Tatsam Mukherjee

There’s a particular kind of independent film from India that has permeated the festival circuit in the last few years. They hint at the recent political turmoil, the social inequities and taboos of an increasingly rigid society. The sound design is decidedly sober, the camera is mostly still, the characters speak soft and slow. The titles are usually long English phrases or sentences (more frequently in the aftermath of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light). It’s a hard trick to pull because a ‘meditative’ film can easily tip over into a ‘self-conscious’ one. Shashank Walia’s Birds in the Dark (Punjabi title: Hanere de Panchhi), which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, lands somewhere in the middle of its fine intention and self-serious form.

Life’s great for actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) when he arrives on set, one morning. Coming from ‘the Narrows’ – the most impoverished, tough neighbourhood in Gotham city – Hagen has paved his way to becoming the hottest upcoming actor in Coast City (possibly a stand-in for Los Angeles). And with his name being announced as an Oscar nominee, the ‘buzz’ around him understandably goes stratospheric. Hagen takes his best friend Corey (Joshua James) for a celebratory weekend on a private jet. The weekend quickly turns into a nightmare, as Hagen flirts with the girlfriend of the most dreaded mobster in Gotham, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), despite Corey’s words of caution. The one-night stand ends with Hagen waking up to find his bed surrounded by Szabo and his men. He doesn’t take kindly to Hagen’s transgression, using a razor to carve his face beyond recognition. Just like that, a blooming life is knocked into hell.

It’s hard to make a worthy film for children in India, where the mainstream inherently infantilises its audience. It’s not surprising then that a large section of supposed films for children that come out in India, are often trying too hard. The lack of assurance stems from a film second-guessing itself, and serving what adults presume children will like. The result, more often, are films so unbearably screechy and annoying that one has to wonder who the filmmakers were even targeting in the first place. At the very least, Kaushal Oza’s Little Thomas doesn’t have that insecurity, as it balances its protagonist’s sense of wonder with adequate padding of the gritty world of the grown-ups, which pokes holes into the fantasy.

Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing has many echoes of Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018), including the at-first seemingly underwhelming premise for their respective films. We know how it ended. They scaled Mount Everest. They landed on the moon. What’s the point? Chazelle managed to turn his film into an urgent family drama, around a grieving father. One of the towering achievements of First Man was underlining how the triumph of the space race ventured through a series of funerals. Many paid with their lives or were exposed to significant mortal danger, while working with technology that was still not as state-of-the-art as it is today.

Avinash Arun’s Prahaar, being marketed as “the untold story of Ujjwal Nikam”, might not be the most accurate description of the film. And that’s because it has little first-hand insight on the much-chronicled public prosecutor in the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts case. This is consistent with the Hindi film biopic, where the subject rarely has to work hard to become the protagonist. It’s something that is consistent here as well, where Rajkummar Rao (playing Nikam) gives a speech at a celebration, after the verdict of the 1993 bomb blasts case. “The foot soldiers faced the consequences, but the main conspirators are still free,” he says, “The job is not finished” and an inspirational score fills the background. I braced myself for yet another hagiography, where the subject is next to God. However, soon enough, Arun’s film zooms out from Nikam, introducing supporting characters, who, reluctantly, express the film’s larger ambitions.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger might be the most self-serious unserious film I’ve seen in recent memory. Ostentatious sets, unsubtle acting punctuated by facial tics, and a score (by Cosmo Sheldrake) that underlines nearly every emotion: the film rarely looks like the finest hour of its star-studded team. Then, about a third into the 129-minute film, Inarritu reveals his conceit: what we’ve been watching is a rehearsal of a play called Fossil Fools, supposed to premiere later in the day. Built around greedy fossil fuel baron Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), who [in the film’s world] triggered an apocalypse with his reckless extraction rigs in Greenland and Alaska, Inarritu’s film admits to be aiming for a deliberately underwhelming play. Its lead, Curtis Markson (Cruise, the actor playing Digger) says he feels “disconnected” with the play. However, Digger also commits the cardinal sin of supplementing the play with a film that has frustratingly little to add to modern discourse. As a result, the over-the-top play begins to look like an excuse for a shoddy film.

One of the great joys of watching a Kartik Subbaraj film is enumerating a list in your head of his possible sources of inspiration. It remains true for his latest directorial venture, Dorothy, too. Like how a home without a woman’s touch has echoes of Kanu Behl’s Titli (2013) – a film about a carjacking crew, comprising a father and his three sons. A scene where the couple bows down to touch an elder’s feet, only to cut to a marriage scene when the couple gets back up, but the man has been replaced by someone belonging to the same dominant caste as the woman. It’s the kind of deadpan comedy scene I’d expect in a modern Malayalam film. A character tries to clumsily kill someone, and repeatedly fails, reminiscent of the assassins in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2013). A black-and-white track takes place in the present, while cutting to a flashback in colour, like in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). There’s also the grit and rigour of the Madurai gangster film, championed by the likes of Vetri Maaran, M. Sasikumar, given how the film centres itself around young boys being taught to ‘man up’ each time they walk, eat or wince while seeing a floating corpse, violence. They’re also repeatedly told crying ‘like a woman’ is disgusting.

In the last few years, a strange but recognisable character has emerged on social media feeds: the lifestyle influencer. Preying on our voyeuristic tendencies, some of them stand at the junction of substance and salaciousness. Every trending topic becomes an opportunity to package their grandstanding as introspection, and monetise their exhibitionism. It’s an endless repository for ‘content’, and it is only a matter of time before the dopamine spikes (surrounding engagement) begin to sidestep the ethical quagmires. I was reminded of lifestyle influencers a lot while watching Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, because before one could peek into people’s lives through phones, there was reality TV. Even though To Catch A Predator (on NBC) started out as an exposé on creepy men soliciting sex from minors, the quest for ratings and well-known host Chris Hansen’s ambition, turned a news piece into a muggy, diseased version of the American dream.