Tatsam Mukherjee

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) establishes its Mumbai DNA early on. A visibly-tired Anu (Divya Prabha), an upstart nurse in a city hospital, is jotting down details of a patient. Age? “24… oh no sorry, it’s 25,” a young woman says, holding on to her child. “Pfft!” reacts Anu, showcasing her mild annoyance for having to strike out what she’d written earlier.

“Will you dance at my wedding?”, a young Reya (Pearle Dey) asks her visibly-ill father, Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan), sitting in their backyard. Arjun used to be a high-flying, pragmatic, proud ad executive in Los Angeles, till one day he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. It’s a loaded question – especially for a still-squeaky voice. The initial prognosis gave Arjun 100 days to live. But he’s somehow lived his way through a few months, maybe even a year. While he awaits future surgeries, many things hang in the balance for Arjun, preventing him from giving Reya an answer. The scene ends with the father-daughter’s heavy silence, staring into a distance.

What happens when you take one of the most irreverent filmmakers of our times, and force him to be sombre, sincere and melodramatic? The result is a film like Gladiator II. It’s not to say that the sequel doesn’t have the campy goodness of the original, especially in the turns by Denzel Washington playing Macrinus (a gladiator-turned-influential figure in Rome), Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger playing Emperor twins Geta and Caracalla (a more sadistic version of Romulus and Remus), but there’s something amiss.

The choices in Citadel: Honey Bunny sing less frequently compared to other undertakings of the Raj & DK filmmaker duo. An offshoot of Amazon Prime’s gazillion-dollar spy franchise pitted against the silliness of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, etc., Raj & DK’s latest carries the baggage of an over-embellished universe tensely fitted into a studio-approved runtime. Like its American counterpart helmed by the Russo brothers, even the Indian version spans six episodes with a duration of 40-50 minutes each.

A lot of the splendour in Sean Baker’s Anora lies in its treatment – where we might be shown one thing, but deliberately made to feel something else. For example, the film opens with a discomfiting panning shot featuring barely-clothed exotic dancers performing with neon lights around them. However, Baker scores this scene with a loud, winsome techno song taking what is a distressing visual of young women forced to work a job that fetishises them, and drains the self-pity out of it.

There’s a lot going on within twelfth-grader Mira (Preeti Panigrahi). Chosen as the first female head prefect at her seemingly orthodox hill-station boarding school, she’s battling most of the pressures and anxieties of being a teenager, while simmering in the shadow of her vivacious mother Anila (Kani Kusruthi). Mira needs to keep her scores up, balance the shifted power dynamic with friends and bullies because of her duties as a head prefect, and rein in her excessively eager hormones for the mysterious new boy – Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron) – in class.

The clock’s ticking for Satya (Alia Bhatt) in Vasan Bala’s Jigra. Her brother Ankur (Vedang Raina) is on death row in an island nation called Hanshi Dao (a fictitious version of Singapore), and she’s just gotten news that the date of his execution has been expedited for an attempted jailbreak. What was supposed to happen in a few weeks, will now happen in a few days. We see her face computing all possible ploys as fast as she can, and then deciding on a plan of action. It’s not going to be pretty, an accomplice warns, but she’s already made up her mind. The accomplice backs out, telling Satya that she’ll be on her own. “I never said I was a hero. I’ll understand if you don’t wish to join me,” she says, “but don’t get in my way.”

There’s one significant challenge to making ‘screen-life films’ (films that unfold almost entirely on digital screens). Once you commit to its visual grammar, you’re tied to them till there’s a good reason to break out of it. No matter what, all your exposition needs to happen on the small screen, key plot points need to be hashed out during video calls, and the filmmakers need to keep imagining newer screens – ranging from iPad, mobile phones, CCTVs, GoPros, webcams, paparazzi lenses, TV screens etc.