Rahul Desai

Most homecoming stories have a narrative pattern. Especially the feel-good ones. The central character returns to their village from the big city. But the perspective is new. Suddenly everything feels regressive. There are problems and prejudices. The locals sound smaller, and the enlightened protagonist operates from a higher moral ground. Social change is inevitable; the hero simply knows better. Either they leave as the bigger person or stay to fix it all. It’s the urban-saviour syndrome refitted into a back-to-roots template.

The Great Grand Superhero has one of the most charming setups in recent memory. The first half is funny, poignant, satirical and very inventive. It also has the best child actors since Stanley Ka Dabba, a film it shares an editor (Deepa Bhatia) and narrative spirit with. There’s a new mid-term admission in a small-town school; his name is Deepu (a pitch-perfect Mihir Godbole). Deepu is a clever student; he knows all the answers to all the teachers’ toughest questions. The other kids envy him and find him strange. He confesses to one of them that he’s “different” because his grandfather (Jackie Shroff) is — suspenseful drum beat — a superhero. It’s a secret, he says, that only kids below the age of 18 can know, otherwise the grand old man will lose his superpowers.

System stars Sonakshi Sinha as a privileged young professional who strives to shed the ‘nepo-baby’ tag by breaking free from the shadow of an influential father. The meta casting is a common Bollywood gimmick: a version of Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi playing the restless outsiders in Gehraiyaan. The context here supplies the characterisation. Sinha’s Neha Rajvansh might be the daughter of a big-shot lawyer, but her rite of passage includes a ‘lowly’ stint at the state prosecutor’s office. Her reel-clicking, selfie-taking and manicured fingers must toil in the trenches to earn her place in her father’s empire: a legal-world equivalent of industry kids landing jobs as assistant directors before they are launched in big-budget productions. Like her old man, Neha treats her career as a medium of winning, not a battle for justice. When he challenges her to win ten cases in a row, she gets cracking — with the help of the court stenographer, Sarika (Jyotika). All she cares about is the gold at the end of this rainbow.

Early on in Chand Mera Dil, two lovers in the throes of a feverish college romance do something weird. They’ve just been arrested for public indecency after stopping the motorcycle in the middle of a busy highway so that she can straddle him for an intimate discussion about their future. I’m all for dramatic gestures, but why risk becoming roadkill for a random film-poster moment? But this is not the weird thing. When they’re at the police station, she starts crying when he admits to having quit cigarettes for her. She explains that she isn’t used to such importance because her father was a wife-beater and her childhood sucked; he also chimes in with his two cents of sadness. Of all the ways their little heart-to-heart could’ve been staged, this has the least sense of occasion and timing. Get a room, but read the room first.

Baapya opens normally enough. A small Konkani village. A boisterous fisherman (Girish Kulkarni as Anya) is in debt. His teenage son (Aaryan Menghji as Sanju) is infatuated with a classmate. Anya’s lawyer proposes a land deal to fix the crisis. The catch: he needs the signature of his ex-wife, Shailaja (Rajshri Deshpande), who left the family years ago. His second wife and kids could do with the money. Both father and son do not look forward to seeing the woman who ‘deserted’ them, but they must. And at the half-hour mark of Baapya, they do. Except they don’t. Shailaja returns as a doctor, but also as a man. A gender reassignment surgery means that Shailaja is now Shailesh (Rajshri Deshpande), a trans man who was once a reluctant wife and mother. What follows is a bittersweet week in a community that grapples with the ‘stigma’ of this transition, even as Anya and his son resist their new reality on the conveyor belt to acceptance.

The protagonist of Bhakshak (“Predator”), the Netflix film directed by Pulkit and produced by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, was a scrappy female journalist (Bhumi Pednekar) who uncovers a small-town sex abuse racket in a shelter home involving some very powerful figures. Kartavya (“Duty”), the Netflix film from the same makers, shares a universe of sorts. It opens with the murder of a senior female journalist who arrives to uncover a small-town child abuse racket in a spiritual cult involving some very powerful figures. The protagonist is the cop who fails to protect her from those bullets; her film ended before it could begin. SHO Pawan (Saif Ali Khan) is then forced to grow a conscience and do the work of a brave reporter who is reduced to a gun-wielding uniform. Both films unfold largely under the cover of night, and have central characters who realise that doing their duty is no longer about doing their job — it’s about doing the right thing. Both also feature Sanjay Mishra in top form as the loyal subordinate.

As a child, I used to enjoy flipping through pages of the Limca Book of Records. There were the weirdest categories: longest moustaches, walking on hands, typing with noses. I always imagined that I could some day qualify by doing an outlandish feat that nobody else thought of. You must be wondering where this is going; who starts a review like this? Wonder no further (like the film at hand). The closest I’ve gotten to being in that book is today. The feat: watching a two-hour “laugh riot” without a single expression on my face. Forget chuckling, I think I anti-chuckled: minus-humour, if that’s a thing. Which surely must be some kind of record. The problem is I’m not the only participant. From the reactions in a cinema hall every other Friday, there’s plenty of competition. And there are sub-categories: watching a comedy without watching it (eyes glued to the phone), maximum yawns in a screening, most planted viewers to elicit reactions. I don’t know if I’ll win. As a film critic, though, I’m a strong contender.

The cinema of “strangers connecting on a call/walk” is a trope as old as time. It’s almost a rite of passage for independent film-makers with lower budgets. The narrative is inherently actor-driven. The context of this connection is what distinguishes a story that has something to say from a film that tries to flaunt its intellect. Writer-director Aditya Kripalani seems to have an affinity for this genre. His previous film, Not Today, revolved around the first day of a female suicide-prevention counsellor who gets on a long and vulnerable phone call with a suicidal man to stop him from jumping off a terrace. The one-line premise eventually became a medium to stage a clunky and meandering conversation — the kind that’s derived from thinking and appropriating life rather than experiencing and feeling some truth.