Ishita Sengupta

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.

We are living in dire times. Films are being made by the dozen, and none can be told apart. Generic music is the norm, and graphic, violent visuals leak from one Friday to the next. This trifecta of male rage, ruthlessness and sad music has been reiterated with such force and abandon that a deep insensitivity has cultivated in both the makers and the audience. A splash of blood doesn’t cut it anymore; a jab of a knife doesn’t do the job. People cannot be gunned down. They need to be murdered, sliced and butchered. They need to really, really die for the hero to be sated and the audience to cheer. When violence assumed such glamour is hard to pinpoint, but the continued success of most actioners, each centring on a bloodthirsty lead, is spawning iterations of the same. And each male actor is trying their chances at it. Rajkummar Rao does the same in Maalik, a film so imitative that it could be the synonym of ‘derivative’.

Few filmmakers aim as high as Anurag Basu. The striving is driven more by curiosity than ambition — the desire to see what can be achieved when a story is set to music and punctuated with whimsy. The symphony is rapturous but not guaranteed, making his storytelling both messy and distinct. Inconsistent as this might be, it can also be rewarding: the highs in his films are so potent that the lesser moments are frustrated and elevated in anticipation Metro… In Dino is no exception. Basu’s feature is characteristically chaotic, buzzing with the cacophony of a crowd and beating with a single heart. It has the levity and longing of his later style and bleeds more than builds. It carries the hurt of unspoken words and the humour of saying it aloud. A spiritual sequel to Life in a… Metro, Basu’s latest has similar vibes but differs in spirit. If the 2007 film was concerned with the loneliness of citied existence then Metro… In Dino is about the cities we carry within ourselves.

Everything about Vishal Furia’s Maa is about the optics. The film is touted as mytho-horror, a shorthand of mythological horror, which has existed before. Aditya Sarpotdar’s Munjya (2024) is an example, yet Maa spells it out like the film is a product undergoing rebranding by a new CEO. Again, given the title, the end credits feature names of the makers and producers with their mothers’ names pencilled in the middle. Even for a persuasive film, this is too much posturing, and Maa is far from it. Hindi cinema has reached a point where the success of a genre should frighten us. The moment something works, ten similar projects are lined up, and this does not consider the sequels of the patient zero. Furia’s Maa is an upshot of this; it belongs in the same world as Shaitaan (2024) and exists because of the latter’s success.

The current landscape of the Hindi language streaming space is so dire that for every bad show, there is something worse waiting in the wings. This not just complicates comparisons but makes objective criticism impossible. For every “this is really the worst show” thought in your head, there is another informed thought that counters with “but don’t you remember that?” Mistry, the new JioHotstar show, is a little of this and that. Which is to say, it is an objectively bad series, but a worse series than it exists. Directed by Rishab Seth, Mistry is the remake of the popular American drama Monk. And while Seth reimagines it in an Indian setting, he also waters down everything fun in the procedural drama, making a damp squib of a series. The premise is the same: a detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder, grappling with the sudden death of his wife, helps the police force to solve cases. Much of the allure of Monk resided in its character development and in using humour not as a means to make light of mental illness, but as a vessel to make it accessible. Mistry goes for cheap thrills.

It is not an unreasonable want. Sitaare is the spiritual sequel of Taare Zameen Par (2007), Khan’s directorial debut that can function as a synonym of a sob-fest. Two decades ago, he played a perceptive teacher who recognised a dyslexic child’s struggle even when his parents failed to do so. This time, he plays an impolite basketball coach entrusted with the task of teaching the sport to a group of specially-abled people. Although adapted from the 2018 Spanish film Champions, there is a neatness to the circle, an authenticity to the premise of a teacher wanting to be taught. But there is a sea of difference between the performances, even when the intent remains the same. If Khan was pathbreaking in calling out the insensitivity in others, he is cloying when portraying the same thoughtlessness. His portrayal of an insecure athlete thrown into the mix of people he is prone to make fun of is superfluous at best, even when sincere. His pitch is perpetually dialled up, reminiscent of the sole misfire in Laal Singh Chaddha (2002), and at odds with the unaffected renditions of the rest. The film mimics the tonality.