Shilajit Mitra

Credit where it’s due: Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri makes the most interactive Hindi films imaginable. One of the discreet pleasures of watching his Files trilogy — Bengal was preceded by Kashmir and Tashkent — in theatres is also listening in on the audience chatter. His films coast on a call-and-response strategy that I find uniquely fascinating. There are pauses built into the narrative for the viewer to gasp and react—in horror, in indignation. Ideologically, these films are crude and convenient monologues; as a piece of communal theatre, though, they’re a dialogue! My morning screening of The Bengal Files at a suburban multiplex in Mumbai was by no means a muted experience. When a hopeful and patriotic man, circa 1946, announces optimistically that Calcutta will be never become a ‘Muslim’ city, an elderly lady three rows from me ad-libbed sarcastically, “Of course it wont”. On Mahatma Gandhi hawking his spiel of non-violence as Hindus are butchered in the streets: “What an a**hole”. And a little earlier, when a Sikh character enters the narrative, this priceless enquiry to the screen: “What is a sardar doing in Bengal?”

In films about laughter and forgetting, flashbacks become a distraction. A sweetly awkward interlude toward the end of Kaalidhar Laapataresolves a minor mystery: why Kalidhar, a middle-aged man with early-stage dementia played by Abhishek Bachchan, loves eating biriyani so much. What links his plate to heart is memory. Let’s call it a meat-cute. This passage (featuring younger versions of characters and scored with the generically sweet ‘Haseen Pareshaniyaan’) returns to conventionality a narrative that celebrates the art of letting go. In the 2019 Tamil original, KD, the moment is handled briskly, with minimum sentimentality. But a Hindi film without a discernible ’love track’ and a cameo is perhaps too much to ask.

A title like Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan spells trouble. It signals the surge of poetry about to overwhelm the screen. Conversations, voiceovers, song lyrics — everything is tuned to Radio Metaphor in Santosh Singh’s romantic drama. “She saw me not with sight, but insight,” says the hero, a visually-impaired man, of his beloved. A beat later: pyaar andha hota hai (love is blind). The film’s obsession with sight-based metaphors and poetic punning becomes… a blind spot. They meet on the train to Dehra. Jahaan (Vikrant Massey) is a musician and a songwriter, low on inspiration, seeking a creative reset in the hills. The passenger opposite him, in the coupe, is Saba (Shanaya Kapoor), a theatre artiste wanting to break into Hindi films. She’s wearing a blindfold (it’s prep for an important audition, she says) and has resolved not to remove it till the end of her trip. Since her manager bailed at the last minute, Saba has to travel alone and unattended. This means two things: (1) method acting, not family connections, is clearly the key to Bollywood. (2) Saba doesn’t realise that her co-passenger, with whom she’s struck up a lively rapport, is not a sighted person. Curiously, Jahaan plays along.

There is a self-aware moment in Sitaare Zameen Par that nicely parodies the moral science cinema of Aamir Khan. A team of neurodivergent basketball players has won a precious free throw in a losing game. Their coach, Gulshan, can’t stop pep-talking the player about to take the shot. Satbir (Aroush Datta) loses his head and yells out. “Sir, pehle aap chup rahiye,” he thunders, telling Gulshan to shut up. Khan — one of the most didactic superstars India has ever produced — needs to surround himself with more Satbirs. In his directorial debut, Taare Zameen Par, a landmark film from 2007, Khan played Nikumbh, a sensitive art teacher who mentors a dyslexic child in a boarding school. The audience, too, felt mentored meaningfully by Khan, their hearts and minds broadened by a thoughtful, virtuous star. Khan spiked his hair and dressed up in a clown suit for the role. Yet, every so often, we spotted a halo behind his head.

Detective Sherdil begins with a rap number talking up its quick-witted protagonist, ending with a declarative “Sherlock and Bakshi could never compare!” A tall claim, but also true in a sense. Neither Holmes nor Byomkesh hung around at crime scenes making reels. This, however, is what Sherdil (Diljit Dosanjh) does in the film’s opening scene, calling it a highlight of his job. The camera circles him in an arc. We are being introduced to a genius investigator. Instead, Diljit looks like he’s ready to drop his latest single. Having busted the biggest kidnapping ring in Budapest — oddly, no one, not even the White characters, speak a line of Hungarian — Sherdil is starting on a vacay. Promptly and unceremoniously, he’s dragged back to investigate the murder of telecom magnate Pankaj Bhatti (Boman Irani). On a highway, Bhatti’s car was waylaid and blown up by a bike-borne assassin. While the killer was caught, who were his paymasters?

Questions abound in Karan Tejpal’s directorial debut, Stolen. For starters, why would Raman (Shubham Vardhan), a young man en route to attend a wedding — not just any wedding, mind you, but his mother’s wedding — suddenly jettison his plans in order to help a complete stranger in peril? There are a couple of ways you can answer it, including a recent bereavement we learn about, but my preferred theory is this: Raman is a freelance photographer who works for magazines. If there is one profession in India with a perpetually troubled conscience, it’s Raman’s. Matters are more straightforward for Raman’s brother, Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee). A foppish, affluent gent, with slicked-back hair and a practical manner, he just wants to get on with his night (“The afterparty is so not lit without your moves,” he’s told on the phone). Come to pick up Raman at the railway station, he witnesses a commotion. A five-month-old child has been stolen from the platform; the mother, a desperate-looking migrant labourer named Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), initially suspects Raman, then acquiesces to his offer for help.

What’s the deal with Sunny Singh? The actor, in his fairly long career, has been a curious nonentity in Hindi cinema, turning up in any and every film that will have him. He was a mildly amusing presence in the Luv Ranjan Cinematic Universe. But his recent output has been especially bleak. It does not seem to matter if he is playing Lakshmana in Adipurush or a boozy beefcake in Wild Wild Punjab. Whatever the assignment, Singh gives the impression of an amiable jock who’s wandered in from the nearest Hakim’s Aalim. In The Bhootnii, a new horror-comedy, Singh plays Santanu, a student of ‘St. Vincent’s College of Arts and Culture’, a true cradle of learning. Its students occupy themselves with the pursuit of sachi mohabbat (true love), which is understandably hard to come by. Each year, on Valentine’s Day, they hang trinkets and pictures on a wishing tree called the ‘Virgin Tree’. It is worshipped as a bringer of romantic good luck, but it also bodes ill: a tree nymph, played by Mouni Roy, haunts the campus, and has apparently precipitated a string of recent suicides.

The release of Ground Zero has been coloured, inescapably, by the deadly terror attack in Pahalgam, which claimed at least 26 lives and has escalated tensions in the subcontinent. Although the film, drawn from real events, is set in Kashmir in the early 2000s, its climactic showdown — a late-night raid on a terrorist hideout by Border Security Force (BSF) jawans — is bound to feed the current mood. This may work to the film’s advantage, firming up its theatrical prospects even as it muddles its intent. There are nuances here that many viewers, under the circumstances, are likely to ignore. There was a hint of this in the film’s trailer. “Is only the land of Kashmir ours, or its people too?” asks BSF commandant Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey (Emraan Hashmi). It is an important question to pose in this heated atmosphere, with allegations of complicity directed at the Kashmiri people, not to mention threats and attacks against Kashmiri students in other parts of the country. Ground Zero stands apart from works like The Kashmir Filesand Article 370. It is closer in spirit to Shershaah: a patriotic, simple-minded biopic, with a passing yet palpable concern for local lives.