Tatsam Mukherjee

Nothing communicates the listlessness of Hindi cinema over the last six years better than the diffidence of Bollywood’s two flagship studios: Dharma Productions and Yash Raj Films (YRF). A staleness has pervaded through their overall slates. YRF’s Spyverse branding of cross-border harmony was battered by Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar films. While Dhar’s films have a gritty self-seriousness to them, the spyverse was nimble and had the ability to laugh at its dramatic license. Dhar’s films are nakedly pro-establishment as opposed to the spyverse, which has managed to remain relatively balanced. This is why they have been mocked. But now, if Shiv Rawail’s Alpha – which positions two women spies at its centre for the very first time – is to be believed, the trolls might be getting under producer Aditya Chopra’s skin.

Christopher Storer’s The Bear has built a singular fan-base, since it arrived in 2022. The kitchen of a sandwich shop in Chicago becomes a place of reckoning for its dozen primary characters, battling one form of existential dread or another. It’s been nice to witness the show’s stylistic swings crystallise over the years. For instance: the loud pandemonium of the largely one-take marvel, Review (S01E07), is contrasted with the precise ASMR of Honeydew (S02E04) – when Marcus goes to Copenhagen to train as a pastry chef. The vortex of a deeply dysfunctional family in Fishes (S02E06), is followed by the winsome redemption arc of Richie in Forks (S02E07). My favourite episode in the show, Tomorrow (S03E01), relaying Carmen’s culinary journey till the end of S02 in non-linear fashion, working like a recap episode, is among the 10 most aesthetically ambitious episodes I’ve seen in my life.

“Come get me. They’re shooting!”

Long after seeing The Voice of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old’s voice still echoed in my ears. It became impossible to unhear her confused, scared and desperate cry for help. Kaouther Ben Hania, who was compelled to direct the film after chancing upon Rajab’s voice while scrolling through social media, is standing on an ethical minefield here. A fictional film – which splices real-life recordings between the Red Crescent volunteers and Rajab into itself – it could’ve resulted in a jarring, self-conscious film. But to the makers’ credit the hybrid form of the film feels almost seamless while recreating the crushing disappointment of the war room – where a handful of volunteers spend an entire day trying to arrange an ambulance to rescue the child. This could have been a sentimental, exploitative film, but it’s, again, Ben Hania’s ability to hold back at the right time that made The Voice of Hind Rajab one of the most essential films of last year. The film is magical in the way it fuses truthfulness and creative license.

In a scene during Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga, when Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) takes the stage at an open mic in London, I braced myself. In my head, Ali is notorious for dipping his toes in subcultures he considers ‘hip and trendy’ (like stand-up comedy here, fresco painting in 2009’s Love Aaj Kal) – including them as passing details in a film, never to be brought up again. Over here, it’s used to establish Nirvair as a young wastrel (from a wealthy family in Amritsar) coasting through life. He can’t stick to a job for more than two months, he can’t commit to his girlfriend, Kaveri (Banita Sandhu). His father (Rajat Kapoor) asks, “Why do you keep running?” – a narrative failsafe, lest the metaphor be lost on someone unfamiliar with an escapist Imtiaz Ali protagonist.

When Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), extraterrestrial life forms were a dining-table conversation, shrouded in mystery and wonder. As his latest venture Disclosure Day releases, aliens, ‘unidentified flying objects’ (UFOs) and deep-state military complexes unfortunately appear more often in the message boards of alt-right conspiracy theorists – folks caricatured beyond redemption in popular culture. This is the first significant difference between the two Spielberg films, released 49 years apart, which might dictate the latter’s reception. Another thing working against Spielberg’s latest film is that it comes a decade after Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve. The Amy Adams-starrer, based on humans making first contact with extraterrestrial beings, managed something rare: being both deeply philosophical about the human condition while also being a definitive anti-Spielberg film, with its devastating, open-ended climax prompting more questions than answers.

Prosit Roy’s Raakh takes a big swing in its last episode. After tip-toeing around the crime where two teens—a brother and his sister—were murdered in broad daylight in Delhi in 1978 and the man-hunt that followed, the non-linear narrative finally depicts the day of the crime. It’s a tricky sequence, illustrating the scene of crime inside the car, where the siblings are being driven by two runaway murderers. Even though there are plenty of markers even before this sequence, it was this scene that assured me about Roy’s directorial intent and creators Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket’s authorial sensitivity behind telling the story. Such a scene could easily become lurid and sensationalise the crime. Instead Raakh remaining a clear-eyed procedural even during its most heated sequence, is testament to the crew’s great care and rigour around the show’s central conflict.

In India, making a film/web series based on real events/people is an adventure sport. There’s no way it can criticise political powers without being selective. Real people/organisations depicted in the narrative need to sign off on permissions before one depicts them, which becomes trickier if the depiction is anything beyond heroic or idealistic. The legal departments comb through the script picking apart inane details; one might argue such films/shows are made by lawyers as much as filmmakers. No wonder most look timid and cauterised. The additional obstacle for Robbie Grewal’s Made in India: A Titan Story, adapted from Vinay Kamath’s book, Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand (2018), is that it’s also partly produced by Titan.

Anurag Kashyap’s Bandar is set in a fascinating world. An out-of-work actor Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol), 50, a shadow of his ‘90s screen-self, has to perform his one-hit wonder at tacky weddings to pay the bills. When he exits the airport and sees his more famous colleagues (cameos by Sunny Leone and husband Daniel Weber) getting ‘papped’, he takes out his phone and takes a selfie of his tired face, to humble-brag on social media. He’s behind on his EMIs; his domestic help, Shiva, hasn’t been paid in four months. Even as he carries a constant back pain, Samar is unapologetic about his carnal desires, dabbling in problematic pornography and scrolling through profiles of significantly younger women, as if to suggest a sexual preference. He’s also petty and territorial, something we find out during a conversation with girlfriend, Khushi (Saba Azad), when he expresses displeasure after she went out with a group of friends the night before. All in all, where protagonists are usually air-brushed, Samar is a grimy, authentic everyman, comfortably placed in his contradictions, unserious world-view and profound vanity.