Tatsam Mukherjee

Near the end of Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I was reminded of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (in my eyes the best Spider-Man film). It’s a scene where the superhero (Tobey Maguire) has prevented a train from derailing. Using all his might, tensile strength and will-power, he faints after the act. About to collapse, he’s caught by those inside the train. His unconscious body surfs over a sea of New York commuters, after which he’s carefully laid down. It’s the first time the city sees him without his mask. Similarly, in Cretton’s film, Spider-Man (Tom Holland) needs to be saved by the very city he’s spent his life defending. In a genre that thrives on an individual saving the world, I was touched to see a hurt, vulnerable ‘hero’ extending his hand (ever so briefly) to the city’s finest. It’s no surprise both scenes, championing community values, take place in films centred around the ‘friendly, neighbourhood superhero’.

Eventually, Sharanya Rajgopal’s Musafir Cafe settles into the cosiness of a novel found in a railway station bookstall. Those unintimidating 200-page paperbacks, which one buys for an overnight journey. Here, it happens in the seventh episode of this eight-episode series. Sudha (Vedika Pinto) is a pretty, impulsive, recklessly-ambitious girl from Bhopal – a version of a metropolitan idea of a small-town firebrand. The kind who discovered ‘Carpe Diem’ in her adolescence and never looked back. She has a job offer from Mumbai, which she reluctantly accepts.

Is there a director working today who has been able to consistently match the crescendo of the last minutes of a Christopher Nolan film? Since Memento (2000) – barring Insomnia (2002), the only remake Nolan has made – the final stretch of most Nolan films could bring corpses to life. In fact, I think one of the most crucial tricks behind his popularity, his ‘prestige’ if you may, might be his ability to finish strong. His weakest film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), after plodding along for 164 minutes, ends with a spectacular five-minute montage tying all the loose ends of the Batman trilogy. The montage is so good, it almost made me forget what a clunky film I’d seen. In The Odyssey, Nolan delivers his usual rousing climax, but the knockout punch comes a few scenes before. Odysseus (Matt Damon) is talking to his wife, Penelope (Anna Hathaway), for the first time in 20 years. After spurts of flashbacks about the Trojan war peppered through the 173-minute film, this is the first time Odysseus looks back on his storied invasion in the most clear-eyed manner.

The title for Nachiket Samant’s film is at first perplexing. But then, once I saw what they were trying to do, I smirked. An English transliteration of the protagonist’s name, Baby Karmarkar — how amused one might be by the pun might dictate how much they end up enjoying Samant’s film – because it’s full of dour, made-in-Mumbai humour. Baby (Huma Qureshi, also producer with brother/actor Saqib Saleem) is a deaf/mute female assassin, whose umbrella doubles up as a sneaky pistol. Exploiting Mumbai’s crowded spaces, Baby slips in, kills her target, and slips out. Thanks to the blinders that Mumbai residents have put on, it takes a while for most people to realise there’s a corpse next to them. It’s a smooth, nifty way to get the job done. In the film’s first scene, the makers introduce Baby’s modus operandi inside a Mumbai local.

Honey Trehan’s Satluj (previously titled Panjab 95) was supposed to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023. It’s been locked into a battle with the Censor board. The film got a brief release on Zee5 (which doesn’t require a CBFC certificate) on July 3. Two days later, on July 5, the film was pulled down. Zee5 announced this on multiple platforms through a statement. Trehan has said he has full faith in the platform, and he’s praying the film will be back soon. Late into the film, a ghost enters a room. It speaks to a man, a state witness who turned hostile in the scene before. The ghost recounts the harrowing circumstances of its death. The eeriness of the scene reminded me of a film by Gurvinder/Anup Singh. A grounded police procedural about a missing human rights activist till then, Trehan’s film boldly cuts across into surreal territory. And yet, it’s his emotional honesty that ensures the wild swerve doesn’t feel jarring.

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.