Rahul Desai

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bajirao Mastani and Padmaavat back when they divided audiences, but I miss them now. A decade ago, the prospect of a lavishly mounted period drama about an iconic Indian warrior or king felt loaded with possibility. These much-revered figures could be accessed through the human dimensions of their personality — and I like that genre specialist Sanjay Leela Bhansali often used love and romantic tragedy as his medium. These days, they can be accessed (if at all) from a space of love too: but only if this love is a form of nationalism. Nothing less than reverence — slow-mo praises, spotless courage and heroism — will do. As a result, most releases arrive with an air of caution and compliance. Reviewing the storyline, its inaccuracies and omissions can be akin to reviewing the country. Raja Shivaji is the latest critic-proof spectacle in this series.

An eloping couple is brutally attacked by masked goons in Haryana. He is killed, and she ends up in a coma. The incident brings the girl’s two brothers back to their hometown. They are forced to reunite with their estranged father — the abusive parent who once drove them away — in pursuit of revenge. ‘Justice’ is not an option. The younger son is softer and more forgiving of the dad; the elder one is wary and resentful. But the three men launch their own unofficial investigation; the suspects range from the father’s jealous rivals and local mafia bosses to corrupt politicians and Khap panchayat leaders. It quickly spirals into a violent whodunnit in a lawless land.

Nobody notices the tall and nerdy IT support guy. He doesn’t mind it; “invisibility is my superpower,” he tells himself. He only longs to be noticed by the popular office girl. But she’s in a relationship with their tall and handsome boss, who is going through a messy divorce. A company trip to Japan beckons. Our nerdy guy makes a middle-class wish at a holy site: “if we could be together even for a day”. It’s a figure of speech that gets lost in translation. An accident happens, and popular girl wakes up with an amnesia specifically tailored to his wish. Her short-term memory is wiped out, but it will return in exactly one day. There’s one more symptom: she will permanently forget everything that unfolds in this one day. Boardgames have less elaborate rules. So our nerd does what any self-respecting romantic would: he pretends to be her boyfriend for the day. This is his chance. You know the rest. You know she’s going to find out, you know it will get ugly, and you know that science will be challenged by its greatest rival: the Bollywood heart.

I have to get this out of my system. We need to talk about the dying — nay, extinct — art of the background score in mainstream Hindi cinema. The setup of Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 somewhat brings to mind Haseen Dillruba (2021), the romantic thriller about semi-toxic newlyweds in Haridwar; she’s a siren, he’s a Nice Guy, she cheats, then he becomes the madness and badness she craves for. I remember disliking Haseen Dillruba until a haunting theme in the climax made me rethink my reading of the entire film — a rare case of a score urging the viewer to feel a story rather than judge it. That’s the job of background music and supplementary sound: an extension of unfilmable text, not lazy mood-prompts for the audience.

Given that the first Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007) directed by Priyadarshan set the template for the modern horror-comedy, it’s unfortunate that Bhooth Bangla feels like a brain-melting horror comedy going through an existential crisis and an identity crisis at once. It’s 174 minutes long, shares several cast members with the 2007 hit, contains multiple personalities and moods and tones and genres, and features flashbacks and folklore so needlessly dense that the final hour feels like a zero-calorie mocktail of Mandala Murders, Indiana Jones and one of the Bhool Bhulaiyaa sequels. I usually worry about reviews being too long because I have so much to say, but this is a rare instance where I’m worried about getting past a paragraph. I might already be done.

If Matka King were a person, he would be slapped with a restraining order for dangerously stalking a celebrity named Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story (2020). The new Prime series feels like a play-by-play simulation of the breakout Sony LIV hit: tonally similar, historically and stylistically connected, antihero protagonists with identical narrative arcs and beats and conflicts and rise-and-fall rhythms and even theme music. The likeness is uncanny, and as is often the case, the stalker is inferior in every department. I would have bet my (non-existent) property on this dream director-actor alliance. In terms of the storytelling template, it has a bit of Hansal Mehta and some Neeraj Pandey, but director Nagraj Manjule (Fandry, Sairat, Jhund) himself seems to be missing. Loosely inspired by the life of Ratan Khatri, a Sindhi cotton trader who reinvented gambling with a popular new game in 1960s Bombay, Matka King stays too generic to scale the peak of a genre that treads the thin line between glorifying and humanising careers of crime. The sense of deja vu is strong, and Manjule’s voice is at sea with the scale of a show that’s designed to replicate rather than create.

My first brush with miserly behavior arrived through a childhood friend’s father. It’s not that he couldn’t afford things; hoarding money was simply his personality. Petrol, AC timings, electricity, discount sales, ice cream bowls, grocery bills: nothing was beyond him. He often claimed that he bought their first bungalow and car from all these micro-savings. After a point, I think he pretended to be a bigger cheapskate because he enjoyed our reactions. It became a performance to elicit shock and chuckles; he would even ask me why I’m having an extra chapati (“atta is not free”) to push everyone’s buttons. I grew up to be cautious with money — borderline stingy, even — because he had reframed the condition as a punchline of sorts. At some level, I convinced myself that it’s funny. So when I see incorrigable tightwads on screen, I’m immediately amused. They don’t even have to be mined for laughs. And there’s no place like Mumbai to normalise the tragicomic humour that haunts a penny-pinching protagonist. The city almost forces upon its people — regardless of social strata and wealth — an inherent middle-classness to process its absurd premiums and myths. It’s so expensive that being frugal is more of a biological need than a mental state.

15 friends (an introvert’s nightmare) meet at a holiday home for a wedding anniversary party. One of them is found dead after midnight. 14 of them become suspects. Nobody is allowed to leave. Rajat Kapoor’s Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa shares a thematic universe with Rajat Kapoor’s Kadakh (2019): overlapping cast members, colourful characters, a dead body, an annual party, free-flowing banter and tense arguments, fragile bonds and incriminatory secrets. But the staging is slightly different. Kadakh was about a couple trying to hide the corpse of a man who accidentally kills himself before their Diwali party. This film is a whodunnit that, in terms of social suspense and tonal flow, shares a universe with ‘psychological’ dramas like Death in the Gunj, Monsoon Wedding (plus a murder) and Titli. It unravels as a deceptively poignant indictment of modern society, armchair morality and rage, and the many ways in which we reverse-engineer our values to fit in.