Tatsam Mukherjee

At one point, in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary, someone asks if they know when a hug ends. “You just know,” comes the response from Dr Ryland Grace, a scientist from earth, trying to devise a way to save the Sun. After the film, my first thought was if Lord and Miller’s film knew when to stop mollycoddling its audience. Why else would a competent film adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name by renowned author Andy Weir, starring an immensely watchable Ryan Gosling (playing Ryland Grace), triggering laughs and tears feel almost immediately forgettable after leaving the theatre? A film can be ‘good’ by any number of metrics, but it’s a certain degree of serendipity galvanising good films, elevating them into an authentic and a moving experience. Even the tears in Project Hail Mary feel like the result of a large assembly line, which is never a good sign.

For a second time in two months, a woman disapproves of her gangster-husband betraying her nation. It happened recently in Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, when Rabia (Tamannah Bhatia) confronts Jalal (Avinash Tiwary; a stand-in for Dawood Ibrahim) for allying with the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI. In Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar: The Revenge, Yalina (Sara Arjun) aims a glock at Hamza (Ranveer Singh) when she finds his secret diary with names of targets — all of them said to be embroiled in terror attacks in India.

More than once while watching Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, I was reminded of Aijaz Khan’s Hamid (2018) – another Indian film that used the ruse of a “children’s film” to examine a region riddled with conflict. In Khan’s film, a serendipitous phone call between a seven-year-old local (Talha Arshad Reshi) searching for his‘disappeared’ father and a CRPF jawan (Vikas Kumar) became an unintentional humanitarian bridge in the midst of Kashmir’s paranoia. In Devi’s film, the unrest in Manipur remains an undercurrent, filling even the ‘cute’ scenes with an unease.

It’s quite a responsibility to be trusted to engage with a debutante’s fragile creation. Operating outside the ‘system’ with few resources, featuring yet-to-be-proven faces – a newbie ‘indie’ film crew might be among the purest underdogs out there. It can colour the judgement of most fiercely ‘objective’ critics. Despite how much one might be rooting for a film, the experience of it rarely lies. The good intentions are visible, the rawness of craft is rationalised, the obvious missteps grate the senses, and the naive sincerity can be disarming. You want to be mindful of the limitations of a production like this, but also will kid-gloving the undertaking breed a level of indolence in the crew’s next outing? Will there be a next outing, if one employs the brutal honesty extended to other films out there? Is it fair to measure all films by similar yardsticks?

Most of the cliches in Subedaar carry a tinge of irony. One can almost imagine the glee on director Suresh Triveni’s face after canning a campy, unsubtle scene. The film feels like a very deliberate hark back to the disillusioned lone wolf of the late 1980s, early 1990s — a genre that was largely cornered by the successors of Bachchan’s angry young man – Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt. It’s no surprise then that it’s one of their contemporaries, Anil Kapoor, playing Retired Subedaar Arjun Maurya in this First Blood (1982)-meets-Prahaar (1991)-meets-The Equalizer (2014) concoction. Triveni is a sophisticated filmmaker dabbling in what’s considered a pulpy genre.

When I watched the teaser for Anubhuti Kashyap’s Accused about a week ago, my first reaction was that of excitement. But almost reflexively, I tempered my expectations. Decades of being let down by Hindi cinema can do this. The teaser reminded me of Todd Field’s Tár – starring Cate Blanchett, playing a renowned conductor, whose mythical brilliance on stage is punctured by her indiscretions. It makes sense that the actor tasked with conveying the moral ambiguities and unpleasantness of the subject is Konkona Sen Sharma. The farthest thing in physicality and style – the only thing overlapping Sen Sharma and Blanchett, is their fearlessness to look absolutely deplorable on screen without breaking a sweat. Also, I’d enjoyed Kashyap’s last venture, Doctor G (2023), pushing the Ayushmann Khurrana social dramedy in a new direction.

Very little of Aashish Mall’s Shatak looks real. I’m not talking just historical authenticity here, or the conspicuous name-dropping of ‘leftist’ freedom fighters (all of them, obviously in awe of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS). Most of Mall’s film looks enhanced like the tacky green-screens on primetime news. Most characters wander around like AI slop, speaking with pauses – without showing the slightest bits of humanity. Walking out of Mall’s film, one of my thoughts was if the film was an exhibit for the India AI Impact Summit held in Delhi. If that was the case, what fresh hell it would mean for the nation already grappling with a dozen controversies brewing because of the event. Would Sam Altman have felt pressured to give it a standing ovation, seeing the Indian Prime Minister sitting adjacent to him, if the film screened there? Mall’s film feels like a 112-minute reel created using AI, chronicling the good/better/best anecdotes of the far-right organisation – without the slightest hint of curiosity. The aim is not to find out about how the RSS came into being, as much as kissing the feet of its founding fathers.

At one point in Anubhav Sinha’s Assi, a father (Manoj Pahwa) and his son (Abhishant Rana) are devouring a plate of chhole bhature. The father says, “Your mother is an excellent cook, but the chhole bhature she makes is… okay. No shame in eating outside once in a while. You can get a plate like this for Rs 60, maybe Momos for Rs 90,” he says, going on to add – “but a man never brings these home.” Only towards the end, does a woman overhearing the conversation realise that the duo aren’t talking about her food. The son is shown to be an accomplice in a rape, a few scenes earlier. I can see why co-writers Sinha and Gaurav Solanki [the duo had also earlier written Article 15] might lean on the wryness of a scene like this to explain a perpetrator’s mindset. But the scene feels too satisfied with its oversimplified metaphors for deep-seated dishonesty and compartmentalisation that the (primarily) male, urban population is capable of.