Shubhra Gupta

Racing towards a 24-hour deadline to submit a presentation which will hopefully get her into a top US university, Bani Ahmad (Kritika Kamra) settles down to it, but she hasn’t taken into account her family, and friends: the door-bell rings with an unexpected visitor, and within a few minutes, the trickle into a flood, and it’s full-blown mayhem. Anusha Rizvi’s second directorial feature, 15 years after rural satire ‘Peepli Live’, circles back to the city, with one day in the life of a Delhi-based comfortably-off Muslim family. It’s the kind of family we almost never see in mainstream Hindi cinema, because usually a Muslim character is safely tacked on to the periphery, biding his or her time for when the script bothers to remember them, and even that kind of tokenism has been steadily erased over these past years.

An early scene sets the tone for this eight-episode SonyLIV series, when an unlikely bunch of footballers became a beacon of hope for the strife-torn Kashmir valley in 2016. Sohail (Ayyub), who has left his compromised journalistic job to help create a local football team, fetches up in a very Delhi sarkari outpost, and within a remarkably short while, convinces a babu to sign off on permissions required to set up a club. Anyone who has had any dealings with the sports ministry, or any other ministry for that matter, will know that these things take months, sometimes even years, of gentle persuasion and other means, to get anything done.

Love, lust and betrayal were the key elements of Chutney, the short film Tisca Chopra had produced back in 2016. Watching Saali Mohabbat reminded me strongly of that short– watch it if you haven’t– written and directed by Jyoti Kapur Das, which had begged to be a full-length feature narrative in the way it peeled back the dark layers that hide behind a seemingly normal household in Ghaziabad. The arrival of a perky young thing creating ripples in a marriage is not a new idea, but Chutney refreshed it with an interesting slate of actors: Tisca herself in the lead as the toothy plain-faced woman with a sharp brain, accompanied by Adil Hussain and Rasika Dugal.

Benoit Blanc is back, and this time it’s with a proper bang, after last outing’s disappointing thud. Fancy yachts and self-obsessed billionaires made for a very dull sleuthing turn indeed. For this third go round, Johnson goes full gothic, combining it with a closed door murder, and the result is wonderful: I was glued to the screen all the way through. You wouldn’t really call Jud (Josh O’ Connor) a failed priest, but he’s done something in the past which he shouldn’t have , and now he has to atone for his sins by going off to a small parish in upstate New York run by the commanding monsignor Jefferson (Josh Brolin) who keeps his small flock tightly leashed, helped by the devout Martha (Glenn Close) who, like the others, seems to be in his thrall.

What happens when a freshly-divorced dude decides that he wants to become a single papa? Gaurav Gahlot (Kunal Kemmu) and wife (Isha Talwar) have an amicable parting: he desperately wants a baby, she doesn’t. So when a baby appears out of the blue, our GG does the only thing his heart has desired for a long time: give the tyke his name, and bring him home. Except, he does it the other way round, and all hell breaks loose in GG’s conservative Punjabi household when the delighted scion appears with his tiny bundle, heading down the road towards formula and diapers and colic and sleepless nights.

What do you do when a guy walks into a cop station confessing he has killed nine women? Nothing about the sentence is a spoiler because there’s nothing Stephen (Gomathi Shankar) hides when it comes to the horribly casual ways in which he says he has killed them: this is how I stabbed, this is where I stabbed, he tells the flabbergasted policemen, who can’t understand how this man, who looks like your average person off the street, can be a cold-blooded murderer.

The Karkarias of Delhi are a family who, like all of us, are desperate to project that everything is perfect. Somanth Karkaria (Manoj Pahwa) owns a mithaai-ki-dukaan which is struggling to stay afloat in a time when people are cutting on sugar, and veering towards videshi sweets. A paterfamilias in the old mould, he carries a comfortable paunch, and a sneering attitude of daddy-knows-best whether it comes to his own wife Kamla (Seema Pahwa), son Vishnu (Gulshan Devaiah), daughter Pooja (Kaveri Seth), daughter-in-law Neeti (Girija Oak Godbole) and their two grandchildren, Daani and Daksh.

The pleasure of listening to Naseeruddin Shah say ‘ool julool’, a phrase nearly impossible to translate, the closest being ‘aisa-waisa’, silly, stupid, but not quite. The pleasure of watching Vijay Varma as a lover of Urdu shairi, using his head and heart to woo an old poet and his lovely daughter. And to have all of this wrapped in a film which privileges a love of language, flowery shairi and broken-hearted shayars, mouldering old Delhi printing presses and broke publishers, should have resulted in a film which makes you ache and sigh in the best way possible.