Shubhra Gupta

It’s 2029, Los Angeles. A detective finds himself in the hot seat, accused of murdering his wife. He has only 90 minutes to prove his innocence: the catch is, that it is an AI-powered justice system which is judge, jury, executioner, and if he can’t lay out sufficient evidence to clear himself, he will be executed. Blinking himself out of a stupor, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) finds himself strapped to a chair, facing the beautiful Judge Maddox (Rebecca Fergusson). From all accounts in front of the judge, the detective was alone with his wife (Annabelle Wallis) for a length of time, during which she was stabbed with a sharp knife. Their daughter (Kylie Rogers) finds her mother lying in a pool of blood, and calls it in, and from then on, starts Chris’s ordeal.

Serial killers are flooding Mumbai. Just a couple of months back, Madhuri Dixit was hot on their heels in the web series ‘Mrs Deshpande’. Now it’s Bhumi Satish Pednekkar’s turn to do the same in ‘Daldal’. Both women have dark pasts, both confront their demons while navigating the quicksand of the present, in which good guys, bad guys and ill intentions wallow: by now, these tales, despite differences in plot and place, feel almost templated.

The chief difficulty even with popular franchises is the scourge of familiarity: how do you build in difference when the lead character and their line of work is the same? With Rani Mukerji returning for a third go round of Mardaani, her doughty cop Shivani Shivaji Roy arrayed against a new set of antagonists, we are left scrambling to discover new beats. This time around, there’s the formidable human trafficker Amma (Mallika Prasad) whose goons have been tasked with picking up pre-pubescent girls– now that’s certainly a difference– from disadvantaged backgrounds. A kidnapping-gone-wrong in a small UP town reverberates in Delhi: the girl’s father is a senior official, and the cops are given orders from on high to crack down.

I went into this film for a couple of reasons. One to see how inventive this silent film was, and the other because I can happily watch Vijay Sethupathi reading a directory. Here’s how it unfolds. Sethupathi plays a Poor Man Living With Usha Nadkarni’s Always Coughing Mother In A Chawl. He is in love with Aditi Rao Hydari’s Beautiful Damsel, who lives Ghar Ke Saamne. Arvind Swamy is a Rich Man Living In A Mansion.

J P Dutta’s 1997 Border was equal parts a war film and a Bollywood film, with strong doses of action and emotion. Its strength came from Dutta’s penchant for patriotic cinema, and of course the elusive thing that no filmmaker knows beforehand — the fulsome embrace of the audience. Despite its occasional spurt of anti-Pakistan rhetoric, and the constant conflation of Ma and Dharti Ma, the original Border remains one of the most complete war films that Hindi cinema has made, and its musical sandese still echo in our movie memories.

Somewhere in merry England lives Happy, a nice guy who can assemble a nifty sandwich which pleases his British dads enormously. They go ummm, chewing beatifically. He can also execute a mean on pointe, in his powder-pink ballet shoes. Everything seems to be going swimmingly with the lad, but all of a sudden he has this feeling of something ‘missing’.

There was a time when the bad guys in Bollywood used to be mainly smugglers. Remember that word sardonically mouthed by the lanky Anthony Gonsalves? ‘Biscuit’, he says, in an iconic Amar Akbar Anthony scene, and we see exactly what he’s referring to: a briefcase filled with shiny gold ‘biscuits’. That was back in the restrictive 70s, when everything had to be smuggled in. Post-liberalisation, with foreign exchange freely available and international travel becoming easier, villainy shifted to other spheres. Or at least that’s what the movies showed us.

One of my favourite scenes in this second season– and there are several– has Jawaharlal Nehru sitting by himself in a large high-ceilinged room. Sardar Patel has just left, with yet another contentious issue left hanging in the air. For a series which leans so heavily into conversation and constant cross-talk, a man alone with his thoughts has weight, giving us time to understand from the comfort and privilege of hindsight, just how hard won our freedom was, which came to us at that famous stroke of the midnight hour.