Saibal Chatterjee

Leaping from the pages of 17th century Maratha history to the fantastical realms of Bollywood mythologizing, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, son of the revered Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, receives no-holds-barred epic treatment in Laxman Utekar’s Chhaava. The burden that the film puts upon itself in the bargain takes a heavy toll on the eventual shape of things. Despite a pair of noteworthy performances from lead actor Vicky Kaushal and Akshaye Khanna as the antagonist, the film falls apart at the seams because it has little to hold it together apart from its unabashed obsession with excess. We accept that it is all right for the makers to take the title literally—it means lion cub. It, however, makes no sense to use that as an excuse to roll out an endless parade of growls and scowls in the service of battle scenes that go on and on.

The shaadi goes off without a hitch. But the suhaag raat in a luxury hotel suite is rudely scuttled by armed goons. As the new bride hopes to get the marital union to a warm start, the uninvited guests knock on the door. What happens next is nothing like anything that the lady would have anticipated. Ahead of her is a night to remember and, just as much, a night to forget. The intruders demand to know where “Charlie” is. The groom, scared out of his wits, has no clue what the gun-waving men are talking about. They will not take “I don’t know” for an answer. The woman isn’t one to take anything lying down, least of all the shenanigans of the thugs or the many avowed frailties of her husband. All hell breaks loose. That is how Dhoom Dhaam, a rom-com caper out on Netflix, kicks off (of course, not before a quick prelude designed to set the tone for the rest of the film).

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.