Rahul Desai

Given the times we live in, it’s a source of constant intrigue that Hindi cinema’s politically aware film-makers have to be smart about expressing themselves. They have to be subtler and sneakier with their views, but also stay just as accessible. You see a push-and-pull balance with the more prolific storytellers like Hansal Mehta, Sudhir Mishra and Anubhav Sinha. But cult-status directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee have found it visibly harder. At times, their opinions are nearly too pure. You can tell that they have so much to say—there’s a lot of emotion, passion, cynicism and awareness—but they’re running out of commercial road.

The Pickle Factory is what happens when The Office (U.S.) and Better Life Foundation (India) reluctantly get married (arranged) and have a pious, Doordarshan-loving child that refuses to grow up. It’s the kind of stagey and adolescent workplace comedy that went out of fashion years ago. You want it to work, of course, for several reasons. The 10-episode show revolves around the quirky employees of a family-run pickle company; imagine the readymade Hindi ‘achaar’ proverbs.

It often takes no more than five minutes to tell that a ten-episode series is going to be … not good. Yet, it’s my job to watch the whole thing. I can’t just abandon it the moment I realise it’s fundamentally flawed. So, I spend a day or two watching the next 395 minutes, hoping against hope that a miracle changes my mind. But, of course, it never comes—the craft is all wrong, the writing is dated, the music is uninspired, and the acting is everywhere. Yet, when a series is so long and stubborn and voluminous, one tends to develop a strange attachment to it. There’s no escape, so I simply make peace with—and normalise—the mediocrity at hand. It’s a reluctant bond, the kind you have with a month-long cough. But it’s a bond nevertheless, and when it ends, a part of your life ends. That’s what Doctors became to me.

Watching a mass actioner is a bit like watching West Indies play T20 cricket. When it comes off, there’s no better sight in sports. It’s all fireworks and fury, natural showmanship and musical rhythm. It makes no sense, yet the joy is real. But when it doesn’t come off, it can look like one giant Steve Smith mishit: ugly, awkward, strange, abnormal. Baby John is an example. Nothing aligns. The timing is woefully off, the star wattage is awry, the sound mix is all over the place, the action is unimaginative, it’s 164 minutes of dated narrative tropes, and the money shots don’t add up. That’s the thing about the genre: it’s boom or bust. It’s high-risk, high-reward, high-everything filmmaking. West Indies either chases down 250 or gets skittled out for 45 — there is seldom an in-between version.

While watching Mufasa: The Lion King, all I could think about was this: 4 precious years of Barry Jenkins’ career were spent in front of Disney green screens and sound stages to not even create something madly original? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against effects-driven or photo-realistically animated movies; visionaries like Peter Jackson and James Cameron have redefined the relationship between technology and storytelling over the years. But Disney? Another Lion King film? My viewing experience was laced with the frustration of realising that yet another Hollywood studio franchise was doing wasteful Hollywood things.

Even as an Ayushmann Khurrana-coded small-town comedy that’s a decade too late, Jhansi Ka Rajkumar feels dated. The film stars Gulshan Devaiah as Rajkumar, a stay-at-home dad struggling to adjust to a move from Delhi to Jhansi — or, more accurately, struggling to function in a judgmental society. His wife, Devayani (Namita Dubey), is the breadwinner with a government job. You know the drill. Gender role reversal. Ridicule. Stigma. Pressure to conform. Marital conflict. Speech. Resolution. This is basically a middle-class Ki & Ka (2016), just not as gimmicky and self-satisfied. But it’s also not as self-contained as Barun Sobti’s track in Raat Jawaan Hai, a show where the guy’s “progressive househusband” tag silently gnaws away at him.

Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous follows, fusses over and indulges Indian rapper Honey Singh on his comeback trail in 2023. He declares that he has returned from the dead for his fans. He looks rejuvenated. On cue, two young ragpickers at a traffic signal recognise and laud him for losing weight. The brief is simple: new body, new mind, new music videos after years of substance abuse, mental health issues and rehabilitation. Drugs are never mentioned, but the camera focuses on his physical tics and foot tapping enough to hint at it. This part is interspersed with his up-and-down journey up till this point: bits of his childhood, his early talent, his fame and fandom, and his widely chronicled collapse. The treatment is all too familiar. The lens becomes his mouthpiece. At some point, he stops being a person. He morphs into a neatly segregated storyline, an impenetrable idea that’s at once marketed and sold.

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.