Rahul Desai

One would imagine gender-based violence is the ‘safest’ way to be critical these days. It’s the most acceptable method to scrutinise a country without offending the world and its father(s). But some of the most potent takes on Indian patriarchy come from the voices shaping contemporary Gujarati cinema. It’s not as simple as “the region is full of repressed masculinity and casual sexism”. Given how tricky it is to be politically expressive in the state, there’s an overt sense that the patriarchy in these stories is not isolated from the society that breeds it. The genre itself is political. The characters and craft work harder to catch our eye because they stem from a culture where misogyny and moral policing are normalised as rhetoric by leaders and campaigns.

Movies can be forgettable for many reasons — objectively bad, boring, self-indulgent, long, unfunny, silly maybe. But Bhai Tera Star Hai is memorable for how forgettable it is. It is aggressively high on film-making and random chaos, like a dog on a deadly sugar rush after wolfing down hash brownies by mistake. I went in blind (my fault), and of all the things I expected it to be, the actual movie has absolutely nothing to do with the title. Given that it stars Raghav Juyal, you’d imagine this might be a high-pitched comedy that extends his scene-stealing Ba**ds of Bollywood performance and reframes him as the spoofy protagonist. But no. Not even close. Juyal is not only wasted, he is reduced to a hammy mess in a peculiar production that defies labels.

Once the nostalgia of watching a new Spider-Man movie after nearly five years wears off, a worrying thought emerges: Is Spider-Man: Brand New Day really just Spider-Man: All Over Again in disguise? Is Destin Daniel Cretton’s film just a factory reset of the New York-based comic-book superhero tale, but with the same actor? Does anything ever truly end in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)? Will my trust issues ever subside? Every new MCU cycle feels like a post-concert encore of the previous one. The framework is not foolproof. Dr Strange’s spell in the admittedly sweet Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) means that the world no longer remembers Spidey’s secret identity, Peter Parker. Young Peter hoped the spell could be customised, but nobody had the memory-wiping machine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

There are bad movies, and then there are movies that make you cringe so hard that you can’t bear to look at the screen. So I grimaced and looked away during Milap Zaveri’s Tera Yaar Hoon Main, the way a squeamish viewer does when confronted with graphic violence and gore. But looking away from the screen meant that I had to make peace with the young couple making out in the row ahead. So I turned my face to the other side, but there was another couple enjoying the privacy of the matinee show. Lest they found my frantic head-turning creepy, I concluded that the safest thing was to look at the screen again. But for how long? The film continued to make direct eye contact with me. This became a circular loop of embarrassment and coyness for 145 minutes, and now I’m so dizzy that I should be seeing stars but I’m not (because 0 stars out of 5).

For most of its 8 episodes, Musafir Cafe has the aesthetic of streaming television from the 2015-16 days (also known as the Little Things age). This natural-artifice aesthetic thrived when YouTube was still the platform for millennial motifs wrapped in modest productions: relatable DIY ‘content,’ relationship-core characters, designer dialogue (“travelers don’t just change places, they travel within themselves”), a gooey soundtrack and title montages, pastel-coloured narratives and branded locations. As watchable as these shows were, they were almost indistinguishable from each other. Given the current onset of true-crime fatigue, this romantic drama might feel either dated or nostalgic — or both at once.

It’s tempting to like a movie like Max, Min & Meowzaki for its many progressive ingredients. The title refers to a young couple and their cat. Or more specifically: a young interfaith couple (‘Max’ is a Tamil-Brahmin named Mahesh and Min is a Muslim named Minara) going through a breakup; they debate the custody of their cat named after iconic Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The film opens with their ending. Production designer Min (Medha Shankar) is already in a relationship with an older Bengali director she works for. Ad-jingles composer Max (Siddharth Menon) goes on a date with an influencer-coded girl who parrots the language of WhatsApp-university forwards (“there is no such thing as Hindu extremists, okay?”) and right-wing algorithms.

Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya revolves around a ramshackle public school and its many colourful faces. It may not directly belong to the ‘Rural Cinematic Universe,’ but you can tell that it comes from the house of former TVF collaborators (you can take the makers out of a streaming brand, but you can’t take the streaming brand out of the makers). It’s the same shtick of Panchayat (ramshackle village office), Gram Chikitsalay (ramshackle government clinic) and Maamla Legal Hai (ramshackled district court): slice-of-life dramedies where everyone is a ‘sample’ character, every crisis is lighthearted, every episode has a centrist moral stance, and every monologue belongs to the Rajkumar Hirani school of happy problem-solving. The genre fatigue is real. The language is faded, like a gravy-stained page of a book that’s worn out from overuse.

The homework required to process The Odyssey is a key part of the experience. Familiarising yourself with the fabled source material (Homer’s ancient Greek epic) goes hand in hand with re-acquainting yourself with the fabled director’s filmography. If you’ve been watching Christopher Nolan’s movies over the years, you’ve essentially seen the making of The Odyssey in real time. It’s not just the recurring themes of adrift men looking for a way home — to children, to comrades, to companions, to family, to themselves. It’s also in the physical images of Nolan-telling scattered across this narrative. There are flashes everywhere. A confused man wrestling with memory on the sea-shore (Inception); the piecing together of a disorienting past (Memento); an injured hero returning to rescue a city under siege (The Dark Knight trilogy); a blind worker, twins, and the obsession to win as a plot device (The Prestige); wars fought on hostile water and lands (Dunkirk); Trojan-Horse-coded deception by a Matt Damon character and a father chasing a belated promise (Interstellar); a thinker haunted by the consequences of his genius (Oppenheimer); a sleepless and guilt-riddled veteran (Insomnia); the blurred lines of time and tide (all of them). The film-maker has been adapting Homer for more than two decades. Like the protagonist, he finally returns home with The Odyssey, but not before defying the genre gods and braving the blockbuster elements.