Tatsam Mukherjee

A young man sits in a cafe with a cold coffee in hand, his eyes searching for someone. Wearing a dull grey T-shirt, it will take him some time to realise that he’s been stood up by the person he was supposed to meet: a girl he exchanged messages with in an online sex chat room. Devastated at being rejected like this, Guru (Mohit Agarwal) gazes into a mirror after going back home, trying to wish away his less-than-affable appearance. Some of us might feel sorry for the protagonist, but then the director does a 180-degree flip on his audience, showing him doing something dastardly in the very next scene. At this point, Kanu Behl’s Agra – which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2023 – begins to resemble an origin story.

In Frederic Raphael’s book, Eyes Wide Open – on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1998), which Raphael co-wrote with Kubrick – at one point, they discuss Schindler’s List. The much-revered, Oscar-sweeping 1995 film by Steven Spielberg is cut down to size by Kubrick for its triumphant, hopeful climax. Something that betrays the way Kubrick sees the Holocaust essentially as a tale of failure. Even though I don’t fully concur with the thesis, I do see where Kubrick was coming from. That the Holocaust was a singular example of systemic moral failure is something that is acutely understood by James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg – a film named after the infamous trial where the Allies prosecuted the surviving officers of the Nazi high command for crimes against humanity. What’s surprising about Vanderbilt’s film is its awareness isn’t instantly apparent. But how it reveals itself slowly.

In an era when films and shows are designed to seem endless (with consecutive sequels and multiple seasons) I’ve come to appreciate standalone films and miniseries. A miniseries in particular, meant to tell one story in between six to twelve episodes, has become a rarity in the midst of a deluge of platforms – where executives are only very eager to commission a second season for successful shows that have definite endings. It’s what I had appreciated about Mare of Easttown, a typical prestige TV procedural, headlined by an A-lister (Kate Winslet). The show didn’t necessarily reinvent the genre, but it delivered a rich world set in rural Pennsylvania, where a sleepy town hides secrets in plain sight. And how a compassionate cop goes about investigating a murder case, while handling fragile egos and respecting the lines in the sand.

I don’t think anyone working in The Taj Story is acquainted with ‘confirmation bias’ as a concept. Or they’re deliberately ignorant – which is worse. I gauged this from a scene, where a noted lawyer character’s reaction to the declaration “I have evidence that the Taj Mahal wasn’t built by Shahjahan” is not “what is the evidence?” Instead, the lawyer’s voice sounds almost jubilant – like it’s some personal victory. The goal isn’t to find the ‘truth’. The ‘truth’ has already been ascertained in one’s imagination – so one simply needs to cherry-pick facts, poke inane holes in the widely-accepted version of history – to plant a seed of doubt. This isn’t a conclusion arrived at after rigorous thought – it’s shameless, weightless contrarianism for its own sake.

A lot of one’s experience of Aziz Ansari’s feature directorial debut, Good Fortune, might rest on what they think of him as a storyteller. A stand-up comedian/actor/writer/director for nearly two decades now, Ansari turned to direction with the Netflix series, Master of None, a semi-autobiographical take on his experience as a brown actor in America, as he goes through the typical ups and downs on both personal and professional fronts. Co-created with Alan Yang, Master of None, in my opinion, is a sublime meditation on modern American society, as we see it through the eyes of Dev (a fictitious version of Ansari himself), and its commentary on immigrant parents, dating culture, and thorny issues like sexual harassment on public transport or at the workplace – but they’re dealt with his customary light touch. Like most comedians working, Ansari has this tendency to bleed out the theatrics of the most unsettling moments in life – stressing on how most life-changing moments can seem mundane in real life. This gentle rebuke as a storytelling choice is instantly recognisable as something from Ansari’s canon.

Since his directorial debut with Pariyerum Perumal (2018), it’s been well-established that Mari Selvaraj’s primary weapons as a storyteller have been his singular point-of-view and guttural intensity. Whether it’s the symbolisation of Karuppi (a dog painted in blue) in his debut, or that interval-block from Karnan (2021), when the protagonist (Dhanush) destroys a public bus. Careful to not end up advocating for mob violence through the scene, Selvaraj uses Santosh Narayanan’s score to build up to the violence as an act of desperate assertion, rather than an accomplishment. In his latest, Bison Kaalamaadan, I kept waiting for a similarly sublime flourish, which arrived in the film’s final moments. Based on the struggles of a Kabaddi player, it’s in the final moments that Selvaraj zooms into what makes Kittan (Dhruv Vikram) such a potent athlete. For the first time in the 160-minute film, we see Kittan’s guile as a kabaddi player, deceiving his opponent by moving sideways and forward faster than his opponents can think. When he’s grabbed by an opponent – instead of trying to free himself, he grabs the opponent back, and spins both bodies around. A couple of twirls later, he’s back on his side of the pitch.

In spite of what the popular perception might be, I can vouch for the fact that film critics still belong in the more forgiving section of the audience. It’s only when the film isn’t working that the mind wanders and inane details grate that much more. In Shashank Khaitan’s Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari, a character introduces someone, whose family business is valued at $1 billion. “How much money is that?” a friend asks, and the reply comes – “Rs 7,000 crore.” If Khaitan’s film was even slightly sincere and disarming, instead of the smug, gassy Hindi film I’ve come to abhor in the last few years, I would’ve overlooked the arithmetic error.

It’s been a while since a contemporary Hindi film reminded me of Salim-Javed without trying too hard. I wouldn’t be surprised if the duo weren’t even on director Neeraj Ghaywan’s mind, when he wrote the opening scene to his second feature, Homebound. Adapted from journalist Basharat Peer’s piece, ‘Taking Amrit Home’ (2020), which appeared in the New York Times at the height of the pandemic, Ghaywan’s film opens with a startling visual. A railway platform is brimming with a crowd of young adults, applicants for a police public service examination. It’s so overwhelming that it momentarily breaks the spirit of Chandan (Vishal Jethwa).