Rahul Desai

It’s easy to process the crushing familiarity of a movie like Keu Bole Biplobi Keu Bole Dakat (“Some call him a Revolutionary, some call him a Dacoit”). Mainstream Indian cinema has long run out of ways to stage populist fiction about swaggering vigilantes meting out their own versions of justice. So storytellers often choose the crutch of nonfiction. For instance, KBBKBD is a big fat superstar vehicle posing as a historical action drama. The figure it’s about — in this case, the controversial revolutionary Ananta Singh — is just a narrative vessel. The framework exists almost entirely so that Bengali superstar Jeet can flex his muscles as a Robin Hood-coded rebel and righteous superhero who fights for the oppressed in a broken system.

It’s not often you go into a film blind — and come out blinder. But Dial 1975 is that rare Hindi thriller. When you have an intriguing logline like “a gripping race to control India’s first wireless telephone takes place during the Emergency,” it takes some doing to make the furthest possible iteration of it. There were times I had to look up the premise again to make sure I wasn’t watching the wrong film. A semblance of a storyline pops up every now and then, and I can’t be sure, but it’s a pot-of-gold plot featuring an ex-soldier-turned-baddie (Kay Kay Menon), an ex-con-turned-goodie (Pravessh Rana), the goodie’s girlfriend (Kirti Kulhari), a bag full of cash (currency notes), missing tapes, a German guy with the precious invention, and a battle between government loyalists and rebel factions to procure said phone.

If I had a penny for every show trying to win a Mirzapur-lookalike contest, I’d have enough money to buy a streaming platform that bans men-and-gang-war shows with fake hinterland accents. Or maybe not. I’d probably have enough money to buy myself two beers after reviewing them. Blame inflation. This genre has begun to aim for second-screen viewing, which is strange, because it’s almost like the makers don’t really want you to be too invested but be just interested enough to notice the cast and hear the bullets. It gears into fourth-screen viewing at some points, but then there will be a plot twist that makes you get annoyed for not paying enough attention. It’s a troubling pattern across most Hindi shows of this ilk; Clean Up Company is another brick in this digitally erosive wall.

I don’t get to describe a premise like this too often, so let me enjoy writing this first paragraph. A prosperous Muslim family from Meerut — led by patriarch Sikandar Mirza (Sunny Deol) — is forced to flee for Lahore on a blood-soaked Partition night. Just like that, they have nothing. After months, they are allotted a house. But they move in to discover that it will never be their ‘home’; the displacement is permanent. An old Hindu lady (Shabana Azmi), the original owner, still lives upstairs. She waits for her own family to return, refusing to leave. Mirza, his wife (Preity Zinta) and his daughter overcome their biases and start to treat her like their mother; they celebrate her festivals and cook her food. This secularism draws the ire of the community; they’re a people still learning how to discriminate by faith and divide by appearances. The local troublemakers include an extremist goon (Abhimanyu Singh) and gang — they prey on the trauma of Mirza’s son, Javed (Karan Deol), and poison him. Tensions rise, and Mirza is threatened for harbouring the ‘enemy’. As a Deol, he resists.

It’s present-day Punjab but it could be Punjab 1995; it could be India 1984. The village of Gujjarwal bristles with unsaid questions and silent answers. Big Bollywood movies (like Dangal) have been shot in the region, but the place is haunted by its own fictions. Everyone’s story is interconnected, like desperate organs of a wounded body. A young man named Keshav is absent from one household; a young father named Balwinder is missing from another. The police go around camouflaging bloody encounters as separatist violence and communal unrest. They assure Keshav’s family that his Sikh killers will be brought to justice; they visit Balwinder’s family to keep an eye on their voices.

It’s no secret that mainstream Hindi cinema today is so empty that we tend to look at previous decades — and even their most middling movies — through rose-tinted lenses. It’s why so many of them become ‘cult classics’. A song here, a mood there. A brooder here, a plotline there. In that sense, Emraan Hashmi is the Vibe Resurgent. I mean 2000s Emraan Hashmi, but it goes without saying. As The Ba***ds of Bollywood recently surmised, it’s the only Hashmi that stopped time in the commercial landscape: the antihero blessed with a musicality that made his movies heard harder than they were seen. In that sense, the nostalgia for Mohit Suri’s Awarapan (2007) is so strong that even a 140-minute-long slow-mo sequence of a smoking Hashmi striding towards the camera to the sound of ‘Toh Phir Aao’ would’ve done the job. Credit to director Nitin Kakkar and writer Bilal Siddiqi for conceiving a whole sequel around it to farm that aura. The moments that matter still revolve around the buildup and use of Pritam’s hits across love and violence; the rest is just narrative padding. It counts on our relationship with music and lyrics past, even though the original songs — like ‘Ve Junoon’ and ‘Yeh Awarapan’ — do well to cultivate some Saiyaara-coded soil.

It’s easy to admire a film like Ohh My Dog. I was admittedly thinking of punny headlines like “Paw-some” and “Canine and Able” before the screening. In an age of mainstream storytelling that thrives on social posturing and performative faith, it’s almost strange to encounter a movie about the agenda-less bond between children and dogs. Even grumpy skeptics (like myself) can’t doubt the pup-loving intent of it all. Both bases are covered — one journey features geeky boy Apu’s search for his missing pooch Momo across the underbelly of Assam; one journey features lion-hearted indie Oscar single-pawedly solving the case of his abducted young human Prince across the underbelly of Bihar. I can only imagine the logistics of shooting with kids and dogs in chaotic Indian cities without leaning on visual effects. Not to mention the ‘courage’ of showing cops as the bad guys in both narratives.

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.