Shilajit Mitra

Farida Jalal didn’t grey her hair overnight. She’s been acting in movies since the 1960s. Since DDLJ, she’s been a sweet, endearing presence in Hindi films, buffing up large ensembles with her nourishing warmth. At 75, she’s a grande dame in the tradition of Zohra Sehgal and Nafisa Ali. Yet like those greats, Jalal is very much her own actor—as Shyam Benegal’s Mammo proved. Her new film, The Great Shamsuddin Family, directed by Anusha Rizvi, is also an ensemble comedy, with Jalal billed behind everyone else. Yet it only sparks to life when the actor joins the fray.

You’ve watched Dhurandhar. You’ve watched Tere Ishk Mein. You’ve watched Haq. You wouldn’t admit it, but you’ve also watched The Taj Story. Now you want to fold the year in peace. How about a silly Kapil Sharma comedy? I hadn’t seen the trailer for Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon 2 and went in expecting more of the same: a tumescent comedy about a man with many wives, with no wars or social unrest to worry about, no particular politics to propagate. The first film, released in 2015, was some form of a hit. Surely the sequel will abide?

Babloo Nishaanchi (Aaishvary Thackeray) is at the end of his rope. Recently released from prison, after a ten-year stint, he finds himself in freefall. A belated discovery about his twin brother and the woman he loved most sends him over the edge. Babloo fumes drunkenly by a pond. He screams into the void. Funnily, the void screams back — there’s a random man on the opposite embankment, mimicking and mocking our hero’s exertions. This scene has the Anurag Kashyap touch: impotent rage and self-pity undercut by absurdist humour.

Hindi cinema operates in extremes. On the one hand, you have the blatant Islamophobia and sectarianism of recent propaganda films. These films dig around in history to single out a particular community. The other approach is rarer: calm, sober-sided films made with a measure of dignity and intent. Yet these films also have a tendency to hedge, to oversimplify. Too often, they reduce complex realities to pat displays of solidarity. I felt that way about Ground Zero, a Kashmir-set military film with a passing yet palpable concern for local lives. And I feel much the same about Haq, which dramatises the landmark Shah Bano case from the 1980s. Incidentally, both films star Emraan Hashmi.

Cliffhangers are the hot sauce of series storytelling. They’re meant to make us drool, lean forward, smack our lips in anticipation. They are old spice, essential for closing out seasons but also necessary as episode-to-episode hooks. They fulfil an ajinomoto-like role in the cooking of compelling shows, and even the most prestigious chefs will cop to their use. The American television critic Emily Nussbaum is dead-on when she writes, “…cliffhangers are fake-outs. They reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing.”

Is Subhash Kapoor the last surviving socialist of Hindi cinema? With Jaideep Sahni in semi-retirement, and belligerents like Dibakar Banerjee put out to pasture, all hope seems to rest with Kapoor. His Jolly LLB movies are animated by a public spirit that doesn’t feel condescending or blasé. Kapoor knows how and when to play it safe, which explains the franchise’s longevity. In a Bollywood that now panders openly to the status quo, these films whisper, if not directly speak, inconvenient truths to power. The latest entry, Jolly LLB 3, is the most urgently confrontational Kapoor has ever made. It is also, I’m sorry to report, the weakest link in the franchise. The satirical silliness of the previous two films — terrorists dressed as monks, an impromptu musical match in court — is given short shrift in Jolly LLB 3; weighty intentions halt the film’s stride. Arshad Warsi and Akshay Kumar return as the homonymous Jollys in a comedy bogged down by messaging and meaning. It’s that most frustrating kind of movie-going deal—agreeable politics hamstrung by a shaky screenplay.

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.