Rahul Desai

No matter how safe and formulaic many biopics choose to be, sometimes it’s the subject alone that does the heavy-lifting. This is quite literal in Sumo Didi, a Hindi film inspired by the life of Hetal Dave, India’s first female professional sumo wrestler. The underdog checklist already exists: an unmarried girl mocked for her weight; a middle-class background; a notoriously patriarchal society; a supportive father; an apathetic federation; a passion as rare and mismatched as a bobsleigh racing team from Jamaica in Cool Runnings; and a sport that weaponises the body-shaming stigmas that infect most cultures. When life itself offers a winning theme — with all social and narrative bases covered — then all ‘fiction’ has to do is show up. The trick is to trust reality, not accessorise it.

It’s easy to suggest that a low-key dramedy about girlhood feels refreshing because it’s written entirely by women. But that’s a generalisation of sorts. We’ve seen women-led shows behave like their sensationalist counterparts in an aggressive tit-for-tat way; they tend to be reactionary — a statement to all testosterone-driven productions — rather than natural. The reason Matargashti works is because it refuses to look like the defiant story of a 19-year-old girl. It doesn’t pretend to be the unapologetic female (or feminist) version of those sex comedies featuring funny boys trying to lose their virginity. If anything, it reclaims the diversity of middle-class conflict from the clutches of male-created TVF family universes. You almost don’t expect the setting to be Lucknow. It unfolds like a lightweight antidote, not a conscious subversion, to a genre largely dominated by men.

When the first word that comes to your mind for a film is “sweet,” it can mean different things. Sweet could be a euphemism for small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, which implies: it means well but I’m reluctant to admit that it’s not made well. Sweet could be the sugarcoating of positive intent over weak craft. Sweet could be the kind of thing adults say to encourage eager kids and soften the blow of mediocrity. But we live in an age of such unbridled skepticism — where fault-finding precedes soul-searching — that we forget how the word can sometimes mean just that: sweet. Little Thomas is that film. It reclaims the harmless adjective from the clutches of condescension and agenda. English is a funny language, but we make it funnier.

The first half of Nayyi Navelli plays out like the answer to the question: What if TVF Gullak is pushed into the supernatural space? There’s a quirky Meerut-based family. An ancestral home. Lots of squabbling. Plenty of fondness parading as noise and taunts. And an hour-long emergency meeting on the terrace (against an artificial background of the city that puts the hand-painted sunsets from the 1990s to shame). The black sheep, Bantu, is desperately trying to convince the rest that the newest entrant in the family is a ‘daayan’ (witch); that his elder brother Raja’s wife, Mohini, is not a normal woman. It’s like watching a low-budget courtroom tale. Bantu painstakingly offers proof of the last few months and the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. He recalls weird scenes, narrates eye-witness accounts, and provokes the irritated family members to punch holes in his narrative. All this while an inauspicious and allegedly possessed Mohini — who will soon get multiple entry shots — is locked away in a room.

As a courtroom drama centred on the Indian lawyer who secured the sentencing of the one surviving terrorist behind the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam is a predictably effective movie. There’s no dearth of storytelling around this tragedy, so the familiarity — the cultural fatigue — is now used as a weapon. Much like its central character, Prahaar postures, pauses, poses, argues, emotionally manipulates, yells, and wins. Given the subject, it’s hard to get wrong. The background score milks every moment; Lalit Prabhakar plays Ajmal Kasab as a brown-faced monster slowly disintegrating into a man; the CST shooting is recalled and filmed through the eyes of a child; the trauma is amplified so that the fruits of justice taste sweeter. And of course, there’s the patriotic closing argument.

There are two kinds of Indian journalism movies. Neither of them is nice — which perhaps reflects the state of journalism itself — but it is what it is. The first kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to one former reporter as research; it explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it’s also learning simultaneously. The second kind of movie unfolds with the confidence of having spoken to several reporters from different newsrooms, past and present, so that this research can be reduced to a journalism-for-dummies template; it, too, explains the profession like a teacher in third grade because it thinks that the viewers are learning something they’ve never heard of before.

Imagine being such a distinct storyteller that your last name is synonymous with a whole language of film-making. It’s a privilege reserved exclusively for directors: Tarantino-esque, Spielbergian, Lynchian. But Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriter solely responsible for the cinema of ‘Sorkinisms’: a style of dialogue and atmosphere where humans speak faster than they think, flaunt intellectual credibility, exchange smug repartee without a single stutter, do deadpan jokes in a hurry, react without listening, unleash crowd-pleasing one-liners, and demonstrate robotic comfort with one another.

A mainstream remake of a non-Hindi-language movie is often a license to hijack, not adapt. If the original depends more on the treatment and cultural rhythm of an old formula, the imposter has nowhere to hide. Girish A.D.’s Malayalam romcom Premalu was about the scrambled identity of love and ambition for middle-class strivers who enter the adult world; it isn’t perfect (especially a copout airport climax), but the humorous ‘youngness’ of the film sells the point. But Apoorv Singh Karki’s Prem Keetanu is flattened by its Bollywood habits. It is tonally greedy, and the gentrified story is demarcated into genres: it starts out as a TVF-style campus-slacker comedy, morphs into a loud love triangle, collapses into echoes of an obsession tale, briefly flirts with the idea of a coming-of-age drama, and ends as a lightweight romcom. It has the grammar of a music-video montage, where every genre behaves like an entitled lover fending off one another to woo the reluctant viewer.