Review: Lijo Jose Pellissery’s “Jallikattu” is a grim study of masculinity.

[May contain spoilers, many of them.]

In the opening sequence of “Jallikattu,” Lijo Jose Pellissery’s allegorical new movie, we hop between close-ups of people opening their eyes and drawing breaths. Set to the beats of an avant-garde score by Prashant Pillai, this spate of quick-cuts culminates in a shot of the sun rising, like life emerging from the dark, like people waking up from the dead. The symbolism, while scarcely subtle, is achieved with the flourish of a veteran. But Pellissery is somewhat of a veteran; “Jallikattu” is his seventh feature, a cinematic experience that is as hard to describe as it is to shake off, as tough to watch as it is difficult to leave. Based on S. Hareesh’s short story “Maoist,” it is a tale told more through sound than images, and one figures after two viewings that it is the only way to tell it.

In a small meat-loving village in Kerala, the local butcher Varkey (played by Chemban Vinod Jose) and his apprentice Antony (played by Anthony Varghese) are celebrities of sorts. People crowd around their little shop for the best cuts, and Varkey even parts with a few scraps for the dogs and a few bones for soup to satisfy his customers. People take the little black meat bags to the church, hanging them outside on the branches of a small tree before stepping into it. Meat, clearly, has this village in its clutch, and so when a buffalo gives its captors the slip seconds before they are to slaughter it and tears through the village, everyone sulks. A small group of men pines for its capture. The buffalo wrecks crops and crashes through shops, leaving local businesses in disarray. The men give chase, but to no avail; the animal is much too powerful, much too angry.

There are other factors at play, too. The men pride themselves on their masculinity: one woman is slapped for serving rice cakes for breakfast, another is molested, and many are haughtily told to go home by men because there is a buffalo on the loose. “Jallikattu” is about these men and their distending egos, and how man and animal are not so different when examined closely. (In fact, man comes off much, much worse.) The buffalo howls, the men scream. It grunts, they screech. At one point, when the buffalo has caused considerable chaos, the village enlists the help of Kuttachan (played by Sabumon Abdusamad), Varkey’s charismatic ex-apprentice who has served time. Kuttachan is Antony’s old foe, and now, with the stakes raised, neither of them wants to simply catch the beast; they want to do it publicly to relish the fact that they beat the other to it. The parallels between man and beast are alluded to several times, and at one point, it is laid out quite prominently. The buffalo gets trapped inside a dry well as men crowd around it, jeering and celebrating in a sickening display of brutishness, throwing their fire torches at the clueless, helpless animal. As she is lassoed using car tires and hauled out, Pellissery embosses the sequence with his signature touch, a motif he visits repeatedly in his work: divine intervention. It starts raining, the men disperse, and the buffalo, now given a new lease of life by the same men who jeered at her a little while ago, escapes. The sequence ends with a fleeting shot of the buffalo’s muddy paw print juxtaposed with a man’s. If it’s the throbbing energy of the filmmaking that leaves us winded, the panache with which it is accomplished answers why Pellissery’s work — more precisely, his recent output — ought to fetch a larger doting audience.

A furious whirl of sound and imagery, “Jallikattu” throws us off and pulls us back in cyclically, never letting us settle down or cling on. Pellissery uses lengthy tracking shots to disrupt the pace, then chucks in a series of quick cuts to brace the narrative. As the fugitive animal starts wearing the group out, more men join in, each laying claim to it. Old rivalries are rekindled and new rivalries formed, and soon enough the village descends into chaos. As the search party moves to the forest (a terrific long shot shows the men clenching fire torches between the foliage, like fireflies buzzing around), the men’s patience wears thin. They begin to turn on each other, as was inevitable, and this natural progression reeks of familiarity. We realise that it never was about capturing a stray buffalo: the risky challenge its capture posed would allow the men a chance to stroke their egos, showcase their virility. Then again, it can be viewed as a resonant political statement, which, I am told (for I have not yet read it), the short story aimed for: it discusses the itch for freedom and the corruption of morals in search for power. There are several ways to look at it, but they, more or less, arrive at the same cynical conclusion.

With its ambitious (and mercifully quiet) parting shot, “Jallikattu” leaves us a lot to chew on. We are no different from the cavemen, it indicates, still belligerently fighting over prey having not yet learned the language of peace. And the prey still is, and quite possibly will be, an innocent.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” fails to breathe new life into the Hindi college comedy.

[Contains spoilers, many of them.]

It’s really hard to not know where Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” is headed fifteen minutes in. A man prances around naked in the corridors of a boys’ hotel, and before we know it a water fight has begun. Two boys become five, then ten, then twenty. In five minutes, everyone is soaked but stoked; it’s a ritual of sorts and it’s done. The boys pledge their allegiance to one another. There we go, another year, another film about friendship in college. Which wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing in more assured hands; consider the charming airiness of Abbas Tyrewala’s “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” for a moment. But “Chhichhore” goes the other way; the approach to the dog-eared material here is deliberately—or at least seemingly so—heavy-handed, confirming quite simply that it is going to be that type of movie.

And that type of movie gets a fresh coat every five years or so, seldom an upgrade. “Chhichhore” tries to get the best bits of “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” (itself a loose remake of the terrific “Breaking Away”), “Student of the Year” and “3 Idiots” to work furiously together. But little does work. When their son tries to commit suicide after failing in an exam, Anirudh (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Maya (Shraddha Kapoor) reach into their past for a story that underlines why failing isn’t necessarily bad. And into the past we dash, where we meet a young Anirudh, a brilliant student (aren’t they all?) condemned to hostel H4 on his first day of college. H4 is reputed to be stocked with slackers, bad rooms, and bad food. And yet Anirudh warms up to his peers, a small group of lazy stereotypes: Sexa, a porn addict; Bewda, an alcoholic; Acid, a foulmouth; Derek, a chain-smoking shirker; and Mummy, a mouse. There is, predictably, an attempt to squeeze humour out of these bare descriptions, but it is forced, delivered consciously, like an obligation that must be met. We never meet the men, though; we never know what they are thinking unless they articulate it, and we never see them vulnerable or nervous like regular engineering undergrads. (I missed terribly the shaggy, smirking architecture students of Pradip Krishen’s “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” who viewed the world through defeated, bored eyes.)

After we meet the group, we meet Maya. Anirudh is smitten, and with him, everyone else. He tries to woo her (thankfully without a song) and fails, fails miserably. This romantic angle oughtn’t have felt so disposable, because it does contains a pleasant moment or two, but it does, for the actors play it blandly. By this point, “Chhichhore” has barely set off but already feels like a patchwork of fail-safe elements threaded together by a clumsy craftsman. We are also introduced to Raggie (played by Prateik Babbar), the conceited (unofficial) leader of H3, the chicest hostel on campus, who will eventually end up challenging the boys of H4 in the General Championships, the annual sporting competition in which the hostels compete against each other. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if I was told Raggie idolised Shekhar from “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” as a kid; for the most part I couldn’t tell the two apart. Raggie spites the boys of H4 by calling them ‘losers’ (which, for some reason, is supposed to be a barb and not a precise classification) in a way not different from how Shekhar called the boys of a lesser college ‘pyjama-chaap’.

After breezing through the imperatives of the Hindi college comedy (with scenes of ragging, a joke about hostel food, and a stray comment about how friends in college end up being family), “Chhichhore” trains its attention on the General Championships. The boys of H4 are desperate to win: for Derek, who may not get another shot at glory, but chiefly to obliterate the ‘losers’ tag that has tacked itself to them. This is familiar territory, at times too familiar: the parallels with “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” are far too many to be an innocent coincidence. (At one point, the final minutes of a relay race are a frame-by-frame copy of the climactic minutes of the last race in the Aamir Khan-starrer.) There’s even a flicker of “Lagaan” here: the boys of H4 are embarrassingly bad, and the smug boys of H3 exceptionally good, and so, in keeping with the rest of the film, the impending clash leaves us little to look forward to. The underdog tale has been redrafted several times, most imaginatively “Lagaan,” which fashioned a spectacle out of an absurd story; “Chhichhore,” I am afraid, does not follow suit. It uses nostalgia to smoothen out its narrative creases, and while that approach works only intermittently, it throws up several questions, the most important of which is: What in this film is novel? The answer, I suppose, would be: Little. Nostalgia, after all, can only do so much. And with it gone, a blandness begins to infect the narrative. “Chhichhore” hits the few highs we expect it to (thanks to sincere turns from the supporting cast) and the lows, but it falls short in surprising us. It is further weighed down by its constant jumps in time, between the present, where Anirudh and his friends recount the story of the General Championships to Anirudh’s coma-bound son, and the past, where Anirudh and his friends strategise to win. This is crucial in explaining the occasional narrative lumpiness: the present is contrived, the past rather chirpy.

With its ambitions neatly outlined at the start of the second-half, it’s disappointing indeed to see “Chhichhore” retreating to the comfort of predictability. Save for a couple of spirited jokes, most of it is spent sermonising. Where a line ought to have sufficed to establish something, the film employs four, said by different characters in different ways. And just to ram the point home, someone repeats it later again, in the plainest possible terms. But in its final minutes, in spite of determinedly sticking to what appears to be a riskless formula, it does spring a little surprise, one that, when I went back to it later, I would never have guessed was coming. It is not everyday that we see a Hindi film that accepts failure as an important (if not integral) part of growing up, and somehow manages to make it uplifting and wise, but “Chhichhore” does so—quietly, skilfully. Although these concluding minutes are dusted in sugar, there is a bittersweetness to them, a rare sort of bittersweetness. God knows this film could have done with more of it. But at least it's a start.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Anubhav Sinha’s “Article 15” is a timely indictment of the caste system.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

The two discrete worlds of Anubhav Sinha’s new film “Article 15” come alive through songs. As the opening credits roll, a Dailt woman (played by Sayani Gupta) croons “Kahab Toh,” an earthy folk song, amidst a downpour. Somewhere close by, two teenage Dalit girls get assaulted inside a bus gliding along the road against the overcast sky. We then jump to a jeep coasting along the highway, under the golden glow of the sun, while Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” plays. The juxtaposition isn’t exactly understated, but the details and colors used to render these two worlds convey a clear message: we are travelling into the heart of darkness and leaving behind the comfort of blissful ignorance. But this also momentarily conveys something far more interesting: the filmmaking is thoughtful, if not subtle. Sinha, who last made “Mulk,” a sharp drama about a Muslim family facing ostracism and a lengthy legal battle when one of their own goes rogue, is staging a comeback of sorts after spending years making underwhelming films. His affinity for the underdog parallels his keenness for uncomfortable truths. In “Article 15” we get both: an underdog battles the centuries-old caste system; one that has a small village (and we have no clue how many other villages and cities) in its stranglehold, one that compels institutions to look the other way when two of the three girls are found hung from a tree the next morning.

Twenty minutes in, I thought the striking similarities between “Article 15” and Alan Parker’s 1986 drama “Mississippi Burning” couldn't possibly be mere coincidence. In Parker’s film, three Civil Rights activists go missing one night in Mississippi, which prompts the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send two agents, Ward and Anderson, to investigate their disappearance. It studied the coming apart of a small town plagued by racial violence, and in doing so, captured quite vividly how hate stays ingrained through little but significant everyday things; segregation in restaurants being one, for example.

“Article 15” borrows loosely from the Badaun gang rape and murder from 2014, an incident of unspeakable horror, to make its observations on caste privilege in small-town India. By the time the newly minted IPS officer Ayan Ranjan (played by Ayushmann Khurrana) arrives in Lalgaon, somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, a cover-up has begun taking shape. He instantly guesses something is amiss. Whispers follow him everywhere, and an old acquaintance behaves strangely, almost as if he were keeping himself from blurting out secrets. The village is drenched in uneasiness. A senior police officer fills him in: three Dalit girls have disappeared. He goes on to talk about “their people” with an airiness that seems to suggest it is a common occurrence within their community. The police is pushing a casteist narrative, one that is far too convenient for Ayan’s shrewd ears. The bodies of two of the girls are discovered the next morning, hanging from a tree. There is an unconvincing explanation to the events that the cops seem eager to pursue, but Ayan is not sold on it.

Hindi cinema has long been averse to the idea of having two protagonists and so we get one. Ayan is the product of the clubbing together of Ward and Anderson's personalities, retaining their virtues while slyly leaving out their inefficiencies. He is young, sort of brash, and his influences, like the liquor he prefers, are largely Western. He is city-bred, ignorant of the ways of the hinterlands, but has a knack for catching on quick. Within days of his arrival he has decoded what (or who) dictates the laws of this region, has singled out the powers that be, and has injected, to some degree, a new life into an indolent police force. This sort of hero, not uncommon in Hindi cinema, is someone we can easily place: one who doesn't take a step wrong, who nudges at the truth, who puts his country before himself, and who will, inevitably, have the last laugh.

This is where “Article 15” and “Mississippi Burning” diverge, albeit briefly. While "Mississippi Burning" explored the dynamic between Ward and Anderson, two contrasting characters who have perhaps been brought up in two very different worlds, "Article 15" appears content in letting Ayan hold the reins of the narrative. He charismatically strides, yells, and banishes; the others take a moment to catch up. “Talk only with me and nobody else,” he instructs a doctor who's been asked to falsify the autopsy report on the two girls. He knows his officers' loyalties have been compromised, for they fear fingering the powerful local politician and setting off a chain of events beyond their control. His inexperience never gets in the way of his unwavering pursuit of the truth, and there was a moment where I wished for a little more realism. There was hardly any.

Sinha was onto something meaningful there. “Article 15” quickly busies itself in its central mystery while calmly exploring several other strands, and occasionally, just occasionally, produces something truly incredible. When the girls’ bodies are discovered in the blue hues of the morning mist, the image of the crowd around the tree, where the bodies still hang, is unforgettable. (The film has been shot by Ewan Mulligan.) There is also a strand examining how the caste system has managed to worm its way into the force, when a police officer cowers in the company of an equal just because he is (and so often is he reminded) from a lower caste. But the most powerful of them all is that lingering image of a man emerging from filth. In what is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, Sinha uses the metaphor of an overflowing sewer to convey a rather bald truth in mere seconds. The sewer, leaky at first but then a hindrance, has to be “fixed” by someone willing to dive into it. Finally, a man is entrusted with the job, but he is of a lower caste. Sinha chooses to film his emergence from the filth in slow-motion, giving us ample time to flinch, and the impact is staggering; I lived with the image for the next few days.

However, it doesn’t take long for “Article 15” to succumb to the temptation of allocating simplistic solutions to pressing problems. Ayan’s chief adversary is Bhrahmadatt Singh (played by Manoj Pahwa), a veteran police officer under his command. Bhrahmadatt puts up a weak resistance, imploring Ayan to not disturb the santulan, the “balance.” But Ayan, like Sinha, is relentless; he does not stop to reason with Brahmadatt or anyone else standing in his way. The reason behind the longevity of caste politics is never touched upon, or why it continues to be a crucial issue during elections. When a haughty senior officer from the Central Bureau of Investigation decides to visit, he is less concerned with the abolishment of the caste system, which he is not entirely for; he is more amused by Ayan’s idealism and that he is far more comfortable speaking in English than Hindi. (He is put in his place later of course, as is decreed by the Hindi film gods.) This creates a dramatic void: it often feels as if Sinha uses his underdeveloped supporting characters to put across his views on the issue in plain, preachy terms, or to relay statistics, which is something the character of Aditi, Ayan’s romantic interest, mostly does.

But one thing is for certain: Sinha wholly deserves our applause and attention. It’s remarkable that he’s made a film of such spunk, of such anger and of such compassion, at a time when we are flaunting our prejudices so openly. His strokes may be broad (I am reasonably sure the fleeting tribute to Bhagat Singh in the climax was deliberate), his style blunt, but he forces us to think. Given all the things that have gone down in this country in the last few years, that is no minor accomplishment.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Ivan Ayr’s terrific “Soni” is a shrewd examination of patriarchy in the new India.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Ivan Ayr’s “Soni” opens with an alarming sequence. We hear catcalls over black and the rustling of a bicycle, and it continues for nearly a minute. A woman races her bike on lonely road on a wintry night in New Delhi and a man chases her on his. He jeers, harasses; she ignores him in a practiced sort of way. Her body language and vacant face suggest that she is well accustomed to this sort of behavior. He continues gaily. Suddenly, she slows down, gets off her bike, and walks it through a dark alley. He follows her. A heated volley of words takes place, and the encounter culminates with her lashing out at him. She is finally pulled off him by her associates. He gets a broken jaw and swollen eye.

In any other Hindi film, this would have been a moment to rejoice. In “Soni,” it becomes a premonition. The general feeling is that she, a police officer, shouldn’t have reacted the way she did. Her superior, Kalpana, chides her for it. What if he had a knife? What would she have done then? Why didn’t she follow protocol?

What if she hadn’t defended herself, we wonder. What then?

Soni, the eponymous protagonist of Ayr’s feature-film debut, is a police officer working in the graveyard shift. In New Delhi, her credentials don’t guarantee her safety; lecherous remarks are leveled at her, and her frequent encounters with men inevitably touch a nerve for men do not seem to value boundaries. It’s a film shaking with rage, but it doesn’t permit us the luxury of catharsis by transforming this rage into quick-fix solutions. Instead, it finds other ways to channel it: through silence mainly, by making its central character silently bear the brunt of being a woman in India who simply defended herself from a ghastlier fate.

It has been so long since a Hindi film has understood and rightly exploited the power of silence. In “Soni,” long silences reveal what words don’t: the loss of courage, the agony of being a victim of a patriarchal system that tries hard to drown a woman’s voice, and the dawning realization that things won’t change, at least not right away. Soni gets reprimanded for her aggression, which is seen as a poor quality in a female police officer, and when she reacts in a similar manner in a situation involving a drunk Navy officer, the system finds a way to get her off her job.

The incisive, knowing script, written by Ayr and Kislay, examines not just the gender divide within the New Delhi police force but also the power structure within it, both bound together by an indiscernible thread. Kalpana and Soni’s personal lives are not any better; Kalpana, the wife of a newly instated senior Crime Branch officer, is inscrutable at home. She manages a tired smile when asked questions about having a child, and is talked down upon by her husband when she broaches Soni’s subject. In a particularly impressive scene, she gets into a brief argument with her husband after Soni’s third scuffle. Her husband rebukes her for consoling her juniors, something he finds distasteful in a police officer. The job doesn’t encourage empathy. But Kalpana cannot help it; she hopes to mend what cannot be mended. The two have disparate working styles, two different ideas of how the world works and should work. His is prudent, shaped by years of working in a system he knows too well. Hers is idealistic, driven by a desire to do things right.

When these ideas exist under one roof, as they do here, it is an open invitation for a clash. But “Soni” shuns the temptation to mine drama from it; Kalpana submits to her husband’s lofty barbs by staying silent. When she wants to get Soni reinstated, she quietly requests him to speak with his seniors. At that moment, she is not the IPS officer with a team reporting to her; she is his wife. And he agrees grudgingly, more as a husband than a colleague. It’s the chameleonic quality of this relationship that lends the film part of its acuity.

Soni’s life is not too different. She has an estranged husband who still cares about her, but is kept away by her stubbornness to not forgive him for his past mistakes. She regularly skips meals, a recurring detail that discloses the extent of how much her job consumes her life, and the only person with whom she seems to speak with a hint of affection is her motherly neighbor. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, the neighbor suggests, with outmost seriousness, a way to curb harassment: by wearing the sacred sindoor, the mark of a married Indian woman. It is a wryly comic touch and a terrifying one at that. In another scene, Soni suggests that a girl, who is caught with her boyfriend by two policemen in an old deserted building in the dead of night, wear a shirt and cap to appear more like a man. It begs us to introspect, to ask ourselves why we have allowed male chauvinism to be so deeply embedded in our social fabric that these suggestions, foolish as they might sound, have become credible solutions for women to evade harassment.

The film’s most significant achievement is its thoughtful exploration of the bond between Soni and Kalpana. Although the difference between their respective perceptions of the city is indisputable, with Kalpana being ferried around in the safety of a police car and Soni left to get around on a bike, their experiences are similar to some extent. There is a clear class divide as well, but patriarchy transcends it; whether it is Kalpana’s increasing dependence on her husband to get Soni off, or it is Soni’s brawl against three inebriated men in the ladies’ washroom at a restaurant, women are quite, quite alone. Their men and their country have failed them. In a beautiful moment near the end, Kalpana gifts Soni a copy of ‘Revenue Stamp’ by Amrita Pritam. This comes right after Kalpana learns that her niece is being harassed by boys at her school, and her niece, fearing ostracism, is reluctant to report it. “Soni” reveals itself fully here: the two women quietly accept that all they have is each other and that is how it is going to be, thus changing the nature of their relationship inconspicuously and irreversibly.

Although we are only into the second month of the year, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if “Soni” ends up being among the best Hindi films to release this year. Ayr, aided by exceptional camerawork by David Bowen, top-notch sound design and two excellent central performances, gives it the tactful treatment it deserves. Its fade-out moment is melancholic, leaving us with a little hope but also the feeling that the future looks bleaker than we feared. At one point, Soni looks on, incredulous, as a man flirts with a female police officer on the phone in the Control Room, and the woman laughs it off, saying she gets four or five calls like this everyday. It is possibly the film’s scariest moment: the acceptance of the fact that men most likely won’t change, so it is up to the women to adapt to the new India. Do we still deserve to remain hopeful, then?

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: “Mirzapur” adds little to its borrowed world of gun-cradling gangsters and power-hungry mafia patriarchs.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

The wedding seems to be a vital element in a gangster picture. The iconic opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, in which a mob patriarch casually conducts his business as shrieks of laughter rise from his backyard, where his daughter is getting married and people are making merry, placed the sacred white of a wedding next to the fiery red of the mob business. The first season of the Amazon Prime original, Mirzapur, created by Karan Anshuman and Puneet Krishna, opens and closes with weddings soiled by blood. It begins with a bunch of intoxicated young men infiltrating a wedding procession going through the sleepy streets of Mirzapur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, and how a moment of revelry changes lives. A gun goes off and the groom is killed. The killing is accidental, and the victim isn’t eminent, but it sets in motion events that will ultimately transform the fate of the town.

In recent years the Hindi film industry has looked towards the north, especially Uttar Pradesh, for inspiration to make gangster films. Anurag Kashyap delivered a major work with the ambitious yet flawed Gangs of Wasseypur in 2012, which brought the flamboyance and unruliness back to the Hindi gangster film. There were several smaller films that tried to emulate its style but were not half as successful. Mirzapur appears to be one of those works that are indebted to Gangs of Wasseypur for its creative vision and courage, but it lacks its epic sweep, its startling imagination, its irresistible humor, and more importantly, its nerve. The concoction here comprises of a familiar set of elements: vibrant characters, colorful language, over-the-top violence, and a smattering of tongue-in-cheek humor. And the inspirations that help brew this concoction are diverse. I could spot overt references to Vishal Bharadwaj’s Shakespearean adaptations Maqbool and Omkara, the occasional bows to Gangs of Wasseypur, of course, and maybe a few touches of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil, too.

However, for any work to be complete, it must find a way around the inspirations that gave birth to it. It must, at any cost, come of its own. In this regard, Mizapur isn’t exactly a success; it struggles to find its feet and establish its world of gun-toting hoods and simmering rivalries, but fails. Its world doesn’t look lived in – rather, it looks borrowed – and the primary characters come alive only much later. But the more urgent problem that isn’t addressed soon enough is, there’s very little originality here.

Mirzapur traces the rise of two brothers against the backdrop of the Uttar Pradesh underworld, and how a stray shooting incident puts them in touch with Akhandanand Tripathi, an arms dealer, opium smuggler and reigning don of Mirzapur, who uses his carpet business as a front for his illicit activities, thus his sobriquet ‘Kaleen bhaiya’. It’s also not particularly surprising to see that he has shades of the character of Abbaji from Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool; both of them appear to have been bred in the same household. Both are married to much younger women and their right-hand men are called Maqbool. And yet, Akhandanand (played by the incomparable Pankaj Tripathi) doesn’t wield the same influence as Abbaji. Never do we believe the extent of his power. We are told about it persistently, though. It’s a little disappointing to pick up bits and pieces about the central characters and events through chunks of dialogue, and it’s one of Mirzapur’s bigger flaws. The writing lacks the polish often found in great cinematic works. The characters constantly articulate what they are thinking out loud, as if being unpredictable is a bad thing, and it robs them of the opportunity to be memorable.

The characters, in themselves, are not a bad bunch. We have the wayward, power-hungry son who is to be Akhandanand’s successor, and the two brothers who threaten his legacy. We have a group of supporting characters as well, boringly written and underused, that inexplicably vanishes for long periods of time. We have a corrupt politician eying higher office who also happens to be a nexus between rival gangs, quite the staple in Hindi gangster films these days. All in all, it’s a mixed bag, and it’s a shame that none of them sparkle. The accents appear to have been picked up rather than imbibed, and the actors seem to have a ball rattling off expletives. Given how the makers of direct-to-stream projects get to work with more creative freedom, it was always a given that Mirzapur would contain a healthy amount of swearing. (There’s little doubt that it would likely not have made it to the theatres if it had been a feature-length film.) And gore, the unwarranted amount of gore. It’s a truly visceral experience to sit through it all, but it’s also a bit of a letdown to see the boundaries of creative freedom being used in a way that eventually adds little to the characters or the plot. It does its bit to set the mood, but it strays far too often into indulgence.

In all fairness, although the brew here is composed of familiar elements, it is never less than fairly engaging. The performances might be a tad inconsistent in parts, and there is no revelation here, unfortunately, but they are strong. (Divyendu Sharma, in particular, is impressive.) And there is a reasonable amount of tension that is executed competently, and two or three powerful moments that clobbered me. I wasn’t fully convinced by how some of the character arcs developed (especially how the two brothers go from innocent students to hardened mafia henchmen in the blink of an eye), but the series moves briskly enough to ensure these shortcomings are not lingered over. The result, then, is a work of few highs and many lows, one that is not immediately promising, but one that ultimately managed to get under my skin well enough for me to look forward to its second season. Hallelujah.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Sriram Raghavan’s “Andhadhun” is the best Hindi film of the year.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Sriram Raghavan’s obsession with tributes would make a good drinking game someday. His films are littered with them; he reads James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich; he watches John-Pierre Melville, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vijay Anand. Every master gets a hat-tip, a reference. Johnny Gaddaar, his spectacular thriller from 2007, seemed to have sprung out of the pages of a great Hadley Chase novel. In Andhadhun, these inspirations coalesce to form something that’s utterly new and compelling. There’s a murder at the heart of it, as is usually the case, but the film isn’t about the murder, or who committed it; rather, it’s about the paranoia it triggers, and how it eventually forces those involved in it to get in touch with their rotten side, right or wrong be damned. It’s about people eager to silence each other, but even more eager to listen to each other if it involves a get-rich-quick scheme. And it asks, above all, a rather interesting question: What are you prepared to do to save yourself?

Indeed, good thrillers often hinge on a surprise or two, while great ones decide against it. Great thrillers, I find, are never about their bag of surprises. They are always about their characters. Raghavan excels at writing both. In a staggering scene in Johnny Gaddaar, a young man picks up a gun and pumps bullets into his unsuspecting boss quite suddenly, killing him. This isn’t played merely for shock value; there’s logic dictating his actions. He’s been pushed into a corner. He’s scared and helpless. It’s his only way out. But, would he pick up the gun lying in front of him and kill his unarmed master? Would he dare? He does. And when he does, it makes us gasp. It’s likely the most revealing detail about this character, something that rather skillfully influences not just our view of him but also what we can eventually expect of the film.

In Andhadhun, a young pianist pretending to be blind is a silent, almost idiotic witness to a murder. We don’t see the actual murder; we see a body and a pool of blood next to it. Two people – one of whom is the victim’s wife, the other her lover – dispose of it as he plays a somber tune, pretending to not have seen any of it. (This is, in a way, reminiscent of Chaplin’s dark comedies, particularly Monsieur Verdoux; a tribute, maybe?) When she lamely tries to cover it up, he goes along with it. The sequence plays for about seven minutes, seven glorious minutes, and it tells us all we need to know about the two central characters. Both sides are lying to each other: he about his blindness, she about being innocent. But little things also tell us about who they are when the masks they wear slip off. He’s smart enough to play dumb. She weeps silently when the body is finally taken care of. A lot of things are hinted at, and some are left unsaid. Neither of them knows what the other’s intentions are. It’s an amusing conundrum. He knows for sure she’s lying. But what does he do with the truth? She suspects he's lying. But what does she do about it?

Like in his previous thrillers, Raghavan puts his characters in precarious situations, adds a layer of intrigue, and then invites us to watch what happens. In Andhadhun, exuberantly written and performed sequences lead us down a cold and damp rabbit hole. The pacing is relentless; we have barely finished relishing one sequence, one marvelous surprise, when the film moves on to a better one. Sample for a bit that terrific sequence featuring a sly police officer arriving at the protagonist’s house and nosing about, waiting for his mask to slip off. The timing of this sequence is especially interesting: it comes right after two dramatic reveals which we are still trying to wrap our heads around. It’s pure cinema, and Raghavan orchestrates the hell out of it. But the same question prods us again: If the mask does slip off, what would happen? We know what the characters are capable of, but they never react in the way we expect them to. It’s the excitement of finding out that fuels the experience of watching this film, of knowing that, in one way or another, it’ll find a way to surprise us. It’s a tightrope walk for any filmmaker, and Raghavan more than rises up to the challenge.

In the second half, however, the film’s momentum does dip. The film, as we know it, is taken from the hands of these wonderfully mad characters and placed into the hands of those we barely know. It’s a risky move, not to mention how puzzling it is, the consequences of which could very well prove disastrous. For one, a substantial amount of screen time would have to be dedicated to develop this new bunch of characters and arrive at an acceptable answer to why we should be watching them instead. (This also explains the strange void at the beginning of the second half. But it mercifully doesn't last long.) Imagination is still very much at the forefront of things, but less patient viewers may disagree. Speaking for myself, I can’t say I was too happy with this change, but I was intrigued nonetheless.

What distinguishes Sriram Raghavan’s films from other Hindi (or even Indian) thrillers is his idea of what constitutes a great thriller. His thrillers seldom revolve around the ‘who’ or the ‘why’. We know why his characters do what they do, and so we aren’t really sure what to expect when things don’t go according to plan. In Andhadhun, we know who committed the murder and why they did it. He also lets us know who might go next. It’s out in the open. And yet Andhadhun manages to catch us off guard frequently, without making a big deal of it. He never draws our attention to how clever he has been nor seems eager to shock. His plots evolve organically, his character arcs develop beautifully, and his twists are deftly done. It’s consistently intelligent filmmaking.

It is not customary for an Indian thriller to place a red herring near the end. I find that in most Indian thrillers the last few minutes before the end credits roll are devoted to connecting the dots, sometimes several times over. Flashbacks are usually employed to do the job of achieving complete coherence, or something close to it. It’s a lazy, lazy move. Andhadhun subverts this cunningly; yet another example of how well the makers have structured it and how satisfying the experience is as a result. I have seen it twice and I saw two different films: the first with an ending that was agreeable, and the second with one that was astonishing. It really depends on how we see it.

Andhadhun might be the finest Hindi film to be released this year. It might just be the year’s funniest as well, and definitely the year’s most irreverent. With an ingenious plot, insightful bits of detail that are woven into the proceedings most scrupulously, and a clump of excellent performances, Raghavan has cemented his reputation of being Hindi cinema’s thriller pundit. I just wish this means he gets to script every movie death henceforth.

[Not for Reproduction]

Review: Akarsh Khurana’s “Karwaan” is a frustratingly bland fare.

[May contain spoilers, many of them.]

It’s not particularly difficult to identify what kind of film Akarsh Khurana’s Karwaan is trying to be. The effort is practically visible. Its characters wear sunglasses picked off a shelf from a designer store. Their clothes are dapper, summery. They travel in a beautiful blue van through some gorgeous, sun-drenched ghats. And their wonderfully trimmed faces (with a touch of make-up) do not show any signs of fatigue or age. Charming. We get a few lines that ruminate over presumably meaningful stuff, like death, life and grief, many of them over a drink of coconut water overlooking streams impossibly blue and lush green trees. We are supposed to swoon, catch these bits of wisdom before they flit through the air and disappear. But the only problem is, we don’t.

Karwaan is a film that proves, among other things, a useful fact: That good-looking films don’t always end up being good cinema. A relationship with a film cannot be built if one doesn't understand from where it originated, why this story needed to be told. Really, there is absolutely no excuse for writing a character who goes on unfounded rants in Hindi whenever he bumps into foreigners, or a coy guy who takes orders (or ‘requests’, if you may, although they don’t sound so) on the phone from a sobbing woman he’s never met. If these are attempts to make us like these two, then one should get the idea that the makers are trying hard to find a footing without straining their imagination too much. And how marvellous to be proved right. For the most part, this film seems to meander through sequences where the characters do things that, I would like to believe, are essential for us to understand them. Only this doesn't happen. These bits seem jarring, alienating us from them. Who are these people? Where do they fit into this world? Why are we supposed to sympathise with them? We don't know. But the film rolls on assuming we do, and so do we.

It's not as if the makers don't try to get us to like them. As if this were a cleverer idea than writing a coherent story, the makers toss in a few painful moments (some unexpectedly hitting their mark) where humour is forced into the story to give it some more juice to keep us invested. These attempts feature a fast-talking character at his brusquest, inviting bewildered looks from the people he comes in contact with. When he’s not jovially expressing his disgust at women wearing ‘skimpy’ clothes (which he does on at least two occasions), he pretends to be mute just so he wouldn’t have to pay for petrol. (Incredible how this callous little detail is played for laughs.)

For all that goes wrong with the film, one thing is for certain: Karwaan’s premise is undoubtedly more interesting than most Hindi films’. Two dead bodies get mixed up, and a software engineer from Bangalore has to travel to Kochi to drop off the ‘wrong’ dead body and pick up his father’s, the ‘right’ one. It could have made a splendid black comedy, but the makers settle for a road film instead. Given that the pleasures of a road film can equal a black comedy’s if done right, this doesn’t seem to be a poor decision at the outset. However, when the characters come into the picture, things do start to look shaky. For one, it often feels as if three different characters written for three different films were plucked out and placed in one, and a blue van was thrown into the mix as an afterthought so that they could be together. These characters have – unsurprisingly – gloomy pasts, and this quirky road trip will – again unsurprisingly – prove to be more eventful and life-changing than they originally thought, wringing their pasts out slowly and allowing them a chance to make peace with them.

If only we were living in the early 2000’s and all of this sounded new. We are, unfortunately, eighteen years into the 21st century. But, this doesn’t deter the makers from approaching it like a brand-new concept, putting together something around the ‘comic’ sequences and ironing it with monologues about life and death to ensure all the elements stay in their place. Half-baked developments are introduced without a good reason. A romantic angle for one character (handled a little insensitively later on) and an encounter with a past flame for another is hardly relevant to the story, which I thought began with a guy trying to arrange for a proper burial for his deceased father from whom he was estranged, but ironically enough these parts are among the film’s most engaging. I am not completely sure the writers intended for it to be so, but much like in life, unpredictability has its own rewards.

What saves the film from being a completely bland fare is the considerable charm of its three leads. (Although it’s been a while since a film has forced Irrfan Khan to ham.) Till the end, Karwaan maintains its distance, its few rewards limited to the surface. I walked away without feeling a thing for any of its characters. That disappointing feeling, I believe, can be cured by a drink of cool coconut water. 

[Not For Reproduction]