Rahul Desai

As a wise antihero once said: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain”. Who knew Harvey Dent was referring to one of TVF’s flagship shows in its fifth and greediest season yet? Gullak has been critic-proof for years, in the sense that it’s built to be liked and ‘felt’ as the cinema of middle-class existence; as storytelling that thrives on nothingness. If it doesn’t work for you, you are accused of not knowing the real India. If it’s too boring for you, you are not wired to handle the mundane colours of everyday life. They will have you believe that the genre is shaped by sweet dullness: the invisible moments between the lofty landmarks of living, the unremarkable and forgotten days between the scenes that stories usually show.

A middle-aged widow (Madhuri Dixit) finds herself in a ‘killer’ soup. She is stuck with the dead body of a next-door neighbour (Ravi Kishan) in her living room. It’s the middle of the night. The panic-stricken woman calls up both her Patna-based daughters — the older one (Triptii Dimri) who slaves away at her husband’s home, and the younger one (Dharna Durga) who’s desperate to go viral as an influencer. The two warring sisters arrive at their mother’s the next morning and wonder how to solve the crisis. When they ask her what happened, she narrates an over-elaborate adventure of self-defense. It sounds like a farfetched lie; they do not believe her. But they go about dealing with the body anyway. What follows is a quirky small-town dramedy that features the squabbling and spirited ladies, the man’s suspicious family, a kidnapping case, a lovelorn cop, an entitled husband, a bag of cash, an upcoming wedding, and a cryptic ransom call.

In theory, nothing about Made In India: A Titan Story is supposed to work. Starting with that corporate-core title. It’s hard not to be wary of well-mounted business success stories about brands and institutions that still exist. There’s the thinnest line between promotional productions and historical dramas. This six-episode series is adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book about the rise of Titan, the world-class watchmaking company founded by Xerxes Desai in pre-liberalisation India. It’s not exactly a rags-to-riches tale; it opens with Desai well into his career, and already an integral part of The Tata Group. It’s not your typical underdog tale either; Desai’s mentor is grand old J.R.D Tata himself, so even when Titan runs into its many bureaucratic and funding roadblocks, it’s not like the team has the odds entirely stacked against them. There’s also the ready-made patriotism angle; Titan unfolds to put the country on a map dominated by shiny Swiss companies. On paper, the series has all the ingredients of a persuasive marketing campaign. For a viewer, it’s the equivalent of trying to root for a nepo-baby in a landscape full of outsiders.

Most homecoming stories have a narrative pattern. Especially the feel-good ones. The central character returns to their village from the big city. But the perspective is new. Suddenly everything feels regressive. There are problems and prejudices. The locals sound smaller, and the enlightened protagonist operates from a higher moral ground. Social change is inevitable; the hero simply knows better. Either they leave as the bigger person or stay to fix it all. It’s the urban-saviour syndrome refitted into a back-to-roots template.

The Great Grand Superhero has one of the most charming setups in recent memory. The first half is funny, poignant, satirical and very inventive. It also has the best child actors since Stanley Ka Dabba, a film it shares an editor (Deepa Bhatia) and narrative spirit with. There’s a new mid-term admission in a small-town school; his name is Deepu (a pitch-perfect Mihir Godbole). Deepu is a clever student; he knows all the answers to all the teachers’ toughest questions. The other kids envy him and find him strange. He confesses to one of them that he’s “different” because his grandfather (Jackie Shroff) is — suspenseful drum beat — a superhero. It’s a secret, he says, that only kids below the age of 18 can know, otherwise the grand old man will lose his superpowers.

System stars Sonakshi Sinha as a privileged young professional who strives to shed the ‘nepo-baby’ tag by breaking free from the shadow of an influential father. The meta casting is a common Bollywood gimmick: a version of Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi playing the restless outsiders in Gehraiyaan. The context here supplies the characterisation. Sinha’s Neha Rajvansh might be the daughter of a big-shot lawyer, but her rite of passage includes a ‘lowly’ stint at the state prosecutor’s office. Her reel-clicking, selfie-taking and manicured fingers must toil in the trenches to earn her place in her father’s empire: a legal-world equivalent of industry kids landing jobs as assistant directors before they are launched in big-budget productions. Like her old man, Neha treats her career as a medium of winning, not a battle for justice. When he challenges her to win ten cases in a row, she gets cracking — with the help of the court stenographer, Sarika (Jyotika). All she cares about is the gold at the end of this rainbow.

Early on in Chand Mera Dil, two lovers in the throes of a feverish college romance do something weird. They’ve just been arrested for public indecency after stopping the motorcycle in the middle of a busy highway so that she can straddle him for an intimate discussion about their future. I’m all for dramatic gestures, but why risk becoming roadkill for a random film-poster moment? But this is not the weird thing. When they’re at the police station, she starts crying when he admits to having quit cigarettes for her. She explains that she isn’t used to such importance because her father was a wife-beater and her childhood sucked; he also chimes in with his two cents of sadness. Of all the ways their little heart-to-heart could’ve been staged, this has the least sense of occasion and timing. Get a room, but read the room first.

Baapya opens normally enough. A small Konkani village. A boisterous fisherman (Girish Kulkarni as Anya) is in debt. His teenage son (Aaryan Menghji as Sanju) is infatuated with a classmate. Anya’s lawyer proposes a land deal to fix the crisis. The catch: he needs the signature of his ex-wife, Shailaja (Rajshri Deshpande), who left the family years ago. His second wife and kids could do with the money. Both father and son do not look forward to seeing the woman who ‘deserted’ them, but they must. And at the half-hour mark of Baapya, they do. Except they don’t. Shailaja returns as a doctor, but also as a man. A gender reassignment surgery means that Shailaja is now Shailesh (Rajshri Deshpande), a trans man who was once a reluctant wife and mother. What follows is a bittersweet week in a community that grapples with the ‘stigma’ of this transition, even as Anya and his son resist their new reality on the conveyor belt to acceptance.