Tatsam Mukherjee

t’s curious how all the prestige around Hollywood war films – lucrative, quasi-recruitment videos and vanity projects for young actors – was punctured by one joke. More than a decade ago, comedian Frankie Boyle said in a set – “Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people – but what’s worse is, 20 years later, they’ll make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers very sad.” It’s a stinging line that rightfully sullied the stock character of the haunted American war veteran. Especially, when such films didn’t show similar sensitivity towards the broad-stroked, faceless ‘jihadis’ and innocent civilians, whose lives are boiled down to just being ‘collateral damage’ before the eventual triumph of the American military. What was once a sure shot for an Oscar nomination – through films like Saving Private Ryan (1998), Black Hawk Down (2002), The Hurt Locker (2007) – has now become a relatively more introspective and self-reflective genre, with even filmmakers like Michael Bay making an effort to assess the problematic presence of America in a foreign land, without glorifying their soldiers.

The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre famously featured in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), where 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed. The event became a springboard in the Eric Bana-starrer, to showcase Mossad’s efforts for retribution – through a series of assassinations. This was before actors, filmmakers called out Hollywood’s implicit Islamophobia – and the fatigue around the binary depictions of Muslims in mainstream Hollywood as dutiful or barbaric. Relatively speaking, Spielberg’s film was pretty nuanced for its time – even showcasing an argument between Bana and a Muslim character in an apartment, which they’re forced to share at one point. A lot has changed in the last two decades leading up to the release of Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, especially with Hollywood’s apparent ambivalence around Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza, triggered by the October 7 attack carried out by Hamas. As much as Fehlbaum’s film would like to revel in being a single-room thriller and tackle the ethical dilemmas that the ABC team went through while observing the coverage of a tragedy, it’s simply not enough for the macro storytelling elements at play today.

It is easy to forget the what we have lost because of Hindi cinema’s tilt towards the right. Initially a mouthpiece for secular values in a post-Partition India, the film industry soon became an emblem for the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (culture). It was the place where a Muslim man would become a newly-independent India’s first superstar, where dialogues in Urdu, Khariboli and Hindi would invent a new concoction of Hindustani, which would trickle down into everyday parlance. It’s only in the movies where the three biggest stars of their time would get separated at birth into homes of different religions, only to reunite and take down the villain in the climax. Sure, some part of it was an echo of popular sentiment, and carried a whiff of opportunism. But the tragedy of our new-age Hindi cinema is how it’s eviscerated even performative niceness in favour of unbridled, authentic hate.

A few days before the release of L2: Empuraan, actor/director Prithviraj Sukumaran was asked in a press conference about how Malayalam films banked on content for their acclaim/success, and if his film would follow suit. Given that the film was a sequel to the 2019 hit Lucifer, Mohanlal’s bid for a globe-trotting, convoluted spy thriller fused with a homegrown tale of political succession, the condescending tone of the question addressing the sequel wasn’t entirely unreasonable. And thus, Sukumaran stepped in to say it was still ‘content’ that had dictated the making of L2; only the content was expensive to shoot. When I saw this clip two days before the film’s release, I fobbed it aside as another one of those empty promises made during a marketing campaign. But only two days later, I found out that the film was being targetted by right-wing forces. This is going to be a challenging review to write because L2: Empuraan is barely a competent film. Inheriting the vague world-building of the first film, Sukumaran’s film is everywhere and nowhere. One of the two primary plotlines takes place in Kerala around its local politics, while the other takes place between Senegal, London, Iraq and Berlin.

While watching Black Bag – Steven Soderbergh’s latest film – I was reminded of Sriram Raghavan more than once. After all, both Raghavan and Soderbergh operate in hardened, grown-up genres. They’re both cinephiles, and therefore well-versed in the unwritten ‘contract’ between a genre and its aficionados, along with being crafty enough to flip the switch on the staples, time and again. They also seem to shoot their films in a non-pompous manner, whose grounded style doesn’t necessarily mean it lacks flavour. Helming thriftily-produced films that make dialogue sound like a martial arts sequence, both filmmakers might make cynical films about dark human impulses, but a deeper examination of their works prove they’re inherently idealists.

It’s a miracle, John Abraham is still acting in films 22 years after his debut in Jism (2003). This isn’t a snarky comment on his limited chops as an actor, as much as his risk appetite in an industry that is too busy holding on to fleeting good times and too happy to repeat its successes. Few actors have visibly lived the ‘one for them, one for me’ maxim (working with as varied a list like Anurag Kashyap, Deepa Mehta, Shoojit Sircar to Rohit Dhawan, Anees Bazmee and Milap Zaveri) with as much gusto as the 53-year-old star. Abraham has seen a few successes, but he’s endured gargantuan failures. In Abraham, there is an insecure star constantly probing the market for his commercial viability (he’s produced most recent films through his production house, JA Entertainment), but there’s also a curious actor constantly trying to prove his mettle. This dichotomy in Abraham also finds itself in his latest film, The Diplomat.

The first time we meet Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) in A Complete Unknown, he’s uncomplainingly laying in the back of a wagon amongst a pile of luggage. He’s just hitched a ride to New York City to see his hero, folk musician Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who has been hospitalised after being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Dylan overhears an impassioned discussion trying to determine if Guthrie is a folk or a country musician. “There’s no need to box him,” one of them says. It’s 1961 and a particularly tense period in America, as the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is summoning people for their alleged communist ties. The celebrities of Hollywood are understandably first in line, just like the musicians of the time like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who was critical of the American government. Social justice is becoming a street-side topic among many, as America is sinking deeper into the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement is picking up steam. Two years later, a president will be assassinated during a motorcade, fuelling the paranoia of the public and future governments alike.

In one of my most favourite scenes from Faiza Ahmad Khan’s Supermen of Malegaon (2008), the protagonist Nasir is having a verbal duel with brother Nadeem, who wants to follow his foot-steps and make a career out of making amateur films in Malegaon. After making Malegaon Ke Sholay – a parody of the iconic 1975 film – Nasir became a local celebrity. Nadeem is showing his parody of Tere Naam (2003) to the camera, when Nasir rebukes him for wanting to pursue it as a career. It’s a fascinating divide Khan captures in her documentary, where one brother is seduced by the magic of cinema, while the other seems blinded by its glamour and fame. For someone so close to the dream machine, it’s incredible how Nasir is able to suss out the lies in the oft-romanticised maxims: ‘Follow your passion,’ or ‘Conquer your dreams’. He tells Khan how filmmaking has to be a hobby. There are no returns here, and one can’t run a household on it. “Main khud phaste jaara ismein (I, myself, am getting trapped in this).”