My Movies of the Year - I

My Mirror column:

A year-end list of the films I most enjoyed in 2018, in no particular order. The first of a two-part column. 

The season of lists is upon us, and so here I am with mine. But a caveat before I begin: this is not, repeat not, a list of the best films of 2018. I cannot make that claim, simply because there are too many 2018 releases I haven't yet watched – in Hindi, in English, in the many Indian languages, and in countries across the world. Instead, if you will all indulge me at the end of a taxing year, here is a list of films that -- in my eyes -- did their bit to redeem 2018.

Let me begin with the Hindi films, in no particular order.

Mukkabaaz: Anurag Kashyap began the year with a bang, giving us a zingy film about an aspiring boxer where all the real drama takes place outside the ring. The last time Kashyap used the poor-boxer-as-underdog-hero trope, Ranbir Kapoor's performance bit the dust along with the massive misguided missile that was its vehicle, Bombay Velvet. This time, the superb Vineet Kumar Singh (who is also the originator of the script) makes the sad-eyed struggler at the film's heart as credible as the desperate New India that surrounds him. Singh's performance as Shravan is more than matched by Jimmy Sheirgill's masterful turn as a casteist coach. Backed by a brilliant, addictive soundtrack, Kashyap crafts the caste and communal politics of Bareilly into a cinematic universe that is equal parts depressing dysfunction and joyful subversion.

Raazi: Meghna Gulzar's nailbiting thriller, based on the real-life tale of a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani army family expressly to scout out state secrets, was also the most marvellously subversive Hindi film in ages, playing around with popular assumptions about gender, religion and nationalism at so profound a level that you barely know you're being played. The doll-like Alia Bhatt as a spying dulhan who sweetly smiles her way into the innermost circles of the military establishment is a masterstroke, playing not just on the anxieties of the India-Pakistan relationship but the familial anxieties around the otherness of all bahus in all sasurals. Raazi also gives us a rare burka-clad heroine who needs no saving (unlike say, the two Muslim female characters in the otherwise praiseworthy Lipstick Under My Burkha, or the award-winning 2016 short film Leeches), and a rare India-Pakistan romance that is based on mutual respect for each other's patriotism. 

Mulk: Anubhav Sinha's response to the growing representation of India's Muslims as the enemy within is a moving portrait of a middle class Banaras family that's vilified and harassed after one of its members turns out to have perpetrated a terrorist attack. Rishi Kapoor, one of those lucky male stars to get his best roles after 50, is wonderful as the portly, bearded, devout Murad Ali Mohammad, who is suddenly reduced from the respected neighbourhood Vakeel Sahab to a man in the dock as a member of a hated community. Less feted but crucial to the film's sense of tragedy is Manoj Pahwa's superb portrayal of Murad's younger brother Bilal: a not-so-clever man whose absence of judgement can appear, in a courtroom and a country arraigned against him, as the presence of guilt. Mulk etches the ordinary mixedness of both mohalla and family with warmth and lightness, but its extended courtroom sequences are a bit overwrought. But given the bigotry tearing us apart, this is the bludgeoning we need.

Stree: Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (themselves directors, of Shor in the City fame) have crafted a rare creature: a Hindi genre film that subverts gender stereotypes while being clever enough to never be preachy. Stuffed with great comic turns (of which Rajkummar Rao's ladies tailor hero and Pankaj Tripathi's local faux-historian are the highlights), Stree combines the chills and thrills of a small town ghost story with effortless humour. Kaushik doesn't shy away from laughter in any direction, embracing both situational goofiness and the perfectly positioned political joke: a line about the ghost being able to identify people by their Aadhar cards, or the cameo by Vijay Raaz in which we're told that the Emergency has never ended.

Andhadhun: Sriram Raghavan returns to the screen with another film that proves his irreplaceability to contemporary Hindi cinema. The film's principal ingredients suggest a chef who's having a lot of fun: an attractive blind pianist, a fading Hindi film hero playing a version of himself, Tabu doing a brilliant riff on a character she has played before – Lady Macbeth. The performances are pitch-perfect for a film that is meant to keep us guessing: Ayushmann Khurrana is sympathetic but suave; the magisterial Tabu is somehow both controlled and manic. Add a sweet old woman who may not be that sweet, a nosy Parsi neighbour who gets her just deserts, and an even more nosy child who... let me not give it away – and you get a deliciously dark confection, with Raghavan's usual bonus layers for film buffs.

Badhaai Ho: Amit Ravindernath Sharma's film is a fine new addition to several growing genres: middle class comedies, Delhi films -- and most crucially, family films that want to talk about deep, dark, once-considered-top-secret topics, eg. sex, while making us giggle. Ayushmann Khurrrana as the son of a Northern Railways TT and Sanya Malhotra as his posh girlfriend are cute together, but Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao walk away with the honours for the warmest, most winsome couple of Hindi cinema this year.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

Heart of darkness

My Mirror column:

With Mukkabaaz, Anurag Kashyap has gone where many might fear to tread, crafting a picture of present day North India whose zingy energy doesn't quite hide its depressing core.

The marvellous Jimmy Shergill as Bhagwan Das Mishra in Mukkabaaz

It would be a mistake to go into Mukkabaaz expecting a sports film. The hero might be desperate to win a boxing championship, but his real battles are not in the ring. For the talented small fish trying to make his way up from the bottom, the entire Indian food chain seems to consist of big fish that want to be fed – or they'll gobble him up. Director Anurag Kashyap seems so keen for us to understand this that he makes his Shravan Kumar pretty much invincible as a boxer: the self-proclaimed Mike Tyson of Uttar Pradesh knows he can beat all his opponents – and after a while, so do we.

So while the film's many boxing scenes are painstakingly crafted: taut, grimy, often gripping, all the drama in Mukkabaaz lies outside them. And the stage for it to unfold are the bylanes of Bareilly: a town that seems to have truly arrived in the country's cinematic imagination, with Kashyap close on the heels of 2017's Bareilly ki Barfi and Babumoshai Bandookbaaz. With Mukkabaaz the fictive possibilities of the contemporary UP small town are exploited in the best way -- by hewing as close to the headlines as its characters' realities will allow, and then digging underneath them for unvarnished truths that aren't seen as fit to print.

Much of the unprintable is spoken by the man who can only be called the film's villain: the superb Jimmy Shergill as the boxing-coach-cum-bahubali who plays God in this universe, acting under the deliberate name of Bhagwan Das Mishra. And much of it revolves around caste. “Sauda toh kar nahi rahe,” says Bhagwan in one scene. “Brahmin hain, aadesh dete hain. [I'm not making a deal here. I'm a Brahmin, I give orders.]” At another crucial juncture, he proposes that Shravan drinks his urine, calling it “amrit”.

Elsewhere, he humiliates a rival coach (Ravi Kissen, doing justice to a rare interesting role) with the pointed question “Sanjay Kumar what? Brahman ho, Kshatriya ho, Kayastha ho, kya?” And when Kumar straightforwardly states his caste as “That fourth jaat that you're unable to even name: Harijan”, Bhagwan makes sure to rub his face in it by calling for a separate water container for the Dalit. Shergill's menacing gaze through rose-tinted spectacles in this scene is a remarkable visual touch: the English metaphor for a too-optimistic view of the world is turned on its head.

Certainly this is not an optimistic film. It almost makes us believe that it is, by handing us an old-style unreconstructed love-at-first-sight narrative between a sad-eyed struggling hero we can root for – the brilliant Vineet Kumar Singh, who is also the originator of the script – as well as a heroine whose muteness thankfully doesn't ever prevent her from having her say (Zoya Hussain, also superb). That illusion is aided by conducting us through their courtship and Shravan's career with Kashyap's usual dizzying energy, with much of the action cut to an immersive, subversive soundtrack and clap-worthy lines crafted out of the everyday wit that the North Indian town uses to cope with its dysfunction. This must be the only film in which boxing moves have appeared on screen marvellously in tandem with hiphop at one point and the murkis in a gentle, almost Hindustani classical song at another. But this is an adrenalin high, not meant to be sustainable. This is a world that is, after all, controlled by Bhagwan, who is, in some ways, another version of the petty, power-hungry sarkaari sports official who unmystifyingly recurs in Indian films about sporting underdogs: think of Girish Kulkarni's character in Dangal, or Zakir Hussain's devious Dev in 2016's Saala Khadoos.

But the reason why Jimmy Shergill's Bhagwan seems more frightening than those men is that he represents the dark heart of the New India – which is unfortunately just an emboldened, lawless version of the old.

In an era when a film like Padmavat(i), with what appears to be its overt celebration of 'Rajput' valour and barely-disguised vilification of the meateating Muslim as uncivilised, somehow manages to be identified with courageous filmmaking, Kashyap's fearlessness makes one want to cheer. Mukkabaaz's fictional depiction of how gau-raksha and the spectre of beef are used to shut down inconvenient voices is both chilling and entirely credible. There is also another long-drawn sequence in which caste plays an overt role, and here it is an OBC character – a Yadav, to be precise – who decides to rub Shravan's nose in the dirt because he thinks he is Rajput. Kashyap's script leaves a deliberate loophole on the question of Shravan's 'real' caste.

Whatever one one thinks of this script decision, or of the fact that the Yadav character's attempt at caste payback earns him only nasty humiliation, Mukkabaaz deals with our darkest selves, head on. 

This is a world where the most soaring dreams must be dreamt without recourse to the rules of justice or fair play. Dysfunction is assumed, and incorporated into plans. Whether it is expressed in a don harassing a family by sending a henchman to keep cutting off their (permanent) illegal electricity connection (the “katiya” that was at the centre of the documentary Katiyabaaz), or in strategizing how to defeat an opponent whom one knows full well is on steroids but cannot report because the system will not listen, Mukkabaaz depicts a world beyond the hope of law. And in this world, to win can mean losing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

Borderline Conditions

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Watching Happy Bhaag Jayegi is an enjoyable way to think about the Indo-Pak relationship in Hindi cinema.

Somewhere in Amritsar, a wedding is in full swing. The bridegroom (Jimmy Shergill) has arrived in all his glittering regalia, and is halfway through a hardworkingly rehearsed solo dance performance, glancing intermittently for approval at his gorgeous bride-to-be, Harpreet alias Happy (Diana Penty). She is laughing a lot, and it looks rather as if she is laughing at him. By the end of the song, our suspicions — and the faint glimmer of them in the dulha's rather thick head — are confirmed: the dulhan has disappeared.

The runaway bride is a recurring motif in contemporary Hindi movie comedy, appearing in variants as different as the 2011 Salman Khan-Asin starrer Ready and 2013's Shuddh Desi Romance. But although this is the comic premise with which Happy Bhag Jayegi begins (and from which it takes its name), the film's more significant humorous track draws on a different Bollywood subgenre: the cross-border comedy.

Penty's long-limbed, moonhphat Happy ends up, by a stroke of bad luck, in a getaway vehicle that leads her not to her lover's embrace, but to Pakistan. The morning after her truck-ride, she wakes up in a grand mansion belonging to a father-and-son politician duo. Played by Javed Sheikh and Abhay Deol, the Ahmeds are known to their loyalists and hangers-on—meaning apparently all of Lahore—as "Janaab Senior" and "Janaab Junior".

The rest of the film involves the hapless Janaab Junior (Deol) trying to restore Happy to her layabout Amritsari beloved, Guddu (Ali Zafar). With the aid of his faithful family retainers—Mamu and Iffat Bi, right out of an '80s Pakistani teleserial, his fierce and aristocratic fiance Zoya (Momal Sheikh) and a wonderfully crackpot policeman by the name of Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra), Janaab Junior (Deol) must contrive to keep Happy out of sight of his domineering father (Sheikh) — while subverting attempts at abduction by her jilted groom Bagga (Shergill, marvellous in a tweaked version of his stood-up-at-the-mandap character from the Tanu Weds Manu films). The writing is nowhere near as funny as screenwriter Himanshu Sharma's TWM, and Penty is inconceivable as a paratha-making Punjaban, but the film remains an enjoyable bit of silliness.

Watching Happy made me realize that Bollywood's cross-border plots devolve into two broad kinds. One is the nationalist we-will-go-across-and-kill-the-terrorists plot, usually containing RAW and ISI agents, secret identities, and wish-fulfilment of both the revenge and romance variety: think of Baby, Ek Thha Tiger, Agent Vinod and Phantom among others. The other kind tends to be grounded in the idea of people from both countries being able to establish a warm human connection, despite the obstacles placed in their way by politics, religion and highly-policed state borders.

Interestingly, this second plot often plays out through a specific narrative. That narrative involves a character being stuck on the wrong side of the border — and having to be rescued or helped to return to the right side. The grand romantic version of this is probably the Yash Chopra love story Veer Zaara, in which the Indian stuck in Pakistan is the film's hero — Shah Rukh Khan as Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh — and he's stuck not just in Pakistan but a Pakistani prison.

Recent variations have sidestepped the romance for something different. Nitin Kakkar's 2014 Filmistaan centred on an aspiring Indian actor who is mistakenly abducted by terrorists and finds himself tied up in a Pakistani village. The huge 2015 hit Bajrangi Bhaijaan made the person stuck in the wrong country a child — and she is imprisoned not by the state or by other people, but by her lack of language. She is mute, and so cannot tell the good Hindustanis that she comes from Pakistan.

By having their protagonists unable to tell that they're not in India, these films underline our cross-national similarities. "Yeh Pakistan hai?" Filmistaan's abducted Sunny (Sharib Hashmi) inquires of his burly captor (Kumud Mishra) in disbelief — there's little about the desert village he's in that suggests he's in another country. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it is the adults around the mute child who can't imagine that she might not be Indian.

Happy, too, falls into this category. "Main Pakistan mein hoon?" asks a shell-shocked Diana Penty, having been so far unable to tell that her unwilling hosts are Lahori. Later in the film, unsuspecting uncles accept Happy as a visiting cousin from Karachi, and we tour a Lahore that combines strolling camels, park joggers and laughter clubs like any north Indian city.

But twinned with similarity comes difference. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it was an overly simplified version of 'Pakistani' culture: burkha-clad women, non-vegetarian food, etc. In Happy, it's a highfaluting register of Urdu that is milked for laughs: Piyush Mishra induces many giggles as he speaks of refraining from maikashi (drinking), inquires if this is Guddu's nasheman (nest) and recommends a qailulah (an afternoon nap) to Bagga.
  
The leg-pulling isn't one-sided: if the film's Pakistani elite is feudal, pompous and thinks nothing of calling in the army and police to solve personal problems, the Urdu-uncomprehending (if reluctantly impressed) Punjabi listeners are loud, boorish and lawless. And yet everyone's really quite good at heart. In these times of high-decibel nationalist nastiness, Happy's gentle ribbing seems welcome.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Aug 2016.

Men Aren't From Mars

In today's Mumbai Mirror, I return to the subject of Tanu Weds Manu Returns. This time, the men:

Tanu Weds Manu's male characters are definitely flawed, but they are also profoundly recognisable.

Last week, I wrote about Tanu Weds Manu Returns, its take on the double-role heroine and how it made me think of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Much newsprint since has been expended on the film. But we've been so busy thinking about the women that no one seems to have bothered to think about the men. 

And yet the men are crucial to Anand L Rai's vision. They were perhaps given more space when Rai first set out to create this world, in 2011. If TWMR spins around Manu Sharma's struggle to decide between two models of womanhood (both embodied by Kangana Ranaut), the pivot of the first film, Tanu Weds Manu, was Tanu's choosing between two models of masculinity. On one hand was her old love Raja Awasthi, a sharp-shooting Lucknow boy with a tongue to match. On the other was Manu Sharma, a suitable boy of the obedient sort who became a doctor because his parents wished it and was now set to marry the same way. 

Jimmy Shergill, arguably the most underrated leading man of our time, effortlessly produced the tough guy exterior and inner vulnerability that made Raja so affecting. Shergill's "introduction" scene was among the quiet marvels of the 2011 film: the Awasthi family is in the midst of the ritual humiliation of displaying their daughter to a prospective groom (Manu) when Raja returns home, carrying fresh scars from some street battle. Embarrassed and angry, his father berates him for being a goonda. Shergill's response captures a superbly specific Indian lihaaz that can still bind our most loutish young men: his eyes flash, but he does not answer back. For what seems like an eternity, as his father speaks, he holds out the bag of samosas, and holds his tongue. 

A minute later, we see another possible reason for Raja's silence: cast in the role of ladkiwala, with a sister who has a slightly deformed left hand, he knows he cannot jeopardise her chances any further than he already has. And then, in a moving statement that marks our surprise nowadays at anyone who isn't pulling rank, Raja tells Manu that he seems like a good man - "Nahi toh kahan aise milte hain London ke aadmi hum Lucknow walon se?" 

Screenplay writer Himanshu Sharma has created characters whose roots extend deep below the visible. Without stating it in so many words, the film makes apparent that the contrast between Raja and Manu isn't only one of temperament (though it is that, too). Both are born into middle class families, but Raja, coming of age in '80s Uttar Pradesh, has arrived (perhaps correctly) at the conclusion that good breeding isn't quite going to cut it in contemporary Lucknow. Manu, whom one imagines as shielded from the cut-and-thrust of the Indian street by good marks and an academic bent, has further removed himself from it by living in London. 

But what was remarkable about the face-off between Raja and Manu was that it reversed the usual hierarchy of masculinities, in which status is determined by who gets the girl. "Getting the girl" has long been the subject of heterosexual male discourse, and every cultural milieu generates informal categories to predict who the getters will be. Siddharth Chowdhury's unabashed novel Day Scholar described one such concept in rather graphic terms: "Just like every door has a dwarpal every ch*t has a ch*tpal. A ch*tpal never gets the ch*t just like the dwarpal never gets to sleep in the master bedroom. Every good girl needs at least one ch*tpal, to run errands for her and listen to her bitch about her mother." Whether one finds the terminology unpalatable, it is clear that the concept has currency. And so, having shown the obliging Manu escort Tanu to the beauty parlour and help her shop for dupattas, as the bride-to-be of another man (Raja, who wouldn't be caught dead doing either), Rai's decision to have Tanu eventually reject Raja's heroic histrionics for Manu's almost boring sweetness was nothing short of radical.

TWMR continues to deal in similar categories. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, playing the smitten young fellow who provides chauffeur-service when Tanu gets Manu's divorce notice, describes himself with touching self-knowledge as the "kandha", literally "shoulder" -- but is somehow still enraged when his affections aren't reciprocated. And there is Deepak Dobriyal's hysterically funny Pappi, whose misconstruing of Komal's messages reveals yet another example of how easily Indian men, starved for interaction with the opposite sex, confuse friendliness with love. Rai's Raanjhanaa pushed this premise to its utmost, casting Dhanush as the boy who thinks stalking a girl all the way to Delhi reveals the persistence of his "love". 

Rather than the high drama of Raanjhanaa, or even TWM, TWMR goes for a lightness of tone, and I think Rai is better served by it. Among the delights of the new film is the updated Awasthi, performing rituals like a proper Hindu householder though he hasn't found a bride. Shergill has acquired a moustache and lost some of his fire, but his pronouncements retain the cut-the-crap hilarity of old. The mellowness suits him -- and he's certainly more self-aware than the other men in Rai's world. Can the next film be about him, please?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2015.

Film Review: Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns doesn’t have a boring moment

With 2011’s Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster, Tigmanshu Dhulia gave us a fascinating contemporary take on Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. Like the 1962 film, Dhulia’s narrative revolved around the titular trio of a dissolute nawab, a neglected alcoholic wife and a rustic young man who gets increasingly embroiled in the intrigues of the haveli. The stark villainy and innocence of the older film had already been replaced, in the 2011 reimagining, by a loving embrace of gray. With Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns, Dhulia shakes himself entirely free of a desire for cinematic homage, setting his superbly etched characters free to roam. As free as they can be, that is to say, in the stifling universe he has created for them.

For this is a world of princely privilege, no doubt, but there is something rotten at its core—and even its proudest inhabitants cannot ignore the stench. In a scene about halfway through SBGR, the eponymous Sahib – Jimmy Sheirgill, absolutely stellar as the wheelchair-bound but still rakishly virile Aditya Pratap Singh – chances upon his more-or-less estranged wife – a voluptuous, bored Mahi Gill – displaying the treasures of their drawing room to a camera-wielding American and her Indian handler. This is my house, not a museum, he says angrily as he shows them the door – it is a mahal, not yet a maqbara. But even the incandescence of his rage cannot prevent us from seeing that while the Sahib may be alive, the world his haveli represents is in its death throes.

Dhulia does an even better job than in the previous film of mapping this murky new universe, where a hereditary claim to royalty is no longer enough to run things, and power must be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, even if it gets one’s hands dirty. The Sahib may wish to be continued to be called Raja sahab, but he is most definitely on his way to becoming a neta—and finding the word distasteful does not prevent him from being a very clever one.

Set in the fictitious ex-principality of Devgarh, in the poverty-ridden badlands of Uttar Pradesh, SBGR unfolds against the backdrop of a political move to partition the state into four (something actually suggested by real-life Chief Minister Mayawati in 2011). And like in the previous film, Dhulia allows himself the luxury of a buffoonish neta – Rajeev Gupta in a masterful performance as the blue-film-watching Prabhu Tiwari.

But the electoral politics of democracy has by no means succeeded in leaching this world of its fascination with lineage. And nowhere is this fascination more evident than in the figure of Inderjit Singh – the titular gangster, not born to kingly splendour but insistent on acquiring it. Played with brilliant insight and flourish by the incomparable Irrfan Khan, Inder exemplifies the strange stranglehold of India’s old world over the new. He may not be a raja, but his admirers call him Raja Bhaiyya – and he himself lives in the hope of recapturing the imagined lost glories of his royal blood.

Lineage, in fact, is the very lifeblood of Dhulia’s narrative universe. And while the masculinity of its men is tied irrevocably to their notions of caste pride and family honour (“Khamakha ek thakur ke haath ek thakur kam ho jaata,” goes one wry line), keeping a lineage going needs women. So it is the Badi Rani who actually sets the film’s plot in motion, by showing up one morning to incite her stepson to produce an heir—and when he bitterly dismisses the possibility of doing so with his current wife, by tempting him with the photographic vision of a new one. And even the romance between Irrfan’s rough-tongued Inder and Soha Ali Khan’s properly delicate Ranjana, for all its tender playfulness, cannot but be seen also as part of Inder’s plan to reacquire princely status – for what better way to do so than by marrying a princess?

But if princesses are made pawns in these carefully plotted games, they do not quite act as the willing footsoldiers their men might have liked. And in their desperate, unpredictable departures from the paths dictated to them lie the intricacies of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s plot.

It would be criminal to give away any of the multiple twists and turns that animate the film, but let me just say that SBGR doesn’t have a boring moment. It is aided by the almost uniformly high quality of its actors. Sheirgill and Khan may walk away with the honours, but Gill must get credit for having perfected the near-stumbling alcoholic’s walk and slightly unhinged flirtatiousness of her inherently over-the-top Madhavi. Soha Ali Khan does not have the world’s most mobile face, and she is often somewhat wooden here too. But she is perfectly cast, springing so superbly to life at one magisterial scene at the royal breakfast table that one cannot but think of her real-life princess-ness. There is also the pleasure of watching Raj Babbar inhabit a nicely written role as Soha’s father, the perfectly nicknamed Bunny Uncle.

If any complaint can be made about this film, it might be that occasionally there is too much going on – never too little. Between these murders and machinations, plots and counterplots, it affords its greedy audience the pleasure of vicarious glimpses into the life of the classy rajwara: polo matches and rifle practice, shairi and jazz bands. But – and this is where Dhulia shows how fine his grip is on both his material and tone – even the retro jazz crooner in her golden gown is not meant to provide an escape from this stifling world. In Dhulia’s measured, unforgiving vision, she can only be a lyrical medium for a cruel comment on thwarted dreams.

(Published on Firstpost.)