Tatsam Mukherjee

I don’t think anyone working in The Taj Story is acquainted with ‘confirmation bias’ as a concept. Or they’re deliberately ignorant – which is worse. I gauged this from a scene, where a noted lawyer character’s reaction to the declaration “I have evidence that the Taj Mahal wasn’t built by Shahjahan” is not “what is the evidence?” Instead, the lawyer’s voice sounds almost jubilant – like it’s some personal victory. The goal isn’t to find the ‘truth’. The ‘truth’ has already been ascertained in one’s imagination – so one simply needs to cherry-pick facts, poke inane holes in the widely-accepted version of history – to plant a seed of doubt. This isn’t a conclusion arrived at after rigorous thought – it’s shameless, weightless contrarianism for its own sake.

A lot of one’s experience of Aziz Ansari’s feature directorial debut, Good Fortune, might rest on what they think of him as a storyteller. A stand-up comedian/actor/writer/director for nearly two decades now, Ansari turned to direction with the Netflix series, Master of None, a semi-autobiographical take on his experience as a brown actor in America, as he goes through the typical ups and downs on both personal and professional fronts. Co-created with Alan Yang, Master of None, in my opinion, is a sublime meditation on modern American society, as we see it through the eyes of Dev (a fictitious version of Ansari himself), and its commentary on immigrant parents, dating culture, and thorny issues like sexual harassment on public transport or at the workplace – but they’re dealt with his customary light touch. Like most comedians working, Ansari has this tendency to bleed out the theatrics of the most unsettling moments in life – stressing on how most life-changing moments can seem mundane in real life. This gentle rebuke as a storytelling choice is instantly recognisable as something from Ansari’s canon.

Since his directorial debut with Pariyerum Perumal (2018), it’s been well-established that Mari Selvaraj’s primary weapons as a storyteller have been his singular point-of-view and guttural intensity. Whether it’s the symbolisation of Karuppi (a dog painted in blue) in his debut, or that interval-block from Karnan (2021), when the protagonist (Dhanush) destroys a public bus. Careful to not end up advocating for mob violence through the scene, Selvaraj uses Santosh Narayanan’s score to build up to the violence as an act of desperate assertion, rather than an accomplishment. In his latest, Bison Kaalamaadan, I kept waiting for a similarly sublime flourish, which arrived in the film’s final moments. Based on the struggles of a Kabaddi player, it’s in the final moments that Selvaraj zooms into what makes Kittan (Dhruv Vikram) such a potent athlete. For the first time in the 160-minute film, we see Kittan’s guile as a kabaddi player, deceiving his opponent by moving sideways and forward faster than his opponents can think. When he’s grabbed by an opponent – instead of trying to free himself, he grabs the opponent back, and spins both bodies around. A couple of twirls later, he’s back on his side of the pitch.

In spite of what the popular perception might be, I can vouch for the fact that film critics still belong in the more forgiving section of the audience. It’s only when the film isn’t working that the mind wanders and inane details grate that much more. In Shashank Khaitan’s Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari, a character introduces someone, whose family business is valued at $1 billion. “How much money is that?” a friend asks, and the reply comes – “Rs 7,000 crore.” If Khaitan’s film was even slightly sincere and disarming, instead of the smug, gassy Hindi film I’ve come to abhor in the last few years, I would’ve overlooked the arithmetic error.

It’s been a while since a contemporary Hindi film reminded me of Salim-Javed without trying too hard. I wouldn’t be surprised if the duo weren’t even on director Neeraj Ghaywan’s mind, when he wrote the opening scene to his second feature, Homebound. Adapted from journalist Basharat Peer’s piece, ‘Taking Amrit Home’ (2020), which appeared in the New York Times at the height of the pandemic, Ghaywan’s film opens with a startling visual. A railway platform is brimming with a crowd of young adults, applicants for a police public service examination. It’s so overwhelming that it momentarily breaks the spirit of Chandan (Vishal Jethwa).

The strongest and weakest thing about Anurag Kashyap’s latest is that it is, indeed, an Anurag Kashyap film. As the film plodded along frustratingly in its third hour, I realised he’s still got the goods as a director. It’s something I gleaned from a tender moment in the sprawling 176-minute Nishaanchi. Wrestler-turned-goon Jabardast Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) has just killed another pehelwaan (wrestler), after finding out he has wronged a local woman. This is Kanpur in 1996, and it’s not just the woman’s ‘honour’ Jabardast wants to avenge; he also wants to settle his score with a man (son-in-law of the president of the wrestling club), who got picked as the captain, ahead of Jabardast for years, forcing him to gulp his humiliation and give up wrestling to become a thug. In the scene, Jabardast is lying in bed with Manjiri (Monika Panwar) telling her he’ll have to surrender to the police. Being the right-hand man of a well-respected/feared thug, Jabardast has been assured that he’ll only have to serve a brief sentence, after which he will come back.

In the last decade, it’s been heartening to see filmmaking voices emerge from the heartland, drawing raw, earthy portraits of rural life, where more than half of India still resides. We see such films hiding in the garb of a genre: comedy, satire, police procedural etc, especially when the director isn’t familiar with the milieu. Hence, the work of an assured filmmaker jumps out at us. The likes of Natesh Hegde, Anmol Sidhu, Achal Mishra etc, confidently marry sophisticated aesthetics with a lived-in grittiness. Director Jitank Singh Gurjar fits right into this mix as his feature debut, In Search of the Sky (alternate title: Vimukt) suggests. Told in Braj language, it tells the story of a family in rural Madhya Pradesh, which is trying to escape its life sentence by visiting the Mahakumbh.

As any film critic these days will tell you, the word ‘Lynchian’ gets thrown around a lot in reviews. The slightest bit of surrealism in a scene is described as something emulating the work of the man behind masterpieces like Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997). I’m guilty of it too. So much so that the descriptor has lost some of its gravitas over the years. Most things that don’t seem logically coherent are touted as Lynchian. However, ambiguity is not a stand-in for true enigma, nor does density always equal profundity. Sometimes, a scene can play straight like a musical note, evoking something visceral in the audience – leaving no room to question its logic. It’s this feeling of discovery through a film that counts for more than ‘understanding’ it. In its duration of a shade under two hours, Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma – The Fable might be the closest an Indian film has come to emulating David Lynch’s genre-breaking style. I’m not saying the film derives it from the existing style, as much as Reddy embraces it and makes it his own. Having made his debut with the fantastic Thithi (2015), the 36-year-old filmmaker might not even have been conscious of it.