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]

Sunny Side Down

My Mirror column yesterday:

Kanu Behl's superb 'Titli' marks the debut of a filmmaker who is unflinching in a way we rarely see.

There's a moment in Titli when a gun emerges from a mithai ka dabba, and one is accosted by the thought that there could be no better way to conceal a weapon. That standard-issue yellow-and-red cardboard box, so familiar and so familial a constituent of North Indian life that it could never be an object of suspicion, seems to me to function as a perfect metonym for what the film is doing at every level -- toying with our expectations, constantly and without prelude. 

First, the name. Titli means butterfly, a word whose automatic association with gardens and spring and flowers in bloom conjures up a natural idyll -- an imagined paradise which couldn't be further removed from the grim urban underbelly the film in fact inhabits (there is more than one reference to feeling caught in a narak, hell). The Hindi word, moreover, is a feminine noun, with a particularly bouncy, childlike quality, and there is something sweetly incongruous about naming a young man that. It is also protean -- with a name like Titli, you think, how bad can he be? And that question does, in some ways, animate our watching of the film, down to the very end. 

Then there are the characters: Kanu Behl's exemplary cast of lower middle class Delhi folk might lull us, in the first few moments, into believing that what we have here is another of those colourful, dysfunctional, lower middle class North Indian families that the Hindi film industry is fast turning into some sort of budget comic formula. But you learn fairly soon that this is no mild, easily digestible form of dysfunction, no collection of quirks that might be milked for wry humour or even affectionate laughter. This is the great Indian family turned inside out, revealing not just the ugly seams but the stuffing. 

Titli (Shashank Arora in a remarkable debut role) lives with his father and two elder brothers in a depressing little gali house "past the Mother Dairy, behind the nala", somewhere Jamna-paar (meaning in one of the Delhi colonies that lie beyond the Yamuna, in the direction of Noida). The interior has a sense of unrelieved gloom, a burnt-out quality that also has something to do with the lack of female presence. The mother is long-dead. Only the eldest brother Vikram (Ranvir Shorey in a stunning performance that gave me goosebumps) is married. But his wife Sangeeta (incredibly effective in her couple of scenes) has already left the house with their little daughter Shilpi. During the course of the film, another woman is persuaded to enter the space as a new bride. Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi, superb) comes with a dining table as dowry, gesturing both to the yearning for family togetherness and the gaping hole that sits in its place. 

What Behl's film does most powerfully is to charge the banality of lower middle class life with the shock of violence. The brothers refer to the car-jackings they do as "kaam" (work), wrapping the blood and gore of it in a coat of chilling everydayness. So comfortably do they adopt the skin of "normal" domesticity that we are surprised every time. But Titli can surprise us even in reverse - the hand-breaking scene might be the most tender act of violence I've ever seen. 

Behl and Sharat Kataria's screenplay seems to me to distil the world into two categories of people. Some, for whom the status quo is working well, have no desire to rock the boat: The corrupt policeman, the smarmy builder. As Prince says to placate Titli, "Jo jaise chal raha hai, woh chalne do". So those who hold the reins of power are loath to let them go, while others are caught in a criss-crossing web they can barely see. Titli seems the only one who can see it clearly, this cycle of poverty and violence, brutality and despair -- and his desperate bid to escape from its clutches forms the film's narrative core. 

The unwavering focus of Titli's desire is a parking lot in a new mall, which he hopes will be a permanent source of income, a way out of criminality. The half-built mall in which the film opens sets the tone for the film's other theme -- money. Titli's is a world in which money seems to come so easily to some, and so very tortuously to others. Some people print five-hundred-rupee wedding cards, while others must scrounge for years together to save three lakhs. 

Director Kanu Behl has worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (OLLO) and Love Sex aur Dhokha (which he co-wrote with Banerjee). Titli seems in conversation with Banerjee's oeuvre in interesting ways. This Delhi-under-construction, with its dreams dominated by real estate, has much in common with the world of Banerjee's own debut, Khosla ka Ghosla. But of course, instead of that film's gentle middle class protagonists - "decent people" who only get sucked into criminality because the evil guy screws them over -- what we have here is closer to OLLO's view of the world: "gentry jo boltein English hai, kartein desi". In fact, the gentry in Titli, such as it is, is one step up from even OLLO: they order sherwanis in one breath while doling out murder contracts in the next. Here it is the poor who are sucked into criminality, the poor for whom even escape involves betrayal. It is not a sunny view -- but the shadows do contain the possibility of redemption.

Published in Mumbai Mirror