Tatsam Mukherjee

It’s been a while since a contemporary Hindi film reminded me of Salim-Javed without trying too hard. I wouldn’t be surprised if the duo weren’t even on director Neeraj Ghaywan’s mind, when he wrote the opening scene to his second feature, Homebound. Adapted from journalist Basharat Peer’s piece, ‘Taking Amrit Home’ (2020), which appeared in the New York Times at the height of the pandemic, Ghaywan’s film opens with a startling visual. A railway platform is brimming with a crowd of young adults, applicants for a police public service examination. It’s so overwhelming that it momentarily breaks the spirit of Chandan (Vishal Jethwa).

The strongest and weakest thing about Anurag Kashyap’s latest is that it is, indeed, an Anurag Kashyap film. As the film plodded along frustratingly in its third hour, I realised he’s still got the goods as a director. It’s something I gleaned from a tender moment in the sprawling 176-minute Nishaanchi. Wrestler-turned-goon Jabardast Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) has just killed another pehelwaan (wrestler), after finding out he has wronged a local woman. This is Kanpur in 1996, and it’s not just the woman’s ‘honour’ Jabardast wants to avenge; he also wants to settle his score with a man (son-in-law of the president of the wrestling club), who got picked as the captain, ahead of Jabardast for years, forcing him to gulp his humiliation and give up wrestling to become a thug. In the scene, Jabardast is lying in bed with Manjiri (Monika Panwar) telling her he’ll have to surrender to the police. Being the right-hand man of a well-respected/feared thug, Jabardast has been assured that he’ll only have to serve a brief sentence, after which he will come back.

In the last decade, it’s been heartening to see filmmaking voices emerge from the heartland, drawing raw, earthy portraits of rural life, where more than half of India still resides. We see such films hiding in the garb of a genre: comedy, satire, police procedural etc, especially when the director isn’t familiar with the milieu. Hence, the work of an assured filmmaker jumps out at us. The likes of Natesh Hegde, Anmol Sidhu, Achal Mishra etc, confidently marry sophisticated aesthetics with a lived-in grittiness. Director Jitank Singh Gurjar fits right into this mix as his feature debut, In Search of the Sky (alternate title: Vimukt) suggests. Told in Braj language, it tells the story of a family in rural Madhya Pradesh, which is trying to escape its life sentence by visiting the Mahakumbh.

As any film critic these days will tell you, the word ‘Lynchian’ gets thrown around a lot in reviews. The slightest bit of surrealism in a scene is described as something emulating the work of the man behind masterpieces like Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997). I’m guilty of it too. So much so that the descriptor has lost some of its gravitas over the years. Most things that don’t seem logically coherent are touted as Lynchian. However, ambiguity is not a stand-in for true enigma, nor does density always equal profundity. Sometimes, a scene can play straight like a musical note, evoking something visceral in the audience – leaving no room to question its logic. It’s this feeling of discovery through a film that counts for more than ‘understanding’ it. In its duration of a shade under two hours, Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma – The Fable might be the closest an Indian film has come to emulating David Lynch’s genre-breaking style. I’m not saying the film derives it from the existing style, as much as Reddy embraces it and makes it his own. Having made his debut with the fantastic Thithi (2015), the 36-year-old filmmaker might not even have been conscious of it.

A markedly distinct genre of Mumbai films have emerged in the Hindi mainstream (Kaun Pravin Tambe?, Lootcase, Madgaon Express) in the last decade. The director is Mumbai-bred for the most part, the dialogues flits from Hindi, Marathi and the in-between language laced with Mumbai slang. The underdog protagonist usually lives in a cramped central Mumbai chawl, and the films tend to have the wry humour and the wisdom of the city’s many pot-holed streets. Chinmay Mandlekar’s Inspector Zende fits into this slew of breezy, playful and intentionally cartoonish films — which are modest in their ambitions, enjoyable in the moment and rarely able to sustain the joys of their first hour. Madhukar Zende (Manoj Bajpayee) is a cog in the Mumbai police machinery, battling the underworld. Like any good fielder in the 30-yard circle, Zende can anticipate his moment to shine. Whether it’s out of a sense of duty or his ‘supercop’ ego is up for debate. A thing I liked about Mandlekar’s film is how it accounts for someone’s ability to exaggerate while regaling anecdotes. It’s amused by the self-mythologising, while also being affectionate towards its subject. It results in a film that is consistently amusing, even if it doesn’t break any new ground.

I’ve always likened the opening stretch of a film to a train about to leave the station. The best films give the impression that the train has been running long before we boarded, and one that will continue after we get off. It’s during these opening moments that, as viewers, we decide if we want to get on the train and go on a journey the director has planned for us. In Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop, this opening stretch features a woman waiting to take a test at a data labelling centre, in rural Jharkhand. Haunted by visions of a childhood spent with a porcupine in her ancestral village, one she’s forced to unceremoniously return to after her divorce begins, Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) fails the test for a job at the centre. She has an infant tied to her back, as her friend pleads her case in front of a superior. “She belongs to the local tribe, and is undergoing her divorce. She really needs it,” the friend advocates in front of the manager (Gita Guha). “She’s a graduate and fairly acquainted with computers.”

Maybe it’s not saying much that Dominic Arun’s Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra is the most progressive pan-India blockbuster I’ve seen. In the competitive aftermath of the Baahubali films, we have seen umpteen stabs by many Indian film industries, where the reverence for Hindu mythology, nationalism, Islamophobia and/or common-place misogyny is dialled up for a big-budget film. It’s a lazy, patronising and dishonest strategy aimed at the layman (arguably with more spending power compared to the average Indian woman). Perhaps, it’s not surprising that a few months ago, another film from the same industry (L2: Empuraan) – a mainstream action film began by depicting the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, 2002. In the same film, the opposition leaders contesting a state election, are shown to be arrested on instructions of an establishment that seems to play on the Hindu majoritarian sentiment. And thus it was almost poetic, when Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax officials conducted raids in the offices of the producers and director of L2: Empuraan, going on to prove the makers right.

One of the incidental pleasures of recent indie-horror films from around the world is how they’ve doubled down on the power of gaslighting. It’s chilling to see the psychological warfare unleashed on a person, enough to make them question their critical faculties and/or sanity. Why fear the monster under the bed, when family members and ‘well-meaning’ acquaintances can make up for it? The power of perception can be vital – which most people are discovering in the age of social media. Imbuing human paranoia into a folk horror-tale is one of the best decisions made by director-duo Danny and Michael Philippou in Bring Her Back – their sophomore film, after their clutter-breaking debut in Talk To Me (2023). Having started as YouTubers in Adelaide, the Philippou brothers soon showcased their knowledge about horror tropes. And they also know the points when most horror films take a leap of faith – and how ludicrous it looks. So the duo mine it for laughs. It’s another miracle of recent that instead of being rigid, indie-spirited horror films operate without any fear of flirting with their own formlessness.