Anuj Kumar

While the tastemakers of Bollywood have shifted their focus to love and romance in the darkness of theatres, they continue to serve slices of the dark ages in the brightness of living rooms. What started as an avenue for experimentation, OTT content is increasingly becoming predictable and phoney. With self-censorship limiting the options for subversion, long-form content with decorative layers is becoming tiresome to watch. The latest is Yash Raj Entertainment’s largely incoherent iteration of a cult’s commitment to recreate its god out of the flesh and blood of a select group of residents in the quaint area. Someone’s murder is someone’s sacrifice. Someone’s god is someone’s demon. We get the gist, but the mood, mystery, and message take a long time to align. Created by Gopi Puthran, who, having made the chilling Mardani universe, knows more than a thing or two about telling stories of women surviving a violent, patriarchal world. Here, he puts them at the centre of conflict, but the chill feels cosmetic.

Sulking sons, duty-bound fathers, and suffering mothers make for engaging Hindi cinema. This week, emerging director Kayoze Irani revisits familiar daddy issues with mixed results. Sarzameen’s basic premise reminds me of Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti, where circumstances force a father in uniform (Prithivraj Sukumaran) to choose between his son (Ibrahim Ali Khan) and his duty. Set in the picturesque political cauldron of Kashmir, the stakes get higher here when the neglected son stutters his way into the enemy camp led by dreaded militant Kabil (K.C. Shankar). As expected, the mother (Kajol) tries to be the connecting link, but a past that needs to be addressed remains unhealed, leaving wounds unresolved.

After delivering logs of deadwood, Mohit Suri, who loves to paint doomed romance on celluloid, returns to his Aashiqui roots with a fresh coat of mush whose ebbs and flows make one feel volatile and vulnerable in equal measure. An uplifting tale of unalloyed love whose pathos leaves its soot on the young souls, Saiyaaracarries the brooding intensity of a Mahesh Bhatt romance in the body of a maudlin Yash Raj love story. With mental health as the villain of the piece, the story echoes the times when love is reduced to a lollipop by market forces. In the digital age, Mohit dials back to the pre-rom-com era, when heartache travelled through the screen on the wings of melodies, sacrifice was considered a virtue, and selfless love was celebrated. Led by Irshad Kamil’s Saiyaara mera badla nahin hai, Mausam thoda badla hua hai (My love, you are the same, only the time has turned its back on us), the tripping soundtrack, put together by five composers, grows on your senses.

About an autistic girl struggling to find her way in a judgmental world, with a spring in her gingerly steps, Tanvi The Great carries the soul of Anupam Kher’s popular play, Kuchh Bhi Ho Sakta Hai (Anything can happen). It cocks a snook at the cynics and naysayers who question the flight of the dreamers. Surrounded by a supportive mother Vidya (Pallavi Joshi), an autism expert, and a grumpy grandfather, Pratap Raina (Kher), who doesn’t understand her condition, the socially awkward Tanvi Raina (debutante Shubhangi Dutt) finds the purpose of her life when she discovers that her soldier father, Samar (Karan Tacker), made the supreme sacrifice for the country. She steps out of the poetic space that her grandfather envisaged for her under the shadow of his friend Raja Sahab (Boman Irani) and resolves to fulfil her father’s wish by joining the armed forces. But the rules don’t allow an autistic person to enter the troops. Baffled by her guts, the grandfather, who also served in the army, tries to dissuade her but gradually finds that she is different but no less, and is fit to carry forward the family tradition when Major Srinivasan (Arvind Swamy makes a stock character functional) agrees to give shape to Tanvi’s dream. Nursing a guilt, in Tanvi’s dream, Srinivasan sees an opportunity to redeem himself.

Rajkummar Rao is going through a purple patch. Taking a break from his comic capers, this week, the actor dons the cape of an outlaw, a product of social injustice who ends up becoming the mirror image of what he sets out to wipe off. Maalik sounds like a spiritual cousin of Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhaiyya Ji, which was released last year. Both films posit masters of understatement who revel in realistic space in a bombastic, mainstream atmosphere. While Bhaiyya Ji went completely off-key after setting up the conflict, Maalik has its moments as writer-director Pulkit manages to create the mood that we associate with Tigmanshu Dhulia’s kind of cinema. The film is set in the feudal Allahabad of the late 1980s, where Deepak (Rajkummar), the son of a farm worker (a solid Rajendra Gupta), rebels against the landlords to become a ganglord and assumes the title of ‘Maalik.’ The police stations of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are full of case files of history sheeters like Deepak, who picked up a gun because of caste or class struggle, and were adopted by politicians to maintain the balance of power. Raj lends the flawed character flesh and blood, and adds sparks to the predictable character arc.

Early in Metro… In Dino, a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road Monty Sisodia (Pankaj Tripathi), desperate to press the refresh button in his married life, blurts out infertility, infidelity, and morality in one sentence to his nagging wife, Kajol (Konkona Sen Sharma), who seems caught between the ideals of today and the values of the past. In one comic flourish, director Anurag Basu reveals what his kaleidoscope holds, keeping us invested for almost three hours. A child born when Life in a Metro hit the theaters must be 18 now. Not much has changed in relationships, apart from the fact that now we have a teenager in the film who is grappling with her sexuality, and she is in no hurry. Meanwhile, technology and therapy have alleviated the issues faced by the individualistic generation and the concerns of people who missed the bus because they prioritised their family over themselves. Our films often tilt one way or the other. Critics bracket them as progressive, regressive, or somewhere in between. Anurag and his co-writers once again break the brackets and jettison algorithmic screenplays to craft a heart-warming tale of people falling in and out of love. There are echoes of the original, but Metro…in Dino has its own heart.

After every few years, we have a female star taking on the role of a doting mother who morphs into a saviour of her child and family. It is a time-tested Bollywood formula for the heroine who is losing her space under the spotlight to play her age and yet remain central to the story. The template remains the same, but the public sentiment associated with the mother figure is such that the melodrama keeps getting recycled. From Jaya Prada in Maa to Sridevi in Mom and Raveena Tandon in Maatr, the mother magic has worked for several actors. This week, it is Kajol’s turn to take the mantle and remind the public that, given the opportunity, she can drive a narrative. While her male contemporaries are still romancing young girls, she has already played a couple of compelling mummy variants in Helicopter Eela and Salaam Venky.

In a bid to cash in on the goodwill around the frat-boy comedy, writer-producer Sajid Nadiadwala, this time, lines his boisterous drollery with a layer of mystery in the vacation season. Set on a luxury cruise ship, where a billionaire (Ranjeet) dies and a doctor is silenced, it literally spirals into a search for the Jolly on the high seas. By the end, we encounter multiple claimants, but none pass muster. Sajid has once again put together a galaxy of stars of different wattage, but in the absence of a supple string of wisecracks, the flash of wit loses its lustre. He draws from Todd Phillips’s The Hangover, where temporary memory loss generates unintended chaos, but the way it plays out, Housefull 5 remains a hollow play of words. The gags outlive their welcome, and the political incorrectness and situational humour that are the hallmarks of the franchise no longer organically fit into the narrative.