Saibal Chatterjee

Self-assured is one thing that actor Boman Irani’s directorial debut, The Mehta Boys, definitely is. It is a refreshingly unpretentious father-son drama that neither strives for gratuitous pace nor looks for pronounced complexity and yet manages to be not only thought-provoking but also emotionally involving. The director is also the lead actor and co-producer of the Amazon Prime Video film but he clearly isn’t weighed down by the workload. He maintains a firm grip on a narrative centred on a 71-year-old Navsari-based man coming off the demise of his wife and his fraught relationship with his only son, an architect who flew the coop a decade ago in pursuit of a career in Mumbai. The Mehta Boys, scripted by Boman Irani and Oscar-winning screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris (Birdman), isn’t crammed with high drama, surprise twists and radical themes. It has its share of emotive highs and performative crescendos but that does not deflect it off its clean, even and realistic arc.

The title of the film whimsically fuses two words from two languages - love and siyappa - to convey what it is about - a wild and wacky scenario in which unbridled, unending chaos caused by secret online entanglements sends a steady romantic liaison between two Delhi youngsters into a maddening tailspin. Loveyapa is uneven but fun, frothy but anything but pointless. It isn’t all empty talk and texting. It isn’t just words that crash into each other in Loveyapa. Two worlds and impulses - virtual and real, East and West Delhi, and male proclivities and female instincts - are posited against each other in the film. The busy crisscrossing creates its share of problems for the characters as well as the film’s makers. Eventually, for the latter, it does not go out of hand.

Home is where the hurt is for the titular protagonist of Mrs., a Hindi-language remake of The Great Indian Kitchen. Sanya Malhotra lives the role and director Arati Kadav orchestrates her resources with striking efficiency. The result: Mrs. gets as close to being a home run as a replication of a critically acclaimed, widely viewed film still fresh in public memory can be. Mrs. makes several significant and clear deviations. The cooking area in the film, for instance, isn’t exactly like the straggly, perpetually damp kitchen in the Malayalam film. Though far less spacious, it is brighter, more airy, and less dispiriting. But the plight of the married woman consigned to this corner of the hearth is no less pitiable. A kitchen sink leaks. The problem remains unattended for days. The lady’s repeated plea to her doctor-husband to summon a plumber falls on deaf ears. The worsening situation isn’t a mere functional crisis - it also points to the state of a disintegrating marriage.

Jailers, convicts and undertrials populate Black Warrant, a seven-episode Netflix series created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Satyanshu Singh and produced under the banner of Applause Entertainment. Barring occasional detours beyond its prison setting, the show remains firmly focussed on an upright, unassuming jailer navigating a corrupt, insensitive system. It provides a sprawling overview of Delhi’s understaffed and overcrowded Tihar Jail of the 1980s from the perspective of a real-life prison superintendent. The insider’s take sets the series apart from average yarns about cops and crooks, crime and punishment. Black Warrant is no yarn. Rooted in reality, it portrays the intense struggles of a hero who is anything but a boilerplate man of action. He isn’t a cocky, hyper-masculine, strapping crusader out to flatten everything in his path.

Aparna Sen, movie star, ace filmmaker, successful magazine editor and active civil society leader, has had an incredibly eventful and diverse career. A documentary chronicling her life and times was long overdue. But that certainly isn’t the only reason why Suman Ghosh’s Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen, should be essential viewing. Straddling a wide gamut - from the personal and professional to the political and public - and employing a wide range of interviews and reminiscences of notable contemporaries, Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen throws light on an accomplished filmmaker, her significant body of work and the complexities of the times that she lives and works in. Suman Ghosh, who cast Aparna Sen alongside Soumitra Chatterjee in Basu Poribar (2018), has produced a deft 81-minute cinematic document that encapsulates the varied facets of one of India’s foremost filmmakers. The female gaze and the primacy of films that put women at their centre are inevitably mentioned, but Ghosh, taking a cue from the subject’s stand on the matter, does not unduly foreground Sen’s gender.

A brilliant and sensitive schoolgirl in love with a classmate is watched, monitored and scrutinised incessantly as she seeks to break free from familial and societal shackles in Girls Will Be Girls, writer-director Shuchi Talati’s self-assured, award-winning narrative feature debut now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The exquisitely crafted and insightful coming-of-age drama, an Indo-French co-production that bagged two awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, is buoyed by impeccable writing and a couple of consummate performances by debutante Preeti Panigrahi and the seasoned Kani Kusruti.

Two early scenes in Despatch provide a foretaste of the complexities that are about to assail the life of crime reporter Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee). In the first, he returns home from a long day at work to find wife Shweta (Shahana Goswami) merrily partying with friends. One of the guests, drunk to the gills, tries to forcibly feed him a pizza. Joy snaps and storms out of the house.

The Siddis, a community unrepresented in Indian cinema, is under the spotlight in Rhythm of Dammam, an exceptionally evocative, visually arresting film written and directed by Kerala-born, New York-based Jayan Cherian. The film premiered this week at the 55th International Film Festival of India in Goa. It is now headed to the International Competition line-up of the upcoming 29th International Film Festival of Kerala.