Shilajit Mitra

In an interview that went viral ahead of The Sabarmati Report, actor Vikrant Massey, briefly turning political analyst, reflected on the state of the nation. “People say that Hindus are in danger, that Muslims are in danger. No one is in danger; everything is going fine. This is the best country to live in the world,” he declared in a podcast. The nervous naivety of Hindi film actors ahead of a controversial release is always enlightening to witness. It’s a balancing act no gymnast or slackliner can fathom.

There was a time, not long ago, when Hindi blockbuster cinema could stand on its own — distinguishable, say, from mythological soap operas and tacky non-fiction programming on satellite TV. But the laziness and opportunism of the last few years have all but vaporized that distinction. It leaves the theatre-going audience in two minds. Adipurush (2023) was laughably inept yet insistently pious and grim. The same applies to Singham Again, ostensibly an action potboiler and an Avengers-like ‘team-up’ movie but playing like an ad for the tourism ministry’s Ramayana trail.

Love, Sitara begins with a nod to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” says Sitara (Sobhita Dhulipala). Unlike Leo Tolstoy’s great novel — whose opening line these words are — the writing in Vandana Kataria’s film isn’t as quotable, though it tries hard. You can assemble a slim volume of pithy self-help slogans from Abbas and Hussain Dalal’s dialogue: “Happiness lies in honesty.” “Dysfunction means they are making an effort.” “I’ll fix myself, before I can fix my relationships.”

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?