Shubhra Gupta

At a late stage in the film, Rajpal Yadav’s character, who plays a side-kick to the hero, gets the best line of Baby John: comedy is serious business. It was about the only time I heard a ripple of laughter in the preview theatre. It is the kind of punchline that masala movies use to bring the house down. And it says a great deal about Baby John, which weighs in at a punishing 164 minutes, that a comic’s dialogue gets more taalis than the hero’s ‘taqia kalaam’ line: ‘par main toh pehli baar aaya hoon’.

In an unspecified North Indian hilltown boarding school, a girl comes of age. That overused phrase ‘coming-of-age’ is a misnomer when it comes to mainstream Hindi cinema: the years between thirteen and eighteen are those where contradictory impulses leap between synapses, with mind and body taking off in opposite directions, and explorations of both taking you into spaces where you’ve never been before.

The first season of ‘Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein’ became an addictive watch in the way it bent one of the oldest genres in the book: being an obsessive lover is not just a male prerogative; women can do it just as well, if not better. It made up for all its nods to hoary Hindi movie heavies who lived in palaces overrun by armed goons, governed by old-style off-with-their-heads villainy.

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.