Uday Bhatia

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.

In the third episode of Freedom At Midnight’s second season, Abhishek Banerjee turns up as an unnamed Hindu rioter. Towards the end, he confronts Gandhi (Chirag Vohra), who’s fasting in yet another attempt to end the terrible sectarian violence in Calcutta. He berates the frail old man, yelling at him to eat, confessing to murder, finally breaking down. Gandhi, barely able to speak, advises him to wipe his heart of hatred.

Madan Lal Khetarpal is in Lahore. He’s attending a college reunion and seeing the house where he grew up, but really, he’s building up courage to visit the place where his son Arun, second lieutenant in the Indian army, breathed his last in the 1971 War. This turned out to be Dharmendra’s final role, and he’s a little too old to offer an incisive performance. Yet, what we get is even better, something pure and unfiltered, an old man using his last fruitful moments to speak of love and understanding. I was incredibly moved, perhaps because my grandfather is also a Madan Lal who studied in Lahore and, like Dharmendra, has been a witness to both undivided Punjab and the entire sweep of independent India.

The last thing we hear in Dhurandhar is: Yeh naya Hindustan hai. Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi — this is the new India. It’ll break into your home, and kill you too. It’s a callback to Aditya Dhar’s previous film, Uri: The Surgical Strike, also about an Indian operation conducted on Pakistani soil. The word ‘ghusna’, with its connotations of an initial breach, feels more appropriate for the 2019 film, which ventures a few miles across the border for a short while. Dhurandhar, on the other hand, barely steps out of Karachi after setting down its bags there in the first half hour. The film is so immersed in Pakistan that India becomes a blip on TV screens.