Tatsam Mukherjee

Karan Tejpal’s Stolen might look like a thriller on the surface. But if one pays attention, it reveals itself as a survival film. For the uninitiated, a survival film is a subgenre of films telling tales of a character surviving an adventure gone awry. In Stolen, the misadventure entails residing in India in the 2020s. A nation with obscene inequalities, a broken law-and-order system that couldn’t be less bothered about the people who need it the most, and a culture that is a sinister concoction of ancient traditionalism and new-age apathy – India in the 2020s is a whole new beast. It’s a place that has picked up the vocabulary of empathy, privilege and virtue-signalling from the West, but one where fans of a cricket team throng a stadium and remorselessly stomp over dozens of people – as a part of their ‘celebration’.

Even though it is widely known, I don’t think enough gets written about how much of a nightmare it is to watch a film in its ‘purest’ form in India. One can overlook the overzealous censors that infantilise the audience with humongous smoking warnings, even for films rated ‘A’, desecrating the work of any self-respecting filmmaker. Along with that, most ambitious films play in sparsely-populated theatres. The screening for Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight that I attended in Bengaluru had about a dozen audience members. I have a feeling I would’ve enjoyed the film more if I’d seen it in a packed theatre because it has many visual gags, and most of them are spot on. Also, muted cuss words can feel like sensory speed bumps even if one can decipher them by reading the lip movement. I wondered how the British-Indian director reacted to the alterations? But hey, at least the film released, unlike Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (2024).

It says something about a star, when a close-up of their weathered face becomes the multiplex poster of the last two films of a $4 billion franchise. Whatever one might think of Tom Cruise, it’s saying something that his face is all the advertising these films need. Why should we watch it? Because it has Cruise, who will be attempting something no one else ever has done in a film. The action set-pieces in the Mission: Impossible franchise have always been the focal point, enveloped in a jargon-addled plot whose flimsiness wouldn’t survive the faintest probes of logic. Their function is to only add emotional stakes to Cruise’s daredevilry. Ethan Hunt – should he choose to accept – needs to steal something from a facility impossible to break into, to either clear his name, save a loved one or avert a nuclear disaster.

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.