Rahul Desai

Gajab Raat is a film about one eventful night in New Delhi, the capital of what many say is the world’s biggest democracy. A corrupt cop, SI Ajay Nirvit (Manoj Bajpayee), is wondering how to fill his coffers when a high-profile case falls into his lap: a young and grievously injured woman (Aditi Sandhya Sharma) flings herself out of a moving car in front of Connaught Place’s PVR Plaza. Before Nirvit even reaches the spot, images shot by late-night moviegoers go viral in a very Bollywood-depicting-social-media way (flying tweets filling the screen). By the time the ambulance arrives, he is dealing with a fearsome social activist (Shraddha Das); he has gotten calls from higher-ups; no politician wants “women’s safety” to be an issue again. By the time the victim enters surgery in a curiously empty hospital, the important people who want her dead crash the party: a shady CBI officer (Akshay Oberoi) sweet-talks Nirvit, who’s still desperate to leverage his sudden spurt of power. Another CBI officer offsets the previous one. A handover of the case is discussed for ulterior motives. Nirvit becomes a shady broker of sorts, but he keeps wondering: Why is this comatose girl ruffling so many feathers?

It’s tempting to blindly like any Hindi film that dares to not be a violent actioner, a superstar-driven mass entertainer, a propaganda historical, a political thriller, a biopic or a mythological drama. Romcoms are suddenly as rare and desirable as spines; love stories — even the bad ones — are novel again. But romcoms like Pehla Pyaar Doosri Baar remind you why they went extinct. The newcomers-who-are-not-ready-but-star-in-a-designer-North-Indian-comedy template is a throwback to the early 2010s, when Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama set the ball rolling and triggered a wave of genre fatigue. Ranjan co-writes and produces here, which partly explains why the movie behaves like an ex who refuses to move on.

There is very little joy in watching a Bollywood spy comedy these days. You’re always on high alert. The suspense stems from the anticipation of exactly when the movie will break. The trust issues are immense. You know the drill: spoofy first half, serious second half. If it starts on an entertaining note, you sense there’s a catch. If it’s funny, you feel a bit guilty for laughing because you know the film will eventually reveal itself: intellectually, politically, patriotically. Humour disarms an audience more than violence and gore, so you know comedy is the prettiest trojan horse to soften the hall for mandatory India-shining messages. Being mean-spirited is a bonus.

Somewhere between passive-viewing content and algorithmic entertainment, there is a field. Shows like Chaar Yaar (“Four Friends”) will meet you there. It is not bad. It is not good. It is arguably something worse: middling and overlong. The 8-episode crime drama takes a stacked cast full of watchable performers and flattens them into a distracted underworld tale that keeps chasing its own tail. Watching the series is strange because most scenes look fine at an individual level: the acting, writing, staging, banter. But they don’t make sense as an aggregative experience, pulling us in multiple directions like a shopkeeper trying to exhaust his stock on a lazy customer.

A small-town girl, Tara (Plabita Borthakur), grows up in a patriarchal and regressive household in 1990s Rajasthan. She wants to break free; she is different from the rest. Like millions of Indians, she finds inspiration in the clutter-breaking career of a cricketer. So we see Tara’s coming-of-age journey intercut with the story of Sourav Ganguly transforming a meek Indian cricket team into a combative force. Doosra, directed by Abhinay Deo, is a docudrama that plays out like a fragile film-school idea inflated into a feature-length production. At its best, it feels like one of those patriotic World Cup commercials with farfetched allegories and corny copywriting. The entire cricket-as-a-metaphor-for-life analogy is well past its sell-by date.

No matter how safe and formulaic many biopics choose to be, sometimes it’s the subject alone that does the heavy-lifting. This is quite literal in Sumo Didi, a Hindi film inspired by the life of Hetal Dave, India’s first female professional sumo wrestler. The underdog checklist already exists: an unmarried girl mocked for her weight; a middle-class background; a notoriously patriarchal society; a supportive father; an apathetic federation; a passion as rare and mismatched as a bobsleigh racing team from Jamaica in Cool Runnings; and a sport that weaponises the body-shaming stigmas that infect most cultures. When life itself offers a winning theme — with all social and narrative bases covered — then all ‘fiction’ has to do is show up. The trick is to trust reality, not accessorise it.

It’s easy to suggest that a low-key dramedy about girlhood feels refreshing because it’s written entirely by women. But that’s a generalisation of sorts. We’ve seen women-led shows behave like their sensationalist counterparts in an aggressive tit-for-tat way; they tend to be reactionary — a statement to all testosterone-driven productions — rather than natural. The reason Matargashti works is because it refuses to look like the defiant story of a 19-year-old girl. It doesn’t pretend to be the unapologetic female (or feminist) version of those sex comedies featuring funny boys trying to lose their virginity. If anything, it reclaims the diversity of middle-class conflict from the clutches of male-created TVF family universes. You almost don’t expect the setting to be Lucknow. It unfolds like a lightweight antidote, not a conscious subversion, to a genre largely dominated by men.

When the first word that comes to your mind for a film is “sweet,” it can mean different things. Sweet could be a euphemism for small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, which implies: it means well but I’m reluctant to admit that it’s not made well. Sweet could be the sugarcoating of positive intent over weak craft. Sweet could be the kind of thing adults say to encourage eager kids and soften the blow of mediocrity. But we live in an age of such unbridled skepticism — where fault-finding precedes soul-searching — that we forget how the word can sometimes mean just that: sweet. Little Thomas is that film. It reclaims the harmless adjective from the clutches of condescension and agenda. English is a funny language, but we make it funnier.