Uday Bhatia

Of all the possible callbacks to Dhurandhar, there was one scene that was always going to be revisited in the sequel. At the start of the first film, Intelligence Bureau chief Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan) negotiates with Pakistani hijackers. Their leader, Zahoor (Vivek Sinha), mocks his attempt to get the passengers to complete his cry of ‘Bharat mata ki…’ and tells him that Hindus are a cowardly race. In the sequel, Sanyal speaks to Zahoor again, on video call, after Indian spy Hamza (Ranveer Singh) has beaten him bloody and is pointing a revolver at him. Sanyal gloats a bit, then asks him to complete the slogan he couldn’t all those years ago. This is Aditya Dhar’s cinema in a nutshell: Bharat mata ki jai, down the barrel of a gun.

Throughout Subedaar, various characters tell retired army man Arjun Maurya (Anil Kapoor) that he’s no longer on the border. Sometimes it’s a threat, sometimes a plea, but the implication is the same: there are rules to that kind of warfare, whereas the battles waged in his small north Indian hometown are cruel and illogical. “Forget you were in the army,” his friend Prabhakar (Saurabh Shukla) urges him. “Welcome to real life.” But Arjun is spiralling in his grief and spoiling for a fight. From the moment we lay eyes on Arjun’s shiny new red Gypsy, we know it’ll be John Wick’s dog. The car symbolises his memory of his wife, who died in an accident while he was away on duty. So, when bratty gangster Prince (Aditya Rawal) takes offense to the veteran’s gruff manner and gets his thugs to trash the vehicle, Arjun snaps. A lot of this is grief turned to rage, but there’s also some relief. The car is a reminder of how he neglected his family for years and wasn’t around for his wife’s final moments. Instead of mending relationships with his grieving, resentful daughter, Shyama (Radhika Madan), isn’t it easier to take on the local sand mafia?

I first heard it about 15 minutes into the film, when Agnes tells the village tutor whom she likes, and who’s crazy for her, that she can read landscapes on his hand. “You saw a landscape?” he asks with a smile. “Mm hmm,” she replies. Later on, the tutor tells Agnes, whom he’s now married and has three children with, that he’s acquiring a house in Stratford for them. To this also she says, “Mm hmm.” Hamnet wants Shakespeare as a hook to hang its tragic story on. It wants a few details of his life. It wants a smattering of the plays. But it wants nothing to do with the language. I don’t know if they said ‘mm hmm’ in 16th century England; for all I know they said ‘uh oh’ and ‘uh uh’. But it feels inadequate. It’s a strange impulse, to want to make a film about someone who changed the way people speak, yet have barely any of that speech coursing through it.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of Vishal Bhardwaj films. The first kind unfold with control and fixity of purpose: Maqbool, Omkara, Haider. The second, films like Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola, Kaminey, Rangoon, are looser, zanier, Bhardwaj like a witch gleefully tossing arcane ingredients into a cauldron. The first category has all his classics, and would seem the essential one to understand the director. Yet, the latter is where I think we see the full flowering of Bhardwaj’s weirdness and breadth of interests.

Desperate for money, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) enlists his friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who’s married but likely carrying his unborn child, for a hopelessly long shot in an endless series of long shots. She calls up the shady Ezra (Abel Ferrara), whose dog Marty lost, then tracked down. When she asks for a finder’s fee of $2,000, Ezra balks, saying he got the dog for free. What if I was a doctor operating on your mother, Rachel improvises, would you refuse the surgery because you got your mother for free? “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Ezra says. Rachel immediately retorts: “Well, then I guess you don’t know anything about love.”

There’s a scene I often return to in Apur Sansar (1959), the third in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, that’s an eloquent defence of ordinariness. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is being gently pulled up by a friend for his lack of ambition. He ventures that he’s writing a novel, and starts narrating the story: a boy grows up in the village, moves to the city, studies hard. “We feel he has in him seeds of greatness, but…” “He doesn’t succeed?” the friend guesses. “He doesn’t,” Apu replies. “But to him this isn’t a tragedy. He realises one must face reality. One must live!” Robert Grainier wouldn’t be able to articulate this, but he’d agree. He’s a young orphan at the start of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, in a tiny town in rural Idaho. “He quit attending school in his early teens, and the next two decades passed without much direction or purpose,” the voiceover says. He becomes a logger, and though he works a few other jobs, that’s the only real profession he has. He’s in his 80s when the film closes, and has lived most of his life in the same small town.

It’s rare to see Hindi cinema offer up this neat a contrast. Three weeks ago, Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, a film on the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, released in theatres. This weekend, Anurag Singh’s Border 2, also set during the 1971 War, opens in time for Republic Day. Ikkis is an interrogation of the modern Hindi war film, cheerfully swatting away stereotypes. Border 2, on the other hand, throws itself frequently on the live grenade of cliché, a martyr’s death for original thinking every scene.

I wonder if Vir Das was a fan of Scrubs. So much in Happy Patel reminded me of Zach Braff’s sitcom: the cutaways and inserts, the sheer number of throwaway gags, the gravitation towards sweetness and light. This sort of busy, packed, self-aware comedy has a robust tradition in American film and TV. But we don’t see it much in India—which makes Happy Patel a bit of a curiosity, as foreign-returned as its protagonist.