Bringing out the Bubbly - II

My Mumbai Mirror column for Jan 17, 2016.

Last Monday's column listed 4 of my favourite Indian films from 2015. Here are 6 others to make up my top ten.

Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost - The primary premise of Anup Singh's film is a man's desperate desire for a son, and the lengths to which he will go to fulfil it. This memorable plot - about a girl raised as a boy, and what happens when this 'boy' is married off to another girl - shares much with a Vijaydan Detha folktale called 'Dohri Zindagi', which Singh sadly does not credit. But Qissa goes far beyond this, linking the strange, tragic tale of one family with an oblique, haunting vision of the effects of Partition. Cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid captures Singh's deliberately dreamlike world of portents and symbols in images of startling beauty. With outstanding turns from Irrfan Khan, Tisca Chopra, Rasika Dugal and Tilottama Shome, and a stellar Punjabi soundtrack from Madan Gopal Singh, this is one of the year's most unforgettable films. 

NH10 -- The director-screenwriter team of Navdeep Singh and Sudip Sharma pull off a tremendous feat: creating a nail-biting genre thriller where the horror turns on caste, class and gender dynamics in India today. Anushka Sharma - who also stepped in as co-producer - gives an exhilarating performance as one half of a Gurgaon couple who step out of their upper-middle-class lakshman rekha and find themselves more vulnerable than they could have imagined: as a cop tells Sharma's Meera, where Gurgaon's last mall ends, so does the power of the Constitution. A gruelling but ultimately cathartic cinematic experience, NH10 is unmissable for anyone with an interest in contemporary India. 

Killa - The latest in a growing sub-genre of Marathi cinema which takes a child's-eye view of the world, Avinash Arun's stellar debut is set in a lovely Konkan town dominated by palm-fringed beaches and the ruined fort of the film's title. What Killa does with consummate ease is conjure up both the wonder and the pain that the smallest of experiences can elicit at that age: a gift, a letter, a promise, a visit. It is a coming-of-age narrative full of understated beauty and quietly affecting acting, especially from Archit Deodhar as the eleven year old Chinmay and the always marvellous Amruta Subhash as his mother. 

Hunterrr -- Harshvardhan Kulkarni's refreshing debut also draws on the experience of growing up in Maharashtrian small towns, except it's made in Hindi, and allows its young protagonists to be sexual beings. Kulkarni's remembered boyhood world of juvenile pissing contests and morning shows give its rather gray hero Mandar Ponkshe (Gulshan Devaiah, superb) a warmly believable history (though the film does end up with a few too many flashbacks and cinematic sleights of hand). Many slotted Hunterrr as a Masti-type sex comedy, which it is far from. It has its flaws, but it's as hilarious and honest a portrayal as we have of the lustful Indian man we all know. It made me hope that we will soon have a film about the lustful Indian woman we also all know. 

Badlapur -- Sriram Raghavan's newest noir shares less with his well-loved Johnny Gaddaar than with the almost-a-decade old Ek Haseena Thi. In both Ek Haseena Thi and Badlapur, Raghavan's interest is in the hardening of innocents, and how long people can spend possessed by the idea of vengeance. The other commonality between the two films is the director's continued interest in the experience of prison - as a microcosm of the world at its worst, but also as a refuge from the world. 

But what makes Badlapur really stand out for me as Raghavan's most sophisticated work is how cleverly he subverts our deepest assumptions about good and evil, justice and injustice. And he extracts brilliantly nuanced performances from his actors to this end. Huma Qureishi and Nawazuddin Siddiqui play off each other with such freshness that you can barely remember they have been paired before (in Gangs of Wasseypur 2), while Varun Dhawan's role extends the young actor in several unexpected directions, and yet never stretches him too thin. The minor characters are also a pleasure - I particularly enjoyed watching Ashwini Khalsekar and Radhika Apte. This is deeply satisfying noir - and yet it adds up to much more than the sum of its twists. 

Court -- The courtroom has long been a staple site of Hindi film melodrama, a place where ostensibly legal battles are fought in terms of good and evil. Chaitanya Tamhane, however, follows in the wake of such recent films as Jolly LLB (2013), Dekh Tamasha Dekh (2014) and Shahid (2013), which have all pointed to the absurdity of what passes for adjudication in contemporary India. But Jolly LLB and Dekh Tamasha Dekh took the satirical route, while Hansal Mehta's wonderful Shahid - a biopic of the real-life lawyer Shahid Azmi - was searingly realist. Court does something a little more oblique. By taking something that ought to be ridiculous - a folk singer, lok shahir, being charged with abetment to suicide for singing a song - and showing us how the court treats it with perfect seriousness, Court produces an effect more devastating than satire. Tamhane's style - and his entire team, including sound and camera - draws on the documentary filmmaking tradition, producing a superbly crafted fiction that has the observational ring of truth. Judgement is left to us, the viewers. Court announces an indisputably original new voice in Indian filmmaking.

Bringing out the Bubbly - I

My Mumbai Mirror column on Jan 11, 2016:

2015 was a pretty good year for Indian cinema. Our columnist tots up some of the films that made it so.

Having taken a break for the last week of last year and the first week of this one, I thought I might escape the list-making frenzy that usually grips columnists like me around this time. But even on holiday, I had so many people asking me for recommendations— friends, relatives, even strangers who'd just learnt what I do — that I have succumbed.

So, without further ado, here's the first of my two-part column on my top picks of 2015's film releases. In no particular order:

Dum Laga Ke Haisha -- Sharat Kataria's second feature (after 10 ML Love, his frothy adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream to a bustling shaadi ka ghar) is a small-town family drama of the sort that's on its way to becoming a new Bollywood cliche. But Dum Laga Ke Haisha departs from previous such films in two remarkable ways: one, it's set in 1995, and two, the heroine is a fat girl. 

The first is done superbly: Kataria's surefooted grasp of his milieu is strengthened by Meenal Agarwal's wonderful production design and Anu Malik's nostalgia-inducing music, leading us by the hand into this remembered world of shopkeepers, shakhas and cassette players. The second aspect ends up being less satisfying: debutant Bhumi Pednekar impresses as the cheerful, unselfconscious Sandhya, but the film, like Ayushmann Khurana's Prem Prakash, seems unable to see beyond her size.

Also, Kataria is a little too influenced by mentor Rajat Kapur's marvellous Aankhon Dekhi, often channelling the public bickering and tearful squabbles of that film, and even re-casting prime players like Seema Pahwa and Sanjay Mishra. Despite these issues, though, Dum Laga Ke Haisha remains among the year's most charming films.

Titli -- Kataria also helped debut director Kanu Behl write this rather more alternative family drama. Set in the depressingly anonymous galis of a not quite up-and-coming Delhi ("past the Mother Dairy, behind the nala", says Titli, when asked where he lives), Behl's film is a searing indictment of our familial pieties. As I wrote when the film released in October, "This is the great Indian family turned inside out, revealing not just the ugly seams but the stuffing."

Titli turns violence into something banal - but also unmasks the banality of lower middle class life as its own kind of violence. Behl draws astounding performances from his actors: Shashank Arora as the eponymous Titli, Shivani Raghuvanshi as his reluctant but defiant bride Neelu, Kanu's own father Lalit Behl as Titli's father, and most chilling of all, Ranvir Shorey as Titli's elder brother, a man caught in a web of brutality and despair. A tautly edited portrait of class and criminality, Titli captures the claustrophobia of a society in which dreams seem attainable only for the very few. Behl is a director to watch out for.

Tanu Weds Manu Returns -- Director Anand L. Rai made a lot of people very happy with his return to the repartee-filled world of the Kanpur mohalla, in which the infamous Tanuja Trivedi (Kangana Ranut) had once caused such a stir by choosing the America-returned sweet but boring doctor (Madhavan) over her dashing beau Raja Awasthi (Jimmy Sheirgill). But what really made TWMR sparkle was Rai's decision to inject into this milieu that old Hindi movie staple: a double role. Ranaut topped her own return as the attractive but irresponsible Tanu with a newly minted persona as Datto, a heartmeltingly youthful Haryanvi hockey player who plays no games in real life.

TWMR had many other highlights —fhe return of Deepak Dobriyal, possibly the funniest actor now working in Hindi cinema, as Manu's ridiculous friend Pappi; Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub as the shaatir Rampuria tenant easily reeled in by Tanu's charms; and of course, Sheirgill as the updated Awasthi, having gained a moochh and lost some of his fire, but still able to make his loutish UP man exterior speak of inner depths with the flash of an eye. But the real hero of the film is Himanshu Sharma's script, marrying old-school Hindi movie tropes to a sharply contemporary wit, creating a film that will likely be watched many times over by its fans.

Masaan -- Neeraj Ghaywan's film announces another of the debut filmmakers who made 2015 such a special year for Indian cinema. Set in present-day Banaras, Varun Grover's script weaves together the lives of several people dealing with distressing circumstances into a moving melange. A young woman eager to embark on her sexual adulthood is dealt a nasty blow by a venal hypocritical system; an old man finds himself preying on a child's talents to salvage his own situation; a young man finds unlikely happiness only to have it snatched from him. Most people who watched Masaan found themselves swept up, and moved by its very real struggles. But there have been those who have taken issue with its many coincidences. To me, it seems that the reason Masaan works so well is that it melds a closely observed realist eye with the sort of emotionally satisfying arc that has long given Hindi films their special flavour.

Note: This list is heavily tilted towards cinema in Hindi, with only a couple of exceptions. 

[The rest of my Best of 2015 list appears in the next post]