Tatsam Mukherjee

Bollywood can’t just stick to making films anymore. Successful films need to be a clarion call for a ‘higher’ purpose. Whether it’s the Kashmiri Pandit exodus in The Kashmir Files (2022), the sadistic torture of a Hindu king by a Mughal emperor in Chhaava (2025), or a visibly deranged man offering his unsolicited opinions on everything, talking at the speed of thought, in Animal (2023).

It takes a special kind of film to be aware of its surroundings. It is one thing to fetishise nature and invite comparison to the sweeping scale of a Terrence Mallick film but Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams does something interesting with the vessel of a meandering Mallick film. It cuts and splices the essential bits of a man’s journey fuelled by cosmic wonder: the meaning of it all. And it does that using a specific means: a voiceover (by Will Patton).

Despite its shortcomings, one thing that is impressive about Vibhu Puri’s Gustaakh Ishq is that it’s not tentative about what it wants to be. No pretence or excessive self-awareness – often a crutch for films afraid to go the distance, hedging against becoming a laughing stock. In an age when Hindi cinema has been pilloried as ‘Urduwood’ by right-wing trolls, it’s heartwarming to see Puri’s film reclaim and revive the Muslim social film.

In episode four of the third season of The Family Man – Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee) gets nostalgic. He asks JK (Sharib Hashmi) if he remembers Kareem – a dissident Kashmiri student who was killed in the first season because of Srikant’s misplaced suspicion. I might be reading too much into it, but it almost felt like creators Raj Nidimoru, Krishna D.K. and Suman Kumar were getting wistful about a time during the first season when there was endless possibility.

A young man sits in a cafe with a cold coffee in hand, his eyes searching for someone. Wearing a dull grey T-shirt, it will take him some time to realise that he’s been stood up by the person he was supposed to meet: a girl he exchanged messages with in an online sex chat room. Devastated at being rejected like this, Guru (Mohit Agarwal) gazes into a mirror after going back home, trying to wish away his less-than-affable appearance. Some of us might feel sorry for the protagonist, but then the director does a 180-degree flip on his audience, showing him doing something dastardly in the very next scene. At this point, Kanu Behl’s Agra – which premiered in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2023 – begins to resemble an origin story.

In Frederic Raphael’s book, Eyes Wide Open – on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1998), which Raphael co-wrote with Kubrick – at one point, they discuss Schindler’s List. The much-revered, Oscar-sweeping 1995 film by Steven Spielberg is cut down to size by Kubrick for its triumphant, hopeful climax. Something that betrays the way Kubrick sees the Holocaust essentially as a tale of failure. Even though I don’t fully concur with the thesis, I do see where Kubrick was coming from. That the Holocaust was a singular example of systemic moral failure is something that is acutely understood by James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg – a film named after the infamous trial where the Allies prosecuted the surviving officers of the Nazi high command for crimes against humanity. What’s surprising about Vanderbilt’s film is its awareness isn’t instantly apparent. But how it reveals itself slowly.

In an era when films and shows are designed to seem endless (with consecutive sequels and multiple seasons) I’ve come to appreciate standalone films and miniseries. A miniseries in particular, meant to tell one story in between six to twelve episodes, has become a rarity in the midst of a deluge of platforms – where executives are only very eager to commission a second season for successful shows that have definite endings. It’s what I had appreciated about Mare of Easttown, a typical prestige TV procedural, headlined by an A-lister (Kate Winslet). The show didn’t necessarily reinvent the genre, but it delivered a rich world set in rural Pennsylvania, where a sleepy town hides secrets in plain sight. And how a compassionate cop goes about investigating a murder case, while handling fragile egos and respecting the lines in the sand.

I don’t think anyone working in The Taj Story is acquainted with ‘confirmation bias’ as a concept. Or they’re deliberately ignorant – which is worse. I gauged this from a scene, where a noted lawyer character’s reaction to the declaration “I have evidence that the Taj Mahal wasn’t built by Shahjahan” is not “what is the evidence?” Instead, the lawyer’s voice sounds almost jubilant – like it’s some personal victory. The goal isn’t to find the ‘truth’. The ‘truth’ has already been ascertained in one’s imagination – so one simply needs to cherry-pick facts, poke inane holes in the widely-accepted version of history – to plant a seed of doubt. This isn’t a conclusion arrived at after rigorous thought – it’s shameless, weightless contrarianism for its own sake.