Priyanka Roy

Before the release of Mirzapur: The Movie, a number of questions popped up in my mind. The most important among them being: how does one view a popular, pulsating world and its indelible, iconic characters through a new lens, having journeyed with them over three blockbuster seasons? Mirzapur: The Movie — based, of course, on the streaming winner which broke out as soon as it dropped its Season 1 in November 2018 and has since become a pop-culture phenomenon — ushers you in with a feel which is familiar yet fresh, taking us into the origins of this gritty, violent world and the beginnings of its memorable players. This is a film that has been created purely in the service of its fans. For a large part, it fulfils that promise, but one also feels that the bite and bhaukaal has gone missing in this tempered-down big-screen outing.

A fundamental problem of Kanika Dhillon’s writing — and that is particularly evident in the case of the films in which there is a raging female protagonist — is that the ideas burst with immense possibilities, but the execution (and that stems from the root of its weak writing itself) is far from effective. Dhillon focuses on flawed, unapologetic women thrust into circumstances which often place them in a do-or-die decision-making pivot, but the result is more of an unhinged chaotic mess than a carefully-built complex quagmire. This is especially true of Kangana Ranaut’s Judgementall Hai Kya, in which Dhillon explored gaslighting, but the film’s convoluted look at mental health came in for much criticism. Or for that matter, Do Patti, with Kriti Sanon featuring in a double role, that felt like a superficial, glossy take on domestic abuse.

Nimisha Sajayan in Babita Singh ReportingIn 2021, The Great Indian Kitchen — a genre-defying, gender dynamic-defining Malayalam film — brought patriarchy to the forefront in ways both casual and conscious, with its scathing social commentary highlighting the invisible, exhausting and unacknowledged labour in the domestic space that most women in our kitchens, and outside it, are still subjected to. Nimisha Sajayan walked away with the spotlight in the film — symbolised by that triumphant walkout at the end — with her character, who is simply credited as “The Wife”, reclaiming autonomy and rejecting the status quo. In many ways, The Great Indian Kitchen, directed by Jeo Baby, feels like a companion piece to Babita Singh Reporting, the new Prime Video film, that stars Sajayan as its protagonist.

Before debating on the yays and nays of Awarapan 2, an undeniable fact has to be acknowledged: Awarapan is a case study. A box-office bomb on release a year short of two decades ago, the film ended up last in a three-way clash at the box office in end-June 2007, lagging behind even Himesh Reshammiya’s Aap Kaa Surroor. At a time when Emraan Hashmi was bolstered/ burdened by the ‘Serial Kisser’ tag, thanks to his lip-scapades on screen, the Mohit Suri film gave us a brooding, silent leading man, a gangster lamenting the loss of his love and seeking redemption by rescuing a damsel in distress. My review, written on release day, had even mentioned how a non-kissing Emraan Hashmi was no fun, words that I have learnt to regret in retrospect. The film, despite its moments and its music, didn’t work.

At the end of Operation Safed Sagar, the following words light up the screen: “Operation Safed Sagar remains the highest aerial offensive operation in history. The Indian Air Force flew a total of 7,631 sorties during the Kargil War across its helicopter, transport and fighter squadrons…. (It is) an operation without parallel in the history of aerial warfare”. Operation Safed Sagar is also a series with little or no parallel in the history of Indian storytelling. Across six episodes, the Netflix show not only talks about facts and figures, numbers and nuances, but also underlines the emotional depth of an operation driven by both patriotic fervour and personal payback.

Through comics and cinema, the cornerstone of the story of men (and women) in spandex is common — it is no cakewalk being a superhero. For decades, our superheroes — even as they have fought fierily and rescued humankind over and over again — have wrestled with self-doubt, isolation, guilt and the pitfalls of leading a double life. All of these feelings explode in the latest Spider-Man outing, with Brand New Day being a crowd-pleasing as well as cerebral film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (drawn, of course, from characters originally created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko).

In Interstellar, a mission to save humanity encompasses the universe, but the emotional core is a deeply moving father and daughter bond. In Inception, the grand, gravity-defying action may be a high-stakes blockbuster spectacle, but it is the deeply personal trauma of the protagonist that drives the narrative. A gritty beach evacuation in Dunkirk is held together by his silent, brooding moments. The backdrop of atomic fission in Oppenheimer is balanced with the psychological turmoil that plays within the man who catalyses it. In The Dark Knight, Gotham is refashioned as a sprawling, worldly canvas overrun with mobsters, corrupt law enforcers and vigilantes.

A lot is at stake in Ikka, and we are aren’t just talking about the receding hairlines of its main men. Almost three decades after they came together on screen for Border, Sunny Deol and Akshaye Khanna feature in this commercial Bollywood-style courtroom thriller that cranks up melodrama to the max, but is nostalgically old-school enough to make for some guilty-pleasure viewing. Unlike Border, where they batted for the same team, Sunny and Akshaye are at loggerheads in this Siddharth P. Malhotra-directorial, though they do join forces — unwillingly for the former — for a large part of this film that throws in enough twisty plot points but isn’t particularly smart or sleek.