Rahul Desai

A small-town woman, Kavita (Radhika Apte), feels out of place at a South Delhi party. It’s a rainy day; she looks at a tree outside the window. Her husband’s friends are snooty and patronising. He has a roving eye. She catches him making out with one of the guests. She then gathers the high-society gang around her and starts to narrate a story in an earthy accent that makes them smirk. But the smirks don’t last long. Her “fiction” revolves around a housewife named Smita (Apte), a previous version of herself that they don’t know about. It goes thus. When Smita’s provocative cousin Shalini (Sauraseni Maitra) visits, her loan-riddled husband Pankaj (Anshumaan Pushkar) falls for the younger woman and the two start a torrid affair in the house behind Smita’s back. That’s not all, Shalini two-times Pankaj with a crooked cop named Ratan (Divyenndu); she’s stringing along two horndogs because why not. Needless to say, a heartbroken Smita is not pleased. And when a seemingly docile homemaker trapped in a setting full of predators and cheaters is not pleased, darkness is always around the corner.

Given Hindi cinema’s long-standing relationship with hypermasculinity, it’s almost refreshing to come across a life comedy named Single Papa. Even the premise is a neat change — a single-parenthood story revolving around the kind of North Indian man-child character who would usually be the tortured hero of a romantic Bollywood film. The icing on this gluten-free cake is that Kunal Kemmu plays this man. For anyone who has followed Hindi film in the last few decades, it’s hard not to have a soft spot for former child star Kemmu — an underutilised, immensely likable and flexible performer who’s made a career out of not fitting into the conventional-star mold. I, for one, am always happy to see him on (or off) the screen. The vibes are just right, and there’s an authenticity about him that’s easy to enjoy.

Since deception is the language of a spy thriller, let’s pretend that movies exist entirely in isolation — like an introvert on a Saturday night. Let’s pretend that Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar’s directorial return after Uri (2019), has absolutely nothing to do with the world around us. (One could argue that it doesn’t, but that’s a mob attack for another day). Let’s also pretend that film criticism is about seeing a movie for what it is, regardless of its moral character or ideology. It’s only fair, given that we all admire great serial killers for being awesome at what they do, legendary dictators for being no-nonsense leaders, wars for being the epitome of courage and technology, and plane crashes for doing tragedy so well.

When it comes to reviewing shows, binge-watching is the default mode of the job. It’s mostly a mad rush to finish all the preview episodes and start writing. There’s no time to be immersed in a universe long enough; the next title is always waiting. So you’re more wired to look for inventive themes and catchy in-points. It’s not often critics get to see a show as it should be seen — steadily, on a drip, one episode at a time, spread over a few days. I had this rare luxury with Real Kashmir Football Club and its eight episodes. Ideal as it sounds, this can go wrong, too; the choice to walk through a show brings with it the risk of losing rhythm and interest. But I found myself ‘waiting’ to watch Real Kashmir Football Club and voluntarily returning to it: during meals, after breaks, before sleeping, between films. Not out of suspense to know what happens next, but out of curiosity to know more. That’s the sign of a rooted and fundamentally sound series. Like a good host, it invites you in without gimmicks and touristy offers, lets you experience it on your own terms, transcends terms like “addictive,” and allows you to establish more of a lived-in relationship. It’s not a perfect bond, but it can be a satisfying one. And it’s kind of fitting for a story set in Kashmir, the one place that cannot be reduced to snap judgments and plain scrutiny.

In Train Dreams, life is but an accruement of endings. Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Clint Bentley’s tender fever-dream of a film is rooted in the anonymity of time: an anti-Forrest Gump of sorts. It’s about the kind of man that history is wired to forget: a humble woodlogger and railroad construction worker, a normal husband and father, a survivor and soliloquy, a grafter and griever. A voice-over introduces Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) as an orphan in his childhood; it closes with him at 80, having lived and loved and lost and lived in the shadow of loss. He is a reluctant protagonist masquerading as just another person. It’s almost as if the story keeps leaving him behind in the hope that he will catch up.

If you’ve watched enough modern Hindi socials over the years, chances are you’re well-acquainted with its red flags. Especially if the themes sound like hashtags: #DysfunctionalFamily, #Therapy, #MentalHealth, #NobodyIsPerfect, #SeekHelp. The preachiness aside, the stories are often designed to offer solutions to everything short of death (or sometimes even that). If not solutions, then righteous advice at the very least. It’s why I both loved and hated Dil Dhadakne Do (and a show like Made In Heaven); the staging of dysfunctionality and cultural quirks are the fun parts, but there’s always a sense that nothing is beyond repair. Every ‘condition’ is curable. The great thing about Perfect Family is that, over 8 fairly long episodes, it puts itself in a position to humanise the hashtags more than feature-length movies do. Its imperfections have character, and even if the intent is tethered to a message of change and higher wisdom, the show feels like more of a journey than a destination. Which is precisely the anatomy of being “fixed” these days; it’s a process with no beginning and ending.

Conceptually, Kaisi Ye Paheli goes for broke. The 95-minute independent film, written and directed by Ananyabrata Chakravorty, wears the cloak of yet another small-town whodunnit. There’s a death in misty Kalimpong; sullen cop Uttam (Sukant Goel) and his boss, Tamang (Chittaranjan Giri), are flummoxed by the details: a religious girl poisoned by a holy sweet? The theatrical Bondo (Rajit Kapur, always) is summoned from Kolkata by the powers that be; the senior sleuth has a direct line to “Didi,” and behaves like he’s an amalgamation of Byomkesh Bakshi and Feluda in his head. Meanwhile, Uttam’s home situation is complicated — he resents his widowed mother (Sadhana Singh) for various reasons, not least because she constantly recalls their past life and late husband. The mother-son bond is strained, she aches for his attention, so it’s amusing when Tamang and team unofficially recruit her to be part of the investigation because of her passion for Bengali detective novels. Uttam’s colleagues confide in her like sons in their downtime; it’s a quirky touch without the energy of a quirky touch.

Animal’s Rannvijay, Kabir Singh’s Kabir, Rockstar’s Jordan, Tamasha’s Ved and Haseen Dillruba’s Rishu walk into a bar. There is no punchline here, because they are no joke. They participate in a victimhood-measuring contest. Rannvijay declares he had to sleep with a female agent knowing who she was and cheated on his wife to make his dad proud; it was very difficult. Kabir claims he slapped a girl to make her love his alpha masculinity; it was very hard. Jordan says he quotes Rumi and chose to meet his dead soulmate in a field beyond; it wasn’t easy. Ved claims his girlfriend fixed him by rejecting his alter-ego; it was terrible. Rishu declares he chopped off his hand to be with his bad-boy-craving wife; it’s been a sacrifice. In walks Tere Ishk Mein’s Shankar, who lights a cigarette and scoffs at them all.