Shubhra Gupta

Hindi movies have played with fire several times before. Those with long memories will remember such films as the 1980 adventure ‘The Burning Train’, which may have picked up inspiration from an earlier Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Towering Inferno’, but those who fight the flames at the risk of their own lives, have never been in the limelight.

The face-off between tradition and modernity, past and present, the strict rules of gharana-and-parampara vs doing-your-own-thing, which were the key notes of the first season of ‘Bandish Bandits’, are back again in the second. As are many of the actors, reprising their roles, along with new faces, as the story takes off from where it left off, back in 2020.

Crime reporter Joy Bag (Manoj Bajpayee) is not the kind of journalist we see too often in Hindi movies. His favourite accompaniment is his rucksack, as he goes about criss-crossing the city on his bike, in search of the latest story. He’s been doing this for a while, because he talks to his seniors like an equal, but at heart he will always remain a scrappy newshound who likes nothing better than chatting up shadowy contacts over cups of cheap cutting chai, which he prefers to the pizza his wife serves at unwelcome parties at home.

A large jewellery exhibition in Mumbai becomes the site of a heist. A hysterical phone call raises alarm, gunfire is heard, the cops on duty herd the panicked gathering into a secluded area, and during the melee, a fistful of precious gems go missing.

A woman leans on a pole in her compartment, for support, for balance, swaying with the rhythm of the train. She looks exhausted, after a long day at work. We take in, like she does, the way the city looks at night, bars of refracted light and darkness dancing across her face. This image, which comes early in Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship, becomes a marker of the themes the film explores, and it stays with you.

An underdog dance group making something of itself: right from the opening frame of Waack Girls, you know that this will be the trajectory of this rag-tag bunch, based in Kolkata. But this Sooni Taraporevala-created-and-directed nine part series attempts to build in differentials. First off, Kolkata is still not a city you’d think of when it comes to street style dancing and underground meetings where dance-offs occur. A lovely Cal feeling is captured in a crumbling old mansion, in a tony club, in the corner puchka-wala, and in the accents people use. You do see some familiar structures on the skyline, like the Howrah Bridge, but they are just there, no emphasis laid. That is refreshing.

Going into ‘I Want To Talk’, I had no idea that that the character Abhishek Bachchan plays is based on an actual person called Arjun Sen. That knowledge would have added a certain layer to the story of a man who bests certain death- a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer and the consequent grim prognosis of a limited future—and is still around on planet earth. A valid question arises, after you’re done: anyone surviving 19-20 tough surgeries, and finding the energy to bring up a daughter, and run a marathon, is worthy of respect, but is that enough to engage us for two hours? Director Shoojit Sircar has an affinity for characters dealing with life-and-death situations, set in the innards of hospitals (October), as well as exploring filial connections (Piku). Both themes are here, but the depth and emotion which elevate his plots surface only occasionally.

The choice of using ‘Freedom At Midnight’, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s account of the tumultuous build-up to India’s independence in August 1947, as the basis for the seven-part web series of the same name achieves one thing above all else: adapting from source material which has been in existence for several years, especially from the celebrity author duo who couldn’t be accused of being either pro-India, or pro-Pakistan, frees creator and director Nikkhil Advani of being accused similar bias.