: The Real Hero (2001), a journalist makes a deal with a chief minister to fill in his shoes for a day. Apart from finding Anil Kapoor, the actor present in all three films, either brokering deals or being brokered in such agreements, the instances highlight the commonality of these segues.

In a literal world, ‘Baksho Bondi’ — Bengali words carrying set meanings — need not exist together. When translated to English, ‘baksho’ means ‘box’ and ‘bondi’ is ‘captive’; both denoting the idea of being boxed up. But then again, in a literal world the verbatim translation of ‘Baksho Bondi’ would be a phrase: captive in a box. Yet first-time directors Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi forsake precision in favour of interpretation, choosing Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi, 2025), meaning to fight with an imaginary adversary, as the English title, and in doing so, shrink the subjectivity of a person to the objectivity of an experience. The result is a film that unfolds as an interplay of both titles —imbued with the angst of confinement and the spirit of resistance— while mirroring the ambiguity that comes with it. Maya (Tillotama Shome) lives with her husband and son in Barrackpore, a neighbourhood located at the fringes of Kolkata, a densely populated Indian city. She works constantly although the specificity of her labour takes shape later. She irons clothes and ferries them from door to door on a cycle, and does domestic work for a family. In between, she outlines her husband’s routine and instructs their teenage son Debu to help him with it.

Like all bad films, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?