Rahul Desai

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.

In a mask, she looks like everyone else. It’s not her city or country, but it’s her home now. The Pune native goes about her daily routine in Tokyo: walking, thinking, dodging other feet, commuting to work on the metro. It’s muscle memory; you can tell she’s been here for a while. The only sounds she hears are of footsteps shuffling, metal doors opening, vehicles moving. Voices stay within; speaking is impolite. And then she sees him, after 7 years, looking perplexed on a platform. In a mask, he looks like the man she loved. They meet at a famous intersection. When they hug, it’s like the moment activates human motion; hundreds of walkers cross the congested street the second their bodies touch. They spend the next few days enjoying the familiarity of an ex-partner in a foreign environment. Everything is new and old at once. She shows him the place; they eat, stroll, run, giggle, puncture the silences, get drunk together. It’s everyone’s Before-Sunset fantasy. But it escalates quickly. When they kiss, it’s like the moment activates faster human motion; a speeding train darts behind them the second their lips meet.

There’s a special genre of Hindi social dramas that distinguish themselves by making a mess of perfectly sensible themes. They’re so chuffed about saying something progressive that they say it with the confidence of a 5-year-old teacher’s pet. They’re so determined to school the average viewer that they do it in the syllabus of pandering. They’re so convinced that only intent counts that the storytelling is treated like a Zoom meeting with an attendance-not-mandatory option. Did I need to use such an unnecessarily colourful analogy? No, but it would help if the film-making tried to be as creative. Chiraiya is the latest example. It brings a cartoon knife to a live-action gunfight. It’s more frustrating to watch because the ideology is sound, but instantly subdued by the demands of a deafening algorithm. The result is a performative women-written-by-men project, where the depth is more theoretical than practical, and where artificial moments are spoon-fed to convey brutal truths.

We’re back to 1971. Again. Contemporary Indian cinema will have you believe that South Asian history — nay, human civilisation itself — begins and ends with 1971. Dinosaurs probably went extinct just before that. Jokes aside, so much of historical storytelling is concentrated into that one decade that the fatigue is real. Ironically, mainstream Bollywood at the time reacted to all the national turmoil with Angry Young Men and disillusioned anti-establishment heroes. But today’s stories are more focused on painting that very country as a vessel of patriotism, political courage and cultural superiority. Naturally, this happens at the expense of two familiar neighbours. To its credit, Jazz City finds a new and expensive way to flaunt India’s role in the Bangladesh Liberation War.