Tatsam Mukherjee

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).”

In another life, Maya (Tillotama Shome) would have lived a different, more comfortable life. A college graduate in Barrackpore, she was set for an ordinary middle-class life like the many girls around her. However, all her parents’ dreams crash and burn when Maya tells them about Sundar (Chandan Bisht) – a pahadi man stationed in the nearby army cantonment. By the time Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi’s Baksho Bondi (English title: Shadowbox) begins – it’s been a few years since Sundar has been dishonourably discharged from the army because of what appears to be a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The rebellion of young love has made way for the caution and weariness of middle age. Both presumably in their late 30s by now, the onus of providing for Sundar now falls on Maya.

Arati Kadav’s Mrs. – an official remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) – is a technically sound film. It opens with a montage of delicacies being cooked in an average Indian kitchen. Editor Prerna Saigal cuts the meticulous preparation of each dish with a carefully choreographed piece, drawing our attention to the ‘dance’ most women have to endure inside a household, to keep it on its axis. Scored by Sagar Desai featuring sounds from everyday life (like squeaky, rusted gate offering rhythm to the track), the montage works well. But it can’t quite conjure the rhythm of Baby’s original film, which editor Francis Louis establishes in the never-ending loop of domestic labour thrust upon women. Especially inside a kitchen. Kadav, who broke out with imaginative Sci-Fi films (The Astronaut and His Parrot) using wide-eyed imagination to compensate for oppressive budgets, also constructs her latest venture with a similar amount of distance. The food photography is immaculate, the kitchen and the home look like they were built on a soundstage. Unlike Baby’s film, where both the kitchen as well as the home felt lived-in. When Richa (Sanya Malhotra) has to immerse her hand into a clogged sink to weed out the sediments at its bottom, it doesn’t feel as viscerally icky as Nimisha Vijayan’s character having to hand-pick the chewed-out bones thrown by her father-in-law and the husband, in the original film.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) has just lost his father, but according to his relatives, it’s not the most pressing absence in his life. Anand is a 30-year-old unmarried man, something which is utterly incomprehensible to the folks in his village in Maharashtra. So even as he gets ready to perform the last rites of his dead father, his relatives don’t forget to remind him about the ‘stigma’ of his marital status. An aunt even wonders out loud, if an unmarried man is fit to light the pyre of his own father. Anand and his mother have to wade through a sea of inquisitions about why he hasn’t settled down – only to come up with stories like – “A girl he was in love with, married someone else. So Anand is heartbroken, and doesn’t wish to get married now.”

“Where are we going?” six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis) asks his father (John Magaro). Charlie, his elder sister Ella (Molly Belle Wright) are seated inside a car with their father within the first five minutes of the film. The kids have no idea where they’re headed. Cole Webley’s directorial debut is the kind of film where exposition comes at a premium. Information trickles down through stray scenes – the sheriff putting an eviction notice on their house right around the time they’re leaving tells us about the family’s dire financial situation. Ella tells Charlie she was taught to fly a kite by their mother before “she got sick” – explaining who the father talks to, grieving his partner, almost praying to her for forgiveness. When they’re at a store, and the father wishes to spoil his kids with a kite and a meal of their choice, the clerk informs him he has only $20 left on his food stamps.