Rahul Desai

Once adulthood sets in, and once we’ve accumulated enough years, most of us have two types of recurring dreams (and nightmares). One revolves around the terror of remembering that the exam is tomorrow and we haven’t touched the school syllabus. The other is shaped by the horror of finding ourselves naked in routine situations, while being totally helpless about it. Both of these are trauma responses to our fraught relationship with society. Both feature a link between social conditioning and shame, but Abhijit Muzumdar’s Body confronts the steeper task of exploring the second dream. It’s a testing watch, but ultimately quite a rewarding one.

Despatch starts off as a journalist story. It’s 2012. Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee) is a veteran crime reporter for a Mumbai-based newspaper. Joy is in a joyless marriage with Shweta (Shahana Goswami), and he plans a future with Prerna (Arrchita Agarwaal), a colleague he’s been having an affair with; he is in search of his next big headline.

For Tarantino, it’s the foot shot. For Rohit Shetty, it’s the drone shot. And for Neeraj Pandey, it’s the walking-talking shot: unbroken over-the-shoulder and full-frontal shots of self-serious men striding in and out of spaces, between rooms and corridors, between people and objects. Cops walk. Robbers walk. Waiters walk. Dogs walk. Thoughts walk. The air walks. No cinematographer finishes a schedule unfit. Basically, walking equals narrative momentum. Pandey is a master at making it look like something is always happening even when nothing is — but not in a good way.

All We Imagine As Light opens like a non-fiction film about a city of grand fictions. We see a dark Mumbai — the factory of dreams — in which its survivors and victims imagine light. Invisible migrant voices play over a montage of traffic, streets, beaches, stations and hope. A pregnant housemaid jokes about being fed well by her employer. A veteran from Gujarat refuses to call it home because he’s afraid he might have to leave any moment. A dockyard worker recalls the fishy smells from his first night; he speaks like the stink has gone, but it’s his nose that adapted. A woman credits the place for making her forget a breakup. They all sound like stories from the “Spirit of Mumbai” handbook — it’s hard to tell their fate from their faith. The film seamlessly transitions from the generic to the specific by the end of this montage. The camera settles on one such story in motion: two Malayali nurses on the train back to their tiny apartment.

As children, most of us learn to see 1947 as India’s finest moment. The event is simple: India gained freedom from the greedy British Raj and that’s that. As teenagers, we start to sense that perhaps it wasn’t all smooth and happy. With independence came the pressure to move out and grow up. But it doesn’t matter much because, either way, colonialism ended. As we get older, however, a full and bittersweet picture emerges: a nation is free, only to be violently divided into two on the basis of religion. It was never as simple as the British leaving or a newly born country celebrating its revolutionaries. This fuller picture has been molded — and revised — into shapeless stories by a future reeling from its scars. History is what happened, but these days, history is what we choose to believe.

Sometime last month, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York took the internet by storm. The prize was a modest 50 dollars. Some participants were more convincing than others, but the reason this event went viral is because the real Chalamet made a surprise visit in the end to greet the winners. Ironically, he looked nothing like the men trying to ape him. The point of this anecdote — wait for it — is that the entire Indian fantasy-period-action-epic bubble these days is an expensive look-alike contest. During the interval of Kanguva, I was momentarily disoriented: was the second half of Devara: Part 1 or Kalki 2898 AD going to start playing? Would anyone even notice? These movies resemble each other in strange and amateur ways, but none of them resemble the original star, S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali. In fact, like Chalamet himself, Rajamouli showed up in a cameo in one of these films — and that scene alone became more popular than the mega-budget production surrounding it.

There are some movies you just want to like before you watch them. Personal biases are an integral part of the cinema experience. For instance, I used to have a soft spot for stories that romanticised a version of myself: slice-of-life introvert tales or dysfunctional family dramas. My focus has now moved to aspirational old-people stories; perhaps it has something to do with my parents aging with all sorts of ailments. The prospect of watching Vijay 69, then, was an inviting one. Not only is it director Akshay Roy’s first film since the criminally underappreciated Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017), it stars Anupam Kher as Vijay Mathew, a 69-year-old widower who attempts to become India’s oldest triathlete. I went into the film expecting to revise my reality — of having a 71-year-old father allergic to physical fitness — for a few hours. A bit of sports thrown in can’t hurt matters. What could possibly go wrong? And what could possibly go wrong when you have to ask what could possibly go wrong?

Citadel: Honey Bunny is a catchy title. In fact, you can almost hear it. “Honey Bunny” instantly evokes the viral Idea Cellular ad jingle from 2012: you’re my pumpkin pumpkin/hello honey bunny. But there’s more to the earworm than a Pulp Fiction tribute or a term of endearment. The commercial itself showed a traveler infecting different parts of the country with a tune; the cutesy lyrics, too, felt like the collective sound of couples staying connected across regions. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Citadel: Honey Bunny — whose pan-world premise features a pan-Indian adventure of a couple named Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) and Bunny (Varun Dhawan) — is a long-form descendent of the jingle. It’s totally on brand for director duo Raj & DK, who thrive on affectionate pop-cultural nods, cinephilia and retro references.