Tatsam Mukherjee

There’s something off about Pushkar Mahabal and Hemal Thakkar’s Black White & Gray from the very beginning. A pronounced foreign accent asking questions from behind a camera, to cops about an unsolved murder case that we’re told took place in Nagpur, in 2020. The talking heads (a sub-inspector and an assistant sub-inspector) seem rehearsed in their responses to questions – almost like they’re acting badly. I wondered if they made the people repeat their answers more than once, which caused the lack of spontaneity. The voice-over featuring the ‘types of India’ sounded almost too generic and lazy by a foreigner. Even the cutting between the fictitious recreations and the interviews felt almost too neat and narrativised, and not something that was discovered in the edit. And then it took me till the start of episode four to pause and properly read the show’s disclaimer, addressing it all as a work of ‘fiction’.

If there’s one thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is good at, it’s capitalising on its self awareness. Tony Stark knew he was the smartest guy in any room, and didn’t bore people with false humility. Steve Rogers knew how corny his idealism sounded in a largely-cynical world, so he kept up a stoic face while being mocked for it in film after film. Peter Parker was just another New York teenager anxious about not fitting in. Ant-Man and Hawk-Eye knew their powers were perceived as ‘sillier’ compared to the A-listers, and they owned this silliness. It’s what used to be endearing about these films [till Avengers: Endgame, 2019] – but once the stronger actors and directors quit, it became increasingly clear there was nothing beneath the layer of self-awareness.

One could argue: making a biopic in Hindi cinema these days is a lost battle even before one begins. Such is our legal system, our near-Olympic status at taking offence as a society, the cumbersome process of obtaining life-rights, and the patronising tone filmmakers adopt to turn someone’s life story into a moral science lesson (or they won’t get it). It’s no surprise then that most biopics coming out of Hindi cinema re-manufacture a stale, reverential tone with intermittent cues of inspirational music – so much so that my brain almost involuntarily switches off during such sequences these days. And god forbid if the film has the slightest socio-political criticism. Then the headache of battling the CBFC (censor board), with the livelihoods of hundreds of crew members being on the line – it’s no surprise why nearly every filmmaker is cautious, even if the film is set around characters who took on Brahmanical patriarchy more than a century ago.

A thought occurred to me while watching Shauna Gautam’s much-derided Nadaaniyan – starring Ibrahim Ali Khan and Khushi Kapoor. To be fair, it was 2.30 am (the hour of epiphanies) on a Saturday, and I was watching it for some laughs. After a while the clunky dialogue, the stiff performances and the air-brushed palette of the film began to feel more deliberate. The film was obviously beyond salvaging, but after a point it seemed like some studio executive had instructed the makers to lean into the ‘badness’ of the film, try to make it as grating an experience for the audience as possible. The thought behind it probably being: if you can’t make the best film, you might as well try and make the worst film out there. In an ocean of content, this might be a way to generate conversation, and stand out. What else explains so many shoddy choices, one after the other, going unchecked? Either that, or the crew, the producers and the platform had fully given up on the film.

Smita Singh’s Khauf is deeply suspicious of the world around it. In the eight-episode miniseries, spanning five and a half hours, there are only a handful of moments when the bystanders come out looking good (or at least civilised). Nearly all men (boyfriends, colleagues, bus passengers, older relatives, autorickshaw drivers, landlords, streetside louts) vary from being insufferable, creepy and abusive to serial killers; there’s no white knight in this bleak, decaying world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Singh’s show is labelled misandrist or ‘men-hating’ by rungs on social media – like they did with Arati Kadav’s Mrs. Will Singh’s show achieve the ‘virality’ that Kadav’s film did? We’ll find out. But, for Singh’s sake, I do hope it earns some notoriety, because it will mean the show will have pierced through the veneer of smug Indian men, touching a nerve somewhere.

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.