Best of 2016: Part II

My Mirror column:

The second part of my year-end list of my favourite Indian films from 2016.

Carrying on from last week's column: here are six more films that I particularly enjoyed last year.

In no particular order, they are:

6. Waiting – In Anu Menon's affecting hospital drama, two unlikely people are brought together by the shared frustration of having a loved one beyond their reach. Naseeruddin Shah is reliably good as Shiv, an ageing professor who is the epitome of softspoken rationality — except when he's not. But it is Kalki Koechlin as Tara who surprises. As a sharp young woman suddenly faced with the potential loss of the man she has just married, Tara's yo-yoing between anger, vulnerability and sassiness is at the film's heart. Shot in an upscale Kochi hospital that somehow lends itself to cinematographer Neha Parti Matiyani's clean lines and bright close-ups, Waiting serves up grief and angst without letting go of humour. (I particularly enjoyed the mild comic relief served up by Rajeev Ravindranathan as the too-helpful colleague).

7. Sairat – Among the frequenters of film festivals, there are still many who cannot but view the slow-mo set pieces and addictive songs of Nagraj Manjule's hugely successful film as somehow a betrayal of the hopes he sparked with his 2014 debut Fandry. But if Fandry's placing of its dreamy-eyed child hero in an unremittingly realist cinematic milieu earned it critical acclaim, Sairat's astute, sparkly retelling of the same tale —a cross-caste romance in a rural Maharashtra educational setting — won not just fame for its actors, huge profits and massive audiences, but an unimaginable level of exposure for both Marathi cinema and the film's difficult subject. Manjule gloriously subverts India's grim social reality with our love for filmi romance — and vice versa. A film not to be missed.

8. Chauthi Koot – Gurvinder Singh's arresting adaptation of two short stories by Waryam Singh Sandhu offers us a tense, sometimes sinister Punjab that's almost unrecognizable as the one regularly celebrated in Bollywood's song-filled sarson-da-sagas. But though the stories he adapts are set during the 1980s militancy and their central themes — gun-toting men intent on silencing a harmless dog, or train conductors unwilling to take people of a certain community on board — are certainly 'political', Singh's rendering of them is anything but heavy-handed. Trained under the late experimental filmmaker Mani Kaul, Singh is much less invested in plot or narrative resolution than he is in the atmospheric, painstaking exploration of a place and people — and of cinema itself. A film which will reward the attentive viewer.

9. Island City – A tonally ambitious film which pitches itself somewhere between sly humour and a pessimistic take on late capitalism, debut director Ruchika Oberoi's triptych of tales about people and machines can feel quite trippy at times. Each segment is anchored in a fine performance. In the first, Vinay Pathak puts in an eerily convincing turn as the obedient corporate slave sent unwittingly on a dangerous path. The second has Amruta Subhash walking a thin line between relief and guilt as a housewife whose oppressive husband's hospitalisation finally frees her to live her own life — and sublimate her desires in a fictional ideal man. The imagined ideal man reappears in the third segment, this time not via the television, but through letters received by Tannishtha Chatterjee's lonely worker. An occasional sliver of abruptness notwithstanding, Oberoi crafts a darkly acerbic comment on our increasingly alienated lives that's well worth watching.

10. Kapoor and Sons: The dysfunctional family is practically an indie staple in the West, but in Indian cinema it is still a rare enough occurrence to make Shakun Batra's film seem remarkable. While nowhere near as devastating as say, Kanu Behl's Titli (2015), Kapoor and Sons manages to take more risks with what it serves up as family foibles than similar recent films like Dil Dhadakne Do, Shandaar and Khoobsurat. Batra's ability to juggle the buried resentments and the goofy jokes is further buoyed by a truly superb ensemble cast: Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah outstripping the youngsters (Sidharth Malhotra, Fawad Khan and Alia Bhatt), and themselves being a little bit overtaken by the infectiously cheerful Rishi Kapoor as the family's indefatigable raunchy patriarch.

11. Thithi: A great deal of worldwide acclaim has come the way of this remarkable film, and all of it is justified. Set and shot in the very particular landscape of rural Karnataka, Raam Reddy and screenwriter Ere Gowda's delightful debut combines an observational documentary style with a fairly large involved set of characters (who are almost all played by non-actors from the region). Things may appear to be unfolding with all the natural ease of everyday life — but make no mistake, this is a carefully thought-through portrait of family and community, age and youth, freedom and responsibility, death and life. Don't let some imagined notion of rural Karnataka or a reluctance to engage with subtitles put you off it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Jan 2017.

Women on the verge

My Mirror column:

What might we learn from Hindi films directed by women filmmakers in the year gone by?

Anu Menon (dir: Waiting); Leena Yadav (dir: Parched); Gauri Shinde (dir: Dear Zindagi)

2016 might just have been the year of the woman director in Bollywood. Don't get me wrong: the proportion of women directing films is still microscopic — out of 225 Hindi films released in 2016, only nine were directed by women, while one (Sanam Teri Kasam) had a woman (Radhika Rao) co-directing with a man (Vinay Sapru). And that tiny number isn't particularly different from what it was in 2015. (Two of the few established female directors in Bollywood — Zoya Akhtar and Meghna Gulzar — had releases in 2015: Dil Dhadakne Do and Talwar respectively. As did another woman making her second feature, Madhureeta Anand, who followed up her 2009 feature debut Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye with 2015's Kajarya, on the necessarily worthy subject of female foeticide.)

But for some reason, the work of women stood out for me this year. Perhaps it was the fact that the women who came out with films this year aren’t names to reckon with, and unlike Zoya Akhtar and Meghna Gulzar, don't have filmi fathers. Perhaps it was the fact that many of these women were making their feature film debuts, making it feel like a new crop of filmmakers. Or perhaps it was simply that they managed to represent a range of cinematic styles and interests while also providing a perspective that seemed distinctively female.

The procession began with fanfare in January. Shefali Bhushan's debut Jugni had a female protagonist grappling with creative ambition and social difference. Sudha Kongara's sports-themed romance Saala Khadoos — while being an overcooked Hindi version of Kongara's simultaneously released Tamil film Irudhi Suttru — gave us a charming heroine who was convincingly brattish and even more convincing in her romantic coming of age (I would, for instance, choose Ritika Singh's hot-headed, kooky Madhi over Kajol's precious Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai any day).

February offered more predictable fare from women directors: Sanam Re directed by Divya Khosla Kumar (wife of T-Series music moghul Bhushan Kumar), and Sanam Teri Kasam. Then came Jasmine Moses D'Souza's One Night Stand, starring Sunny Leone, which I missed then but now can't wait to watch, especially after reading an interview where D'Souza asks all-important questions about sexual double standards in our society: “For a man, we justify by saying that he has his needs. Can't a woman have her needs? Can't she get carried away? And if she does, does it make her bad?

In May, came Anu Menon's Waiting, a quietly atmospheric drama that pitches an older man (Naseeruddin Shah) against a younger woman (Kalki Koechlin). Menon, who debuted with 2012's London Paris New York, here, crafts an affecting intergenerational relationship whose instantaneous intensity is made entirely believable by both protagonists' partners battling death in a Kochi hospital. In different ways, Jugni, Saala Khadoos and Waiting all challenge the boundaries of who women can fall in love with.

Leena Yadav's Parched is a much more self-consciously feminist take on women's lives and their sexual needs — its occasional missteps in the seductive tourist-y direction somewhat compensated for by a rare, affectionate depiction of female friendship, its frank bawdiness a rare treat on the Indian screen.

I was apparently among the rare people to enjoy Baar Baar Dekho, directed by first-timer Nitya Mehra. Her use of a comic time-travel premise to portray a checked-out husband seemed a great way to communicate with audiences who may not have taken too well to a flat-out melodramatic message about what long-term relationships mean: I met an Uber driver watching the film on loop and pondering the too-little-time he spent with his wife.

Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, one of the year's finest films, is not centred on women, but both Amruta Subhash's housewife who finds herself liberated from a domineering husband and Tannishtha Chatterjee's quiet girl blossoming in a secret romance are superb characters. Although not the main focus, Subhash's relationship with her mother-in-law and Tannishtha's with her mother portray complexity with rare economy.

In Saala Khadoos, two sisters battle each other for a man's attention, which seems to stand for the world's praise, while in Parched, women strive to keep their connection alive despite being given sharply different statuses by a male world. In Waiting, Koechlin's Tara angrily unpicks a female friend's pious platitudes. Meanwhile two very different films — Ashwini Iyer Tiwari's Nil Battey Sannata and Gauri Shinde's Dear Zindagi — dealt movingly with fraught mother-daughter relationships. The strength and tension of relationships between women might well be the theme that women directors brought to the table last year.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Jan 8, 2017