Uday Bhatia

When was the last time the hero in an Indian commercial film was introduced without any fanfare? Deva opens with downbeat credits composed of fractured surveillance images. And then its titular character just appears, riding his bike down a tunnel. No buildup. No flying bodies. No ‘Sparkling Star Shahid Kapoor’. Ten minutes later, Kapoor is, in effect, reintroduced: there are sundry hero shenanigans and a dance number. But the opening is enough to guess that this is a rare contemporary Hindi commercial film whose rhythms aren’t those of Tamil or Telugu cinema. Then again, its hurt, sombre rhythms aren’t classic Bollywood either—despite Dev being positioned before a mural of Deewaar while ‘Main Hoon Don’ plays.

This week last year, a film released that seemed to epitomise popular Hindi cinema’s decline over a decade. Fighter might have set out to cash in on the success of Top Gun: Maverick, but it played like an advertisement for the sitting government at the centre. Releasing months before the general elections, the film—like Uri: The Surgical Strike in 2019—showed the prime minister as capable commander in chief while engaging in hysterical Pakistan-baiting. “Unhe dikhaana padega ki baap kaun hai (we’ll show them who daddy is),” the PM in the film says, a statesman-like sentiment befitting a Republic Day release. Sky Force also takes a ‘baap’ jab at Pakistan, but it’s a half-hearted swipe. As a fighter pilot film releasing on the weekend of 26 January, there are certain jingoistic beats directors Sandeep Kewlani and Abhishek Anil Kapur must feel they have to hit. And they do, but their heart isn’t in it. On the face of it, there’s not much to recommend this film—it’s underwritten, square and tries to pull off elaborate action on a clearly insufficient budget. But where Fighter tends towards rabid nationalism, Sky Force stumbles awkwardly in search of reconciliation.

There were only two things I asked of Emergency. One was to literally see the presses stop (we’re shown this twice). The second was for Sam Manekshaw to call Indira Gandhi ‘sweetie’, like Vicky Kaushal does in Sam Bahadur (2023). This, surprisingly, wasn’t fulfilled. I’m certain the makers were aware of the legend of the army chief saying this to the prime minister, but chose to leave it out. Its absence says a lot about this curious film suspended between opposing impulses. Emergency isn’t what I was expecting. For starters, its focus isn’t the Emergency; the events of 1975-77 take up, at a rough estimate, half an hour in a 146-minute film. Instead, this is very much a Indira Gandhi biopic, progressing in linear fashion from her childhood to her assassination in 1984. Since it’s Kangana Ranaut—a BJP MP who has made a number of incendiary statements about minorities and protestors—directing, producing and playing Indira, I was expecting a crazed hatchet job. This too doesn’t happen.

“People say prison is a trashcan, but it’s really a circus,” DSP Tomar (Rahul Bhat) tells his new jailers. Black Warrant suggests that hangings are the circus’ circus. The sentenced are celebrities of the prison world. The visiting hangmen are celebrities for the Tihar staff. Inmates become nervy; reporters start asking questions. Everyone’s on edge—all except ASP Dahiya (Anurag Thakur), grinning broadly as he massages banana pulp onto a noose. The best Hindi streaming shows of the past few years are carefully built from the ground up, the longer runtimes allowing for more complex narratives but also challenge creators to populate and make believable specific universes—stock markets, village councils, counterfeit operations. I didn’t know hanging ropes were once smoothened with mashed banana. It’s not a vital piece of information; you’d miss it altogether if you weren’t paying attention for those three seconds in the second episode. But it’s sort of detail that gives me confidence, tells me the makers have burrowed deep inside their setting.

A boy of maybe five or six stands over his dead parents. They’re in a row of bodies on the ground in front of a high-rise, construction workers who died because of low-quality netting. The builder at fault calls the boy over (he’s from the northeast—migrant labour!), gives him 10 rupees and tells him to buy some chocolate. In the next scene, John (Varun Dhawan) crashes the builder’s party, decimates his goons, and sends the man crashing through a window to his death. One of the onlookers is the young boy, who takes a triumphant bite of chocolate.

There’s a moment late in Despatch when Manoj Bajpayee looks, suddenly and disconcertingly, like his character from Kaun? (1999). It made me think of the giddy fun of that turn, driving Urmila Matondkar half-crazy with those nagging ma’ams. It also made me wonder—despite the obvious differences—what this film might have been like with that Bajpayee performance. Bajpayee once played heels with obvious relish, whereas his character in Despatch is wrapped in disgust and disdain, a bitter pill to spend two hours with.

Shoojit Sircar’s recent film work has been preoccupied with mortality. Shiuli’s freak accident and subsequent state determine the course of October (2018). Gulabo Sitabo (2020) is a comic look at death, with an ageing man hoping for the demise of his even older wife. And Sardar Udham is death-haunted, not just the historical fact of the protagonist’s execution but the guiding hand of the ghosts of Jallianwala Bagh.

A portly white-haired man walks into the frame and, even before he’s sat, addresses the camera with some urgency. “Before he arrives, there are some things I just want to say. It’s about the nature of the structure of, and the destructure, and the non-structure of what we see." He lists the disparate thoughts running through his head: a green cake he once ate in Naples, the fish pie he must take out of the freezer, a line from Mayakovsky, digging in The Great Escape and as a young boy on the beach, a row of coffins for mass burial, the impending birth of his granddaughter