Rahul Desai

Over its three seasons, The White Lotus has become an American TV franchise that at once satirises the insularity of American affluence and the superiority complex of a social media generation that laps up the satire. Much of the show — its characters, reaction shots, music, monologues, conversations, scandals, twists, weekly episodes — is staged with a sense of the memes, hyper-aware humour and internet buzz it generates. The virality is an inextricable part of the design. It caters to — but also skewers — an average woke viewer’s desire to be seen as well as their disdain towards Western capitalism and anti-intellectualism. We are invited to laugh at rich and culturally oblivious vacationers dispensing the emptiest thought farts with the self-seriousness of 13-year-old cinephiles. Note, for instance, the gravity of the score almost mocks the levity of Sam Rockwell’s hysterically hollow monologue about his sexual awakening (if one can even call it that). But we are also lured into identifying with a couple of ‘outsiders’ — people who think they’re better than everyone else — in each of the seasons. In Season 1, it’s a Black teenager tagging along on a Hawaiian holiday with the wealthy white family of her best friend; it’s also a freelance culture writer who’s newly married into money. In Season 2, it’s a straight-laced lawyer who cringes at the superficiality of her husband’s friends; it’s also a frumpy young assistant of an eccentric heiress on a Sicilian holiday.

Early on in Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, we see its central character, Raghvendra “Raghu” Pawar (Raghu Prakash), commuting to work one morning. It’s an innocuous little routine—a man rides through town on his motorbike. The passing scenery is reminiscent of any tier-2 Indian city: dusty cricket grounds, petrol pumps, bus stops, a giant clock, a flyover under construction, a bridge. A closer look, however, reveals that the streets simmer with unresolved frictions and resolute fictions. Garlanded statues of fabled kings compete for attention with garlanded statues of fabled queens. Flags of clashing political parties and communities dot the statues and bus stops. A lone church shies away in the background. Raghu has the stoic manner of a combatant weaving through the debris of a decades-long dispute. We soon learn that this town, Belgaum, is a war zone of identity.

S. Sashikanth’s Test is yet another story about a celebrity feeling the rage of a common man. It follows Arjun Venkataraman (Siddharth), a legendary Indian cricketer thrown into a crisis. The crisis is manufactured by a bitter scientist, Saravanan (R. Madhavan), who needs money to fend off loan sharks, pay for his wife’s IVF treatment and, most importantly, float a revolutionary hydro-fuel project. The twists are corny and implausible. The Netflix-thriller template flattens the initial promise. There are too many loose ends, abrupt transformations, unnecessary characters, over-the-top performances (Madhavan’s villain era — or Maddy’s baddie era — is just not it), and lazy resolutions. In short, Test is not a great film.

I admire ambition. But ambition without direction can be like an ice cream cone without the ice cream: hollow, weird, tasteless and sad. Sorry for the analogy, but I was left with a sticky cone in my hand after my ice cream scoop met the footpath last week and I’m still salty (not sugary) about it. It wasn’t even a waffle cone. Coming back to Chamak, rarely has so much ambition resulted in so little. It’s a miracle that this musical drama manages to be 12 episodes long without making a Punjab-sized dent in the OTT landscape. The series is disjointed and distracted, but it generously allows the viewer to be just as distracted. I found myself doing some chores, learning of Hollywood star Val Kilmer’s death, watching Real Madrid highlights and reading about the IPL — all of this while six episodes of Chamak: The Conclusion (the first 6 dropped in 2023) played in the background. But the empty cone, in this case, elicits sympathy. It’s a lot of production, money, writing, acting, culture, songs, sound. It’s hard not to feel for a show that works so hard to tell a story.

Given Hindi cinema’s twin obsession with nepotism and nationalism, it’s hard not to be nostalgic about a dopey Salman Khan movie. The badness of a family entertainer like Sikandar is harmless, vintage, candid, pure almost. It has no ulterior motive, no genre, no affiliations; it’s a festival release, but the festival may as well be a Salman Khan release. It’s just there: a 150-minute montage of intro shots and ad slogans parading as punchlines. In other words, Sikandar is a dying breed of Bollywood vice. I’ve kind of missed it. The brain melts, but at least the spirit stays intact. It’s so critic-proof that I’m heaving a sigh of relief as I write this — there’s no prospect of offending anyone because nobody cares. Happy days. Both its villains are bald, so hair propaganda is the closest it comes to taking a stand. The closest it comes to being political is Khan playing a Rajkot resident who (occasionally) speaks Gujarati, a language that gives him a direct line to New Delhi. The closest it comes to meta referencing is when this godly hero delivers its actor’s thoughts while punishing an errant minister: “I don’t know about PM or CM, I can easily be an MLA or MP, but I’m not interested. Don’t force me to be interested”. It’s so strong on fan service that when Khan breaks the fourth wall during an action sequence, he doesn’t look at the camera; the camera looks at him. It even reverses the anxiety around modern technology: the acting all around is so robotic that AI would in fact humanise it.

Some of the sexiest thrillers aren’t about the plot. They invite the viewer to slice through a perfectly sculpted body—not murderously, of course—and try to find a tiny, beating heart within. The sleekness of the body matters. And perhaps no contemporary filmmaker encourages such surgical eroticism more than Steven Soderbergh. His movies are so wildly watchable — even when they’re not great — because the style itself is the substance. Black Bag is perhaps his most complete work in a decade; it’s a London-set spy thriller where the very concept of espionage becomes a parable for the devaluation of trust in modern-day relationships. Soderbergh and writer David Koepp don’t come at it from a nostalgic back-in-our-day space. If anything, they fetishise what it takes to keep a tradition alive in an institution that’s rigged against the anatomy of faith. The framework is clever. The film revolves around a cold-blooded British intelligence agent, George (Michael Fassbender), who must investigate a top-secret leak and find the traitor among his colleagues. The details are not important; let’s just say there’s the standard threat of a nuclear meltdown and dissolved governments. One of the five suspects, however, is Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), his wife and fellow intelligence agent. George and Kathryn are kind of an urban legend in the spy world — not because they’re excellent at what they do, but because they’re married and intensely committed to each other in a vocation that requires duplicity, roleplay and moral ambiguity. They’re a social anomaly, so much so that a dinner invite to their home feels like a “visit to our parents”. It’s a marriage so solid that when George goes up to Kathryn’s floor, everyone in her meeting (including her superior) automatically pauses — you can almost hear the mental eyerolls in the room. They’re used to it.

Watching a Zakir Khan stand-up special is like watching that funny friend from your childhood actually find his true calling. It’s sort of moving, because you know for a fact that none of those friends took their talent seriously. Society simply reduces them to a personality type — the witty guy, the joker, the attention seeker, the mischief monger, the crowd pleaser, the yapper. If anything, they barely recognise it as a talent. Khan’s sets often feel like an authentication of such transient, everyday humour. His languid delivery expands the most ordinary details into mini-narratives of being alive. Which is to say: Zakir Khan isn’t a comedian; he’s a very good storyteller with comic timing. He isn’t really funny; he’s funnily real.

Santosh is two movies. The first is rooted in how Santosh, meaning “contentment” or “happiness”, is traditionally a man’s name. This underdog movie is about Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), a 28-year-old widow who inherits her late husband’s police job. As a new woman constable, Santosh strives to make a name in the notoriously masculine field of law enforcement. She finds a mentor in Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a veteran cop who has over the years become a symbol of feminism and gender empowerment. Together, they investigate the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Santosh impresses her superiors, transcends her “compassionate appointment” (or bereavement quota) image, reclaims her own identity, and chases the case. This is the film that a specific India believes in: an inspiring coming-of-age story, a narrative of human fortitude, a gritty tale of patriarchy smashing and female agency. Santosh herself believes in it. It’s her against the world. But this is also the film that’s sold to this India. One that’s bereft of complexity, truth, ambiguity and labels. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss — or contentment.