Shubhra Gupta

At the end of 161 minutes of Chhaava, based on the high-points of the life of Sambhaji Maharaj, the son of Shivaji Maharaj, you are left with two chief thoughts. How do you pull off a film which talks up a historical figure not as well known as his illustrious parent, without us wondering: how much is fact, and how much fiction? And the other, which is the reason you manage to sit through this ultra-loud, ultra-violent re-creation of a slice of the 17th century Hindustan is the total commitment on display by its lead actor to the titular character: Vicky Kaushal becomes Chhaava (‘son of a lion’), whose story the film adapts from the Marathi novel of the same name by Shivaji Sawant.

If you married ‘Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin’ with a zillion iterations of the odd-couple and lovers-on-the-run and heist movies, you would get Dhoom Dhaam, a film which borrows from all these elements, while straining every nerve to be novel. The trouble with skimming tropes is that your film, even with a fresh pairing, and despite a few flourishes, ends up more or less trope-y.

To make a modern rom-com remains the bane of Bollywood: Loveyapa proves all over again just how difficult it is to create a cracking love story which truly captures the essence of today’s swipe-right-and-left generation. The real film kicks in well into the second half, much after the listless toing-and-froing of the pre-interval portion between the two leads who cutely call each other Baani Boo, and Baboo. Ooo. You think you love each other? Ok, exchange your phones for a day, and see where you go with it, declares Baani’s stern shuddh-Hindi spouting daddyji (Ashustosh Rana). Consternation on faces, and dread in hearts, Baani Sharma and Gaurav ‘Gucci’ Sachdeva hand over their phones to each other, and thus begins loveyapa, love plus ‘siyapa’, that untranslatable Punjabi word whose closest meaning is trouble.

The distance between these two contradictory statements — the smell (khushboo) of the kitchen is sexy, and, you smell (baas) of the kitchen, do you expect me to be turned on — is measured by, who else, a man. The man who has deposited the woman he has married and brought to his home, where he lives with his parents, in the kitchen. Where she is expected to be an uncomplaining slave to everyone’s time and moods: the doctor husband who runs a clinic while constantly complaining of overwork, expecting his wife to serve ‘garam phulkas’ when he sits down to eat, the father-in-law wanting his slippers placed just so for him to slide his feet into, the mother-in-law using the sil-batta to grind the chutney, because the mixer-grinder is not loving enough.

The spiky relationship between a father-and-son, which shapes the narrative in ‘The Mehta Boys’, leads us to predict a resolution in which things will get better. The theme has that familiar predictive tilt built into it, but what lifts ‘The Mehta Boys’ are the little spurts of unpredictability built into the script of Boman Irani’s directorial debut. That, and the performances, which are all pitch perfect.

Watching this nine-part show, run by Sooraj R Barjatya, the Rajshri scion who got back maryada and sanskriti back into Hindi cinema in the mid-90s, is a conflicting business. It makes you wonder at the time and place we live in: have we moved forward at all from the 1994 Hum Aapke Hain Koun!, in which it was perfectly acceptable to offer a freshly-widowed bhai’s hand to his sister-in-law, and where the big temple-going joint family is kind-but-dismissive to its minority characters?

A Satyajit Ray short story becomes the basis of ‘The Storyteller’, an unhurried unspooling of an unlikely relationship between two men, separated by geographies, backgrounds, and, most crucially, intent. The result is a film which takes its time to lay out its wares, demanding your patience, which does get a trifle stretched, but overall rewards you for it. Tarini Bandhopadhyaya (Paresh Rawal) is a 60-something Bengali gent who loves fish and hates capitalism with equal passion. Ratan Garodia (Adil Hussain) is a Gujarati businessman who has everything except the comfort of sleep.

A bunch of cops in Mumbai track down the killer of a fellow officer, opening up several cans of worms. That, more or less, was the thrust of the Roshhan Andrrews-directed Mumbai Police (2013), headlined by Prithviraj Sukumaran. Another bunch of cops in Mumbai do the same, broadly, in the 2025 ‘Deva’, also by the same director. From what I remember of the original, there seem to be several scenes which are exact replicas, but for some strange reason, the filmmakers have taken great pains to prevent themselves, as well as anyone else, dubbing the Shahid Kapoor starrer a remake.