Shubhra Gupta

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.

‘Sabar Bonda’ is the story of two young men, finding their way back to each other. It is also a story of grief and acceptance, told with warmth and piercing sensitivity. Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) accompanies his mother to their ancestral Maharashtrian village from Mumbai, for the ten-day mourning period after the death of his father. He is back after a sizable gap, but the reason for his staying away starts up again: ‘potential brides from good homes’ are back on the table, and Anand finds himself struggling, like he did before, for a way to tell his relatives that he’s gay. ‘Sabar Bonda’ has a couple of firsts to its credit. It is self-taught filmmaker Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s debut feature, and the first Marathi film chosen to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, whose 41st edition is currently underway.

Last year Bollywood’s Republic-Day gift was Fighter, which zoomed in, checking several patriotic-movie boxes: brave Indian fighter pilots, going up against favourite enemy Pakistan, displaying valour and camaraderie. This year, it is Sky Force, coasting on the same elements, except this one is a thinly-disguised account of a real life incident during the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict, in which a squadron decimated a fleet of modern American jets housed at Pakistani base Sargodha, in an operation the film calls Sky Force.

An honest-to-a-fault, maths-whizz ticket collector gets embroiled, unwittingly, in the doings of a greedy banker: this one-line premise may have sounded exciting on paper, but the execution comes off contrived and clunky. Madhavan plays Radhe Mohan Sharma, who brings his affable self and a razor sharp brain to his job, whose first encounter with a comely cop (Kirti Kulhari) isn’t exactly a meet-cute. She rebuffs his offer of an orange bought from a fruit-seller at the station: ‘main chori kiye santare nahin khati’, she says.