Rahul Desai

Think of the hundred ways in which a story about the transformation of a small-town playboy can happen. Think of the hundred ways in which the sexist hero learns his lesson. Love? Heartbreak? Big city humbling? Grief? Falling for a feminist? Falling for a gangster? Falling for Ravi Kishan reels? Trust Bollywood, however, to find the 101st way. Trust mainstream Hindi cinema to come up with a gimmick that pretends to be entertaining and edgy and self-aware but is unwittingly creepy and regressive. Trust it to provide an answer to a question nobody asked: What if Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and Dream Girl had a baby that grew up to become a Tanu Weds Manu fan stumbling out of the bar?

In this age of remakes and adaptations and loose inspirations, I automatically nurse a soft spot for originality. The moment I see a period production that’s not based on pre-existing mythology, literature, movies or true events, it’s like discovering a rare (and soon-to-be-extinct) animal or an uninhabited new island at the corner of the earth. The heart rate shoots up. The mind hopes. You mean world-building is the actual building of a world without blueprints? The characters and rules are conceived from scratch? The fiction is imagined out of thin air? Backstories are created? How is that possible?

He drinks, she smokes. He sings, she heckles. He eats, she cooks. He calls her a mad woman, she calls him a wastrel. He criticises her food, she whines about being stuck with him. Bickering is not only their only means of communication, it is also their love language. Or whatever you call “love” after 65 years of marriage. They don’t speak, they mutter to themselves so that the other can hear. Padam and Tulsi are rusty habits to each other. They may sound like a crowd-pleasing romcom tale, but they’re actually life companions browbeaten by time and tide. Misery loves company, but their company is fuelled by misery; he enjoys winding her up, she is affectionate in her meanness.

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.