Rahul Desai

CELINE SONG’S Materialists opens in a cave. In a past life, perhaps. A caveman offers a ring made of flowers to a cavewoman; she is moved by his proposal. All they need is love — and a tiny material consummation of it. It’s a sweet and wordless sequence. The film instantly switches to the high-tempo Manhattan life of 35-year-old matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson). She is a master at “dating math”: ticking boxes, reducing surnames to alphabets, catering to clients’ dreams, perpetuating the dehumanisation of modern dating. The abrupt cut from the past to the present — or the present to the future — reveals both evolution and the erasure of it. Back then, it was a symbol. Now it’s a status symbol. It’s a swift but suggestive transition. Somewhere along the way, capitalism in the age of love slowly repositioned itself as love in the age of capitalism.

A spin-off in the John Wick universe, Ballerina stars Ana de Armas as Eve, a young orphan trained by the Ruska Roma — the crime organisation famous for creating Keanu Reeves’ Wick — to be a ballerina-assassin. She is taught to weaponise her intuition and “fight like a girl” instead of trying to defeat men at their own game. She graduates the programme and starts work as a cold-blooded contract killer. But just as she sets out to become the next big Ruska Roma legend, she is overcome by an urge to avenge the murder of her father. All the trauma comes back to her when she identifies an opponent bearing the symbol of the Cult, the outfit responsible for the death of her parents all those years ago. Her ‘mission’ changes.

A whole lot of nothing happens in Season 2 of Rana Naidu, the Indian adaptation of Ray Donovan. The first season (2023) was populist and provocative for the heck of it, what with its look-maa-sex-gore-expletives rhythms. But at least it was a world-building phase, where fan service prevailed (the casting coup of a star uncle-nephew duo) and viewers could be introduced to the concept of a badass Hyderabadi “fixer” in Mumbai, his daddy issues, and the endless struggle to fix his own family. It was like watching a celebrity gossip column posing as an OTT-template action thriller. A slog, but a new one.

I’ve chuckled a grand total of two times across five instalments of the Housefull franchise. It says something that, in both instances, the gag involved an animal (not the film). No humans were harmed in the making. The snoring crocodile from Housefull 2 (2012) broke through my defences. I have a fondness for crocodiles (on screen), so to hear one snore in his post-lunch sleep was a dream come true I never knew I needed. In Housefull 5, it’s a parrot named Gucci that attacks a man who killed said parrot’s dad in one of the previous films — all of this scored to the Om Shanti Om soundtrack, lest we assume that only human characters are allowed to have reincarnation revenge tracks. Two men team up to bodyslam Gucci and pin him down to the count of three like a wrestler. I might have also grinned when Akshay Kumar smashes his fingers and Jackie Shroff gives him a guitar to make music out of those quivering fingers. It’s an inspired piece of inanity in a Bollywood franchise that feasts on the lowest hanging fruits.

Stolen tells an NH10-coded story of two city-slicking brothers who — in trying to aid a police investigation of a stolen baby from a rural railway station — get sucked into a heartland nightmare. A drowsy Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) waits in his black SUV to pick up his younger sibling, Raman (Shubham Vardhan), whose train arrives late. Before they exit the platform, they bump into Jhumpa Mahato (Mia Maelzer), a distraught young mother who accuses Raman of abducting her toddler while she was asleep. The cops get involved; the confusion comes to light. Much to Gautam’s chagrin, Raman is consumed by an urge to help the woman. But they pay the price for being human. Things spiral quickly in a search that features a cursed manor, rehab center, angry mobs, baby-snatching gangs and illegal surrogacy rackets. The brothers find themselves trapped in a dark survival thriller. The question that emerges, however, is troubling: whose survival?

Sister Midnight is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I mean that in both a good way and bad way. It’s the kind of droll, deadpan, disorienting and daringly designed film where the camera is as socially awkward as the characters it films — like an anachronistic Wes Anderson video trapped by the audiovisual rhythms of Mumbai. People face the lens and speak like humanoids; absurd things happen in strikingly staged night-time incidents; the city behaves like a grainy and reluctant painting; everyone acts wild and unpredictable. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of an offbeat person who hides their vulnerability behind a barrage of provocative cues. If we question them for not staying with an emotion longer than a few seconds, they counter-question us for being so uptight. The joke is supposed to be those who find the film increasingly bizarre and difficult to watch. For better or worse, its relationship with the average viewer is part of its conceit.

When you hear that a film made ten years ago is getting a long-delayed release, preconceived notions take over. The same set of thoughts emerge: it’ll be dated, it’ll have the small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, it’ll be an indie asking for sympathy, it’ll be have intentions than craft. It can be worse when it’s a children’s film — you almost expect it to revolve around a cycle or an unattainable toy or the pursuit of little-things happiness with sad-violin music. Chidiya, too, revolves around two brothers from a Mumbai chawl — 9-year-old Shanu (Svar Kamble) and 5-year-old Bua (Ayush Pathak) — who want to play a game whose name they don’t know. It involves a shuttlecock and two rackets. They spend days trying to hustle together a net, some space, and most of all, some time. Their struggle features a few quirky characters from the neighbourhood. See what I mean?

The last few years have been spent watching the downfall of mainstream Hindi cinema. I’ve reviewed so many atrocious Bollywood movies that I often sound like a bitter Indian dad citing the example of the exemplary “Sharma-ji Ka Beta” when I write about a foreign film. I can’t help but compare — and wave my finger disapprovingly at my litter. But once in a while, an absolutely horrid Hollywood movie like Karate Kid: Legends arrives (last year it was Madame Web), and all feels right with the world. The mediocrity is almost soothing because, as an Indian cinephile, it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore. They can be just as bad as us; it feels so nice to say that. We’re all in this together: divided by borders but united by bad cinema.