Rahul Desai

It takes a considerable amount of skill to make big-budget action movies — in this case, a period pirate swashbuckler — that are neither great nor terrible. How is it possible to be so safe when the scale is lavish and the stakes are high? How is it possible to be so deliberately sterile and precisely average when the resources are limitless? But one of the magic tricks of this decade has been the way streaming platforms have legitimised the middling-and-forgettable genre. Heck, it’s almost an art form. “Produced by the Russo brothers” is usually a tell, and The Bluff is another bullseye for ambient action (I vowed to get through this review without using the word “algorithmic”). The Bluff has some texture, a pinch of personality, bone-crunching violence and gore, a spirited lead even, yet I can’t remember a single moment right now. And it’s been only 8 minutes since the end credits rolled. I suppose that’s a win for the content ecosystem.

t’s bittersweet when you learn of an independent film releasing against all odds. The more inspirational the journey is, the more complicated it gets for film critics who must approach it objectively. What if it’s not good, despite the sincerity and courage? What if the inventive process of making it is the best part of its legacy? What if the craft is consumed by underdog hype and passion? What if the behind-the-scenes story is more interesting than the film’s story? What sort of euphemisms might one have to use to be kinder to gutsy ‘outsider’ art? The anxiety is more heightened with a film like Tanmaya Shekhar’s Nukkad Naatak: a crowd-funded, self-promoted and self-distributed indie whose guerrilla marketing campaign features a recent cross-country road trip in a rented caravan. It wears its defiance on its sleeve. The premise is even designed to be curious and socially expressive — a sign that commentary might be used to offset a lack of depth.

Accused dives straight in. It has no time to mess around. We are parachuted into the life of Dr. Geetika Sen (Konkona Sen Sharma), a senior surgeon at a London hospital: smart, confident, married, on the brink of a major promotion and a move to Chester. She’s a taskmaster, but so good at her job that her social identity — a queer South Asian immigrant — is a footnote. Until it isn’t. HR receives an anonymous email by a patient accusing Geetika of predatory behavior and sexual harassment. Just like that, this life starts to unravel. Seeds of uncertainty are planted in the head of her wife, Meera (Pratibha Ranta), a doctor at a children’s hospital herself. Social media puts her on trial. Her colleagues look at her differently. An investigation begins. The film points in both directions, of course. Geetika’s personality is scrutinized in a way that invites the average viewer to interpret complexity as culpability. It says something that, even as an alleged perpetrator, she gets the victim beatdown: her past is dug up, mistakes are weaponised, judgment errors are revealed, evidence of moral ambiguity is shown, credibility is doubted. In short, she is viewed as guilty until proven innocent.

In terms of animated sports comedies featuring anthropomorphic animals, the bar is high. Surf’s Up (2007) set it nearly two decades ago; the mockumentary sports comedy about a young northern rockhopper penguin (voiced by a still-sane Shia LaBeouf) who dreams of becoming a professional surfer is unsurpassed in ingenuity, wit and underdog cinema (it’s one thing to make an animated film, it’s another to ‘shoot’ it like a live documentary). I’ll never forget the truth of the moment the protege discovers that his idol (Jeff Bridges) has been alive all along. The medium melts away, the cutesy humour pauses and out comes a classic genre trope. The heart doesn’t care if it’s not a live-action scene; emotions do not discriminate. Manufacturing them from scratch is arguably harder.

Anubhav Sinha’s latest, Assi (“80”), is a uniquely uncomfortable film to watch. There are two reasons. The first one is by design. The title lays it out: approximately 80 women are sexually assaulted in India every day. The film is built to convey the full force of this number. It revolves around one such ‘case,’ opening with what looks like a regular day in the life of Parima (Kani Kusruti), a Kerala-born schoolteacher residing in Delhi with her husband (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) and son. There’s a tangible undercurrent to her middle-class routine; something bad is around the corner. While returning from a staff party one night, it happens: five men pull her into a moving car and rape her for hours, repeatedly and brutally. She is dumped on a railway track. It’s 2025, but the ghost of 2012 hangs heavy. It’s national news. The law-enforcement, trial-by-media and justice mechanisms take over.

The Mumbai of Kennedy is dark and dystopian. It’s straight out of a Bhavesh Joshi-coded graphic novel: the sort of city that breeds neo-noir lawlessness, stylised violence and broken vigilantism. Bodies are maimed to Tchaikovsky compositions (performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, no less); a lyrical voice-over haunts the central figure; an indie-hop soundtrack bleeds into set-pieces that use time and stillness as a narrative weapon; heroic masks are worn to protect and destroy. Except this place is real. The dystopia is Covid-era Mumbai. Face-masks are still mandatory. Cultural distancing is rampant. Capitalism is suspended between lockdowns and life. A desperate police force runs extortion and contract-killing rackets in a crumbling economy. They are part of the political pandemic, leaching on the power-dynamic between ruling parties and billionaire industrialists. Survival is a divisive religion.

For 8 impossibly long episodes, Bandwaale invents different ways to be forgettable. The musical dramedy is no Bandish Bandits (I’m no fan but that’s the genre bar), but to be fair, it doesn’t really try. The premise is almost reverse-engineered to justify its dearth of personality. Created by composer-filmmaker Ankur Tewari and writer-actor Swanand Kirkire, the series stages the modernity-versus-tradition conflict through a tiresome template: a small-town girl strives to break free with a little help from her friends. It’s a bit like seeing the alt-reality story of Simran from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge — there’s only the million-and-fifth reference at yet another railway station; an oppressive father; a spunky kid sister — except her liberation is not love but art. Mariam (Shalini Pandey) is a covert poetess who uploads her work online so that she can go viral before her textbook-patriarch dad (Ashish Vidyarthi) marries her off to an eligible bachelor. Along the way, she finds two unlikely male allies: an outdated brass-band singer unwilling to evolve (Swanand Kirkire, as Robo), and a hunky-and-aloof DJ (Zahan Kapoor, as Psy) with a penchant for remixes.

You can see what Vishal Bhardwaj is trying to do with O’Romeo. The film is inspired by a chapter from journalist Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai (Gangubai Kathiawadi was another). The chapter delves into the life of Sapna Didi, a damsel in distress who mutates into a femme fatale in her quest to avenge the murder of her husband and take down dreaded don Dawood Ibrahim. She takes the help of Hussain Ustara, a Dawood rival and sharpshooter, to disrupt the D-Company empire and aid her mission. The mighty Bhardwaj takes these factoids and runs with them; he also sprints, strolls, jogs and trips with them. The very loose adaptation means that O’Romeo — as per its title — reframes the Sapna Didi story as an Ustara tragedy. Keeping with the times, it is centered on a cold-blooded womanizer who is tamed by love. His masculinity finds purpose; even his violence becomes an ode to her. He doesn’t gatecrash her narrative; she supplies his. He is both man-child and male saviour at once. Her wish is his demand. Where have we heard that before?