Uday Bhatia

By the time four thugs corner SHO Pawan Malik (Saif Ali Khan) in his home, Kartavya has been simmering for an hour and 15 minutes. Threats are made; Saif folds his arms and tells them to do their worst. I was ready for him to knock them out cold, but then something interesting happens. There’s a fight. It’s not even close. Saif barely gets two punches in and he’s overpowered. It took me a while to realise this wasn’t some clever ploy on the cop’s part. When’s the last time an Indian film hero lost a fight? It doesn’t take the small-town cop film anywhere new. There’s nothing in its view of khap panchayats or corrupt local police forces that hasn’t been explored before. Still, it’s hard to argue that Pulkit’s film doesn’t capture something of the spirit of these dejected times. Everyone in the film is resigned to their place in a rigged system, so much so that Pawan’s attempts to ensure justice are seen by well-wishers not only as foolhardiness but irresponsibility towards his family and his own prospects.

Ritwik Pareek’s film opens with the image of a temple on a hill after dusk, prayer bells on the soundtrack. This gives way seconds later to shots of distant highway traffic and a great reverberating spaghetti western guitar chord. A man stumbles out of a dive bar, slurs a farewell “Jai siya Ram” and rides off into the night. In the world of Dug Dug, the distance between sacred and profane can be covered in one drunken lurch. The opening stretch, around 11 minutes, is as mesmeric as anything I’ve seen in this decade of Indian film. Walking out of the bar, the man stands in semi-darkness, takes a swig from a quarter bottle, tries to light a beedi. He’s successful on his third try. At this exact moment, lights come on overhead, a brilliant mesh of blue and purple neon. A gravelly voiceover mulls the mystery of life. The man sets off on his motorbike, straight down the middle of a badly lit highway. More ominous twangy music. Vehicles whiz past; some curse at him and he curses back. He veers off the main road onto a less crowded one, but having got this far, skids and crashes. Under a gaze of a lurid billboard announcing a magic show, he lies, gasping. The camera pans away just in time for a passing truck to run him over.

It’s telling that one of the producers of Michael is John Branca, an entertainment lawyer and co-executor of the Michael Jackson estate, played in the film by Miles Teller. This feels like a film produced by a lawyer—a soulless document sure, but one that’ll hold up in court. Another producer is Graham King, the man behind Bohemian Rhapsody. That this 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic was directed, for the most part, by Bryan Singer, accused multiple times of sexual assault, had no visible bearing on its box office. And King has good reason to hope that the allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson won’t dent the success of this new biopic.

In the week of her passing, Toaster has a doozy of an Asha Bhosle joke. Distraught Glenn (Abhishek Banerjee) has to address the small gathering at his mother’s funeral. To get their attention, he taps his glass: clink clinkclink, clink clinkclink. This is, of course, the opening of ‘Chura Liya Hai’, sung by Asha in Kati Patang, a rhythm so distinctive Glenn’s not even finished when Ramakant (Rajkumar Rao) tells his wife, Shipla (Sanya Malhotra), “He’s going to sing.” It’s worth noting that Toaster immediately follows its best joke with a flat one, which it underlines. Glenn announces he wants to say ‘two words’ about his late mother. But he can only blubber “Mumma” twice before he breaks down. Cue comic score. “True to his word,” Shilpa says. “He only said two words.” More comedy music.

Long before The Drama unveils its central conflict, the filmmaking clues us in on where we’re headed. Kristoffer Borgli’s film opens with a Hitchcockian closeup of Zendaya’s ear. The camera stalks and skulks. The ambient sound fades in and out. Robert Pattinson spies, stammers, lies. It’s a meet-cute, but the tone is just shy of psychological horror. With days to go for their wedding, Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma take their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) to dinner. Several drinks in, they stumble into a truth game: each person will tell the group the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie’s and Mike’s confessions are fairly innocuous; Rachel’s is more shocking (locking a developmentally challenged child in a shed overnight). All the while, Emma looks distinctly uncomfortable. But she’s too drunk to lie, and admits that, when she was 15, she’d planned a school shooting, opting out only at the last moment.

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.