Shilajit Mitra

Movies can shape us in silly but significant ways. Growing up in the 1990s, for instance, I developed an irrational and premature fear of foreign travel. This had little to do with any growing awareness of geopolitical realities and everything to do with a schlocky Bollywood film starring Sridevi and Sanjay Dutt. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, Gumrah (1993) — a jailbreak drama set between Mumbai and Hong Kong — was shivery B-movie fun, and it left me with an enduring anxiety. If I clutched my cabin luggage a little too cautiously on my first international flight, nervously looking over my shoulders, I had Bhatt and the duplicitous face of Rahul Roy to thank.

What sort of a spy movie is Sudhanshu Saria’s Ulajh? It begins as a Raazi (2018) in pantsuits: patriotic female protagonist, driven by loyalty and legacy, enlists to serve her country on foreign turf. Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, as fraught and fragile as they were in 1971, inform the narrative stakes. Both films hail from Junglee Pictures, and the editor, in each case, is Nitin Baid. If that weren’t enough, the new film even has a song with ‘watan’ in its title — plastered, ineffectually, over the opening credits and thereby fast forgotten.

Gyaarah Gyaarah, out on ZEE5 and adapted from the Korean series Signal, is a time-warping thriller of the dour, soulless kind. Tumbling across timelines, director Umesh Bist always makes sure to hold his audience’s hand. Bland letters appear on screen to indicate the precise date, year, location. Lest we lose our bearings, the pop-culture references are even more plain: Dil for 1990, Kapoor & Sons for 2016. This is a fairly unimaginative way to summon a period, to evoke a mood. It’s unlike the scene in Back to the Future where Doc in the 1950s exclaims to Marty, who’s traveled back from the 80s, “Ronald Reagan! The actor?! Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?”

It was evident, even before Varun Sharma clambered onto the roof of a car, unfastened his fly and shot out a tall projectile of piss, that Wild Wild Punjab was not a serious film. But is it even that wild? The aforementioned scene is probably the looniest thing that happens — a nod, perhaps, to Fukrey 3, which had an entire pee-based plotline dedicated to Sharma. The rest of Simarpreet Singh’s film is oddly strained and docile, a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane one-liners. “Respect, dude,” someone tells Sharma’s character, a compliment I cannot extend to the film.

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?