The ghosts among us

My Mumbai Mirror column:

A new anthology film about the supernatural is a mixed bag, but it does try to point Hindi film horror in consciously critical directions.

A still from Dibakar Banerjee's segment in the new anthology film Ghost Stories.

After first coming together to pay homage to the cinema in Bombay Talkies (2013), and the self-explanatorily titled Lust Stories (2018), the once-unlikely foursome of Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar are back with a new anthology film: Ghost Stories.

The films vary widely, not just in setting and tone, but in quality. Anurag Kashyap's contribution, starring an awkwardly gangly sari-clad Sobhita Dhulipala as a woman who is both an expectant mother and a surrogate maternal figure to her little nephew, didn't work for me at all (spoilers ahead) despite the effectiveness of the scowling child. The possibility of an uncanny relationship between external visual depictions and real-life transformations – think everything from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to MR James 1904 classic ghost story 'The Mezzotint' – has always fascinated me, and it is of course also the basis of certain long-held ideas of magic, such as voodoo. So Kashyap's use of the child's drawing, his repeated scratching-out, and his apparently innate sense of his own power, was for me the most gripping part of the story. But the film stirs in all sorts of other elements – nightmares, superstitions, silent men, shouting mothers, half-human states, crows' eggs, and a whole room full of creepy dolls. If all these ingredients were meant to be a recipe for chills, the dilution leaves us baffled and lukewarm.

Zoya Akhtar's film wins big by casting the brilliant Surekha Sikri as a bedridden old lady attended on by a lackadaisical young replacement nurse (Jahnvi Kapoor). As always with Akhtar's films (including her segment about a maid and her master in Lust Stories), there is an attentiveness to space: the multiple empty rooms that the youthful Sameera dashes through with a token agarbatti, the echoing sound of children's laughter from the stairwell when she answers the doorbell to find no-one there. It's a talent particularly useful in crafting fear, if Akhtar were interested. But she isn't, not really.

What she seems keen on is a juxtaposition of youth and age, sharpness and shutdown– and things aren't as simple as they seem. Sameera's briskness as she cleans up Mrs. Malik is matched by her frequent distractedness. Mrs. Malik, meanwhile, drifts in and out of consciousness, but recites from Wordsworth's apposite 'Intimations of Immortality' with tinny perfection: “Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night or day./ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” And knows more about the fruitlessness of waiting for someone than Sameera can.

Genre fiction and film – especially of the scary variety – has long been a vehicle for social commentary. The man-made monster at the centre of the still-popular Frankenstein – a book first published anonymously by a ridiculously young Mary Shelley in 1818 – is an early (and eerily prescient) warning against technological intervention in human life. Twentieth century horror, especially the zombie movie, has been powerfully shaped by George Romero's cult classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of his triad of 'Dead' films: Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead (1985). Romero onwards, the slow-moving, cannibalistic zombie – a creature whose bite turns the bitten person into a zombie herself -- has more often than not been a powerful metaphor for the horrific things that ail society: racial prejudice, consumerism, militarism, classism. That tradition continues down to Jordan Peele's Us (2019).

Karan Johar's film isn't scary, despite his newly-married heroine walking us endlessly through the candle-lit expanse of her husband's family mansion (going for a cross between K3G and Trikaal) in search of a ghostly grandmother. The only effective presence is that of the forbidding housekeeper Shanti, who guards Dadi's room in a manner clearly inspired by Mrs. Danvers' guarding of Rebecca's in the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film). Johar has moments that invite critical examination: such as the friend who declares the family as “totally legit” based on “community mein izzat” and “thriving business”, forcing us to think about how such an aura of social legitimacy survives the violence pushed under the floorboards. (But you'd do better to watch Parasites.)

There is, happily, a zombie film in the quartet. It is Dibakar Banerjee's, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the sharpest of the four – politically, but also in filmmaking terms. Sukant Goel plays a bored, exhausted sarkari official who arrives in a remote village to report on a government school – to find a ravaged, half-burnt settlement where the only living humans appear to be two children. The zombies from the bigger village have eaten everyone from the smaller village, and will eat everyone except those who turn on their own kind. If you speak up, you attract the attention of the creatures. If you join the feasting, you will save your skin – but be blinded for life. Watch it -- and try not to be blind.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jan 2020.

Heading to the Wedding

My Mirror column:

The new series Made in Heaven is a meaty addition to a genre that has captured our imagination for the last two decades: the big fat Indian shadi. (First of a two-part column)

As I succumbed to social media peer pressure and binge-watched the new web series Made in Heaven this week, I started to wonder when weddings in our movies went from being the all's-well-that-ends-well freeze-frame at the end of all the drama to becoming the locus of the drama. 

The original moment of change, it seems to me, might have been Monsoon Wedding. Mira Nair's 2001 film used an upper middle class Delhi wedding as the setting for a social and familial unravelling. Nair and her screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan unveiled the deep, dark secrets of the Indian family with a frankness that felt shocking at the time – but managed to use the glitter, the banter, the infectious energy of the North Indian wedding as the perfect foil for all the intense stuff.

In retrospect, Monsoon Wedding was the sophisticated prototype of something that would define our era. Among South Asians, a daughter's wedding had always been something to spend on. But a decade after liberalisation, the country's burgeoning middle classes suddenly had more money to spend – and were increasingly unabashed about being seen to spend it. The big fat Indian shadi and the high-gloss, exportable version of Hindi cinema that we call Bollywood arrived in the world more or less together, film and life cross-fertilising each other. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released the same year – 2001. Through the 2000s, aided by Karan Johar and others, the shadi became an essential part of Bollywood – and Bollywood became essential to the shadi. Across regional/linguistic boundaries, in India and in the desi diaspora, a with-it wedding now had to have a choreographed Bollywood sangeet. Across national boundaries, too, the newly performative Bollywood-style wedding established itself as a hegemonic cultural export – as a graduate student in New York in 2004 or so, I had the enjoyably surreal experience of watching my university's Pakistani Students Association stage a Bollywood-style faux-wedding as their big cultural event of the year.

Nearly a decade after Monsoon Wedding, in 2010, came another era-defining wedding movie: Band Baaja Baraat (BBB). Written by Habib Faisal and directed by Maneesh Sharma, BBB was also set in Delhi, but with a much more expansive socio-economic canvas than Monsoon Wedding's elite, English-speaking South Delhi family. BBB opened with Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar (Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma) meeting at a wedding, as so many Hindi movie couples have from Chandni to Saathiya – but then cleverly subverted expectations until at least halfway through, by making them partners not in love but in business. A wedding planning business, to be precise, which let Bittoo and Shruti – and their audience – work their way through a series of different Delhi milieus.

Made in Heaven (MIH) – conceptualised by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and co-written by Alankrita Shrivastava of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame – often feels a cleverly reworked combination of Monsoon Wedding and Band Baaja Baraat (BBB), expanded to series length and set in the present. As in BBB, the protagonists run a wedding planning business, and each wedding they organise gives us a ringside view of a particular Delhi social setting.

Only Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra (Sobhita Dhulipala and Arjun Mathur) move in more moneyed circles than Bittoo and Shruti. And consequently, so do the couples whose weddings they organise. The poshest echelon of golf-playing industrialists and their rummy-playing bitchy wives are straight out of Akhtar's 2015 film Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD), as are the Punjabi-speaking business families one notch down, whom the top tier fraternises with but also scorns. And as in DDD, these jokes at the expense of non-English speakers – a rich aunty saying “twat” instead of “tweet” – often feel like a stretch. Sometimes it’s the placement that's off. I'm not saying the Delhi rich don't mispronounce English words, they do – but if your daughter's marrying their son, you don't correct their pronunciation.

There are other glitches that show up the lack of Delhi detailing by a team of Bombay people who can't be bothered to go beyond visual and class clichés. Sure, this is fiction – but if you're going to say a character lives in Dwarka, then don't show her getting off in Sheikh Sarai, at the other end of Delhi. And definitely don't show her in a home that isn't a DDA flat. Don't give us a Delhi-based character who describes himself on his website as a “Mughal historian” and then responds with baffled surprise to the existence of a late Mughal haveli. Don't bung in a troupe of hijras from a “Fateh Baba Ki Dargah” when there isn't one in the city. As a Delhi person, I rate MIH sadly low on the authenticity scale – a matter I bring up only because every second episode seems to end on a platitude about Delhi delivered by Shashank Arora's video-camera-wielding Kabir – apparently Akhtar's human replacement for Pluto the dog, who delivered them in DDD.

But then what makes Made in Heaven worth watching isn't Delhi. If BBB acquired some cool in 2010 from not making its central pair start romancing immediately, MIH is immeasurably cooler because the couple at its centre are not a romantic couple at all.

The second and concluding part of this column is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Mar 2019.

Singing from the soul?

My Mirror column:

Gully Boy movingly fictionalises the lives of two real-life Mumbai rappers, but its insistence on authenticity masks as many contradictions as its characters 

In the opening scene of Gully Boy, the film’s protagonist Muraad (Ranveer Singh) is roped into stealing a car by his friend Moeen. It’s clear that Muraad isn’t too comfortable doing this, and yet he goes along for the ride, literally. The scene manages to do several things with superb economy. It marks, first and foremost, the thin line between the legal and illegal that these young men must straddle, a lakshman rekha where the temptations of stepping over are much greater than any benefits that might accrue from staying within. It also returns us to the risky lives of poor young Muslim men in Mumbai, exactly thirty years after Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), evoking an updated version of that youthful urban swag but avoiding the sense of real danger. Specifically, though, Zoya Akhtar’s achievement in the scene is to show us what really matters to Muraad: when the stolen car’s stereo starts playing some generic rap, he mocks the lyrics showing off girls and gaadis. Whoever listens to such “nakli rap” must be a “nakli aadmi”, the boys giggle, and in their heads the stealing of the car is now more than ok.

Given that Akhtar’s consummately crafted film is, after all, an appropriation of the lives and work of real-life Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, there is something audacious about Gully Boy’s frontal claim to authenticity. The unspoken message, in this scene and throughout the film, is that Muraad is asli, the real thing. Some of the most affecting lines in the film are built to bolster this truth-claim: “Teri kahani tere ko nahi bolni toh main kae ko boloon? (If you don’t want to tell your story, why should I tell it?)” MC Sher asks Muraad when he says he’s afraid to actually perform the poem he has written. Or later, before a crucial rap battle, when Muraad seems dejected by his poverty and what he sees as his lack of exposure, Sher tells him, “Tere paas kya hai tu woh dekh (What you have, you look at that)”.

Of course, this is tied to the idea of hip-hop as an autobiographical form, whose discomfiting of its audience draws on the authentic experience and unexpurgated language of African Americans from inner city backgrounds. As Sher tells Muraad in response to his “Comfortable nahi hoon main (I’m not comfortable)”, “Bhai duniya mein sab comfortable hote toh rap kaun banata? (If everyone in the world was comfortable, who would make rap?)”.

And yet Gully Boy itself shows us otherwise. Rap, like any other art form trying to succeed under conditions of late capitalism, must become comfortable receiving the patronage of the comfortably-off. So while the film shows how rap is enabled by the democratising possibilities of the internet, it also acknowledges that the music industry continues to have gatekeepers. Money matters, as does the influence of what Moeen once cuttingly refers to as “the English-talking gang”. A crucial character here is Sky (Kalki Koechlin), who is Indian but studies music in the US, with enough university funding to enable a posher studio set-up than anything Muraad and Sher can imagine. 

There is some symbolic power that Indian rappers can draw from hiphop’s international linkages. But while the film invites us to smirk along with Muraad when he shocks an American tourist by coolly reciting lyrics by the famous rapper on the tourist’s T-shirt, the fact is that Muraad actually lives in a Dharavi jhuggi that’s on the American’s Mumbai slum tour.

But what the film also offers is a clear-eyed vision of how no-one can be a single “asli” self, simply because social and economic and cultural pressures force most of us into inhabiting multiple universes. Muraad must cover over his distaste for his chauffeur father’s decision to marry a much younger second wife, literally playing his own soundtrack on his headphones to block out the traditional shehnai music whose maudlinness feels like a comment on his mother’s (Amruta Subhash) misery. Muraad’s long-time girlfriend Safina (Alia Bhatt) might want to be her authentic self with her loving but conservative father and mother, but she knows that telling them the truth about her desires will only result in them being scotched. So she keeps Muraad’s number on her phone labelled as “Mrs Ahmad” and uses the excuse of imaginary medical deliveries to sneak out and meet him.

Safina and Muraad’s perfectly choreographed romantic assignations, clandestinely conducted in the city’s most public places – trains, buses, bridges – are among the film’s unerring joys. As is the emotional landscape of their relationship, especially in the tear-inducing moment where Muraad explains her shaping influence on him to Sky: “Safina ke bina meri jindagi aisi jaise bachpan ke bina hi bada ho gaya (My life without Safina would be as if I’d just grown up without a childhood).”

Safina is both the aspiring doctor for whom career comes first and the girlfriend reckless enough to risk a police case to keep her man; the headscarf-wearing Muslim daughter and the girl rubbing rouge onto her cheeks on a railway platform. Muraad moves from being the white-shirted employee who must keep his mouth shut to the fit guy with two top buttons open, pouring his angst into a microphone. Like many films about artistic aspiration, Gully Boy seems certain that only one of these selves is the real one, the one worth celebrating. But perhaps it is the very fact of acknowledging multiple selves that keeps us asli. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Feb 2018.

Lust, with much caution

My Mirror column:

A film compendium of four tales promises to unbutton our lustful selves on the Hindi screen, but remains tied up in all sorts of knots.

There’s something a trifle odd about Lust Stories. The film, which premiered on Netflix on June 15, is made up of four stand-alone segments by four different directors — but all united in pursuit of a single theme. The directors are the same as in 2013’s Bombay Talkies: Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar. There, the unifying theme across segments was the power of cinema. Here, ostensibly, it’s lust.


But here’s the thing: it’s not clear to me that these four tales are really about lust at all. Sex, maybe. Sexual satisfaction, sexual deprivation, sexual confusion, sexual jealousy — all of these are dealt with. And while these might seem to be spin-offs of lust, they do not in themselves constitute it. Whether unabashed or guilt-ridden, lust is a full-bodied, carnal thing. But there is very little sense here of that experience, of coveting and deriving sexual pleasure from another person’s body.

The first segment, directed by Anurag Kashyap, stars Radhika Apte as a married college lecturer called Kalindi, who drunkenly hooks up with her student Tejas (Aakash Thosar, the hero of Sairat) and cannot quite handle the ramifications of the act. Kalindi starts by assuming that the younger, less English-speaking and less sexually experienced Tejas will become besotted with her. But as things begin to pan out rather differently, she gets embroiled in a tangled web not quite of her own weaving.


Apte’s on-the-verge performance is fun to watch: her believable air of manic excess lifts the segment above what otherwise might have felt like a mockery of a character. But we never get the vibe of lust from Tejas and Kalindi, or from Kashyap’s direction. It seems as if both have ticked the mental boxes marked ‘adventure’, ‘older woman’, and ‘younger man’ without the relationship producing the slightest bit of on-screen frisson. There’s only social awkwardness, confused power play and avery predictable jealousy that assumes, if anything, romantic form rather than sexual: the feeling of betrayal comes from having had the same song played to another potential lover.
The second segment is a finely wrought one and Zoya Akhtar’s opening sequence does come close to a portrait of mutual lustfulness. The master and the maid we meet mid-coitus look exhilarated. In that moment of pleasure at least, the hierarchies of who must serve and who must be serviced are apparently transcended. Bhumi Pednekar’s superb Sudha is neither put-upon nor coy, and to be lusted after by her upper middle class employer gives her a little licence, social leeway she would not otherwise have. But the intimacy of lust has clear limits, Akhtar seems to suggest, as she delivers Sudha and us, within just a few minutes, from the edge of an illusory domestic fantasy back into the ‘real world’ of marital alliances — where lust is trained to toe the line of social and economic order. What we experience with any degree of depth is not Sudha’s (or her employer Ajit’s) desire, but its erasure into an almost inevitable sense of melancholy.

The third segment, directed by Dibakar Banerjee, deals in another kind of socially censured attraction, that between a man and his best friend’s wife. Again, though, the scenario Banerjee sets up is by no means one of frenetic, passionate or even zestful attraction. In fact, when we meet Reena (Manisha Koirala in a perfectly cast and perfectly pitched performance) and Sudhir (Jaideep Ahlawat), the vibe between them is so comfortable as to make them seem like a long-time couple. They have tea together in a lawn, they lie in bed reading and chatting without any sign of sexual frisson — so much so that when it turns out they’re having an affair, it’s a surprise.

I’m not suggesting that lustful sex must be signposted as something unadulterated by other emotions, separate from loving sex, but surely what Banerjee’s film is concerned with is the breakdown of a marital relationship and the need for emotional intimacy and connection as much as to be physically desired? Both the times that we see sex here, there are tears in one person’s eyes. This is scarcely lustful sex. It might be comfort sex or pity sex, or even intense emotional sex, which is fine. But why then suggest we’re watching a film about lust?

The last segment, directed by Karan Johar, changes the tone of the film. From the realist, often sombre relationship dramas created by the other three directors, Johar transports us into his universe of campy, comic excess. But he addresses the question of lust more directly. An all-girls’ school serves as the setting for a romp with a programmatic message about female pleasure. His characters are ridiculous but entertaining. There’s Neha Dhupia as the cleavage-revealing, divorcee sex goddess teacher (slyly named Rekha); Kiara Advani as Megha, her younger colleague, a virginal-looking bride with non-virginal desires she is keen to fulfil; and Vicky Kaushal as her besotted and good-looking but hopelessly bad-in-bed husband.

Looking at the hilariously performative, uber-vocal female masturbation scene(s) in Johar’s segment and earlier in Veere di Wedding, it looks like broad comedy is the register in which Bollywood has decided to present us with the female orgasm. That’s a good enough place to start. It might, however, be a bit of a tragic joke that so many of these lustful heterosexual women are lusting after vibrators — not men.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 1 July 2018.

The Heart of the Matter

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Rich people do think about money, suggests Dil Dhadakne Do. And sometimes, it seems, they even have feelings.

Through the looking glass: Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah in a scene from Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

For that category of Zoya Akhtar fans who have been waiting for a return to the understated charisma of Luck By Chance, the arrival of Dil Dhadakne Do tells us what we've been refusing to believe: Woh director na milegi dobara. DDD, which plays out almost entirely on an ocean cruise, has much more in common with Akhtar's second offering, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Other than replacing sun-kissed Spain with Turkey, Akhtar has substituted ZNMD's male friendship with a focus on family bonding. 

The family, needless to say, is fantastically rich. The Mehras -- salt-
and-pepper-haired Kamal (Anil Kapoor) and trying-to-lose-weight Neelam (Shefali Shah), both rather fine -- are celebrating thirty years of marriage by inviting close friends and family on an all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. The fact that it's a marriage both parties have pretty much checked out of doesn't seem to matter much to anyone, least of all the gossipy ladies who seem to hang out with Neelam only so they can make catty remarks behind her back. Even the Mehra progeny -- Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra, both effective in their respective roles as hangdog and tightly-coiled siblings -- seem not to particularly care that the anniversary is just an excuse for their parents to conduct a lavish display of wealth. 

There's nothing wrong with the premise. In fact, Akhtar makes things interesting by telling us that Kamal Mehra's plastic-container-manufacturing firm is making losses. It makes the expensiveness of the cruise a kind of Jalsaghar-style last dance, before the Mehras are forced to publicly acknowledge impending bankruptcy. It also increases the level of fakeness with which we're now dealing. Plus I enjoyed the idea that someone who thinks nothing of inviting three dozen people on a two-week-cruise can simultaneously keep zealous tabs on how much champagne is being drunk.

One of the unexpected things about DDD as a rich-people film is that the rich people in it aren't oblivious to questions of money. Kamal Mehra's self-made businessman (nouveau riche if you're being snooty) is full of resentment at the people living off the wealth he thinks has been produced by his talent and hard work, and the scenes in which this comes to the surface -- with his wife and son respectively -- are some of the film's most brutally honest. I wasn't quite as convinced by the idea of Ayesha's being self-made because she sold her jewellery to start a business: there's a bizarre obliviousness here about khandaani capital as what helps create capitalists. 

But the film's take on these business families is so ridiculously monochromatic that one has the sneaking suspicion that this is the Bombay person's unreconstructed view of the Delhi rich.Whereas in both of Akhtar's previous films, one felt she wasn't harsh enough with her characters, here it seems that she doesn't like them at all. The men's golf-playing camaraderie involves snarkily pulling each other down on business deals, while the lunching wives do the same on personal matters. Ranveer and Priyanka's likeable characters are saddled with familial expectations whose unreasonable burdens Akhtar is clearly sympathetic to, being the inheritor of a weighty family legacy herself. But Akhtar's account of the Delhi elite stops at the lowest level of caricature: uncles who mispronounce English words, and aunties who have nothing better to do than matchmake their daughters, or those of others. And oh God, is it possible that a business scion distressed about selling his private plane would have a mother trying to comfort him with a Nirula's Hot Chocolate Fudge? The whole of the parental generation is shown as so dull, manipulative and narrow-minded that it's not at all clear how their children are managing not to be like them. 

These are the distant, controlling rich parents we've met in many a Hindi film (think of Shenaz Treasurywala's parents in Delhi Belly, or Imran Khan's in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu), and I applaud Akhtar's desire to scale up them into full-fledged characters. Anil Kapoor is brilliant in comic mode - wait for the moment when he hides behind a tree, or the smug grin with which he sits up from a hospital bed. The tragically under-used Shefali Shah is better in the bitter moments, but even she has some exceptional scenes of black humour: "Acting kyon kar rahe ho?" she says to her suddenly romantic husband, deadpan. "Koi nahi dekh raha."

Such constant transitions from humour to high drama are not easy, and the actors do a fine job, even if the film doesn't always pull it off as a whole. Even Rahul Bose, cruelly miscast as Ayesha's preachy illiberal bore of a husband, manages some decent physical comedy on the tennis court. It's clear that Akhtar is aiming for something that sits between our love of melodrama and a sharply funny undercutting of it. The signature scene that exemplifies this is probably the one where a character threatens to cut her wrist -- with a butter knife. The deliberately dramatised climax, too, is of this ilk.

But when you've spent a whole film showing people as hypocritical control-freaks who're only concerned with what 'society' thinks of them, it's hard to believe in their last-minute changes of heart. No matter what the film's most ridiculous device -- the family dog Pluto, pontificating on human foibles in the voice of Aamir Khan -- tells us, it's hard to believe these unpleasant people have a dil that dhadkos after all. We can but try.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 June 2015. 

Film Review: Bombay Talkies

 

Bombay Talkies is made up of four short films created by four different Hindi film directors as a tribute to the power of cinema in India. The first film, directed by Karan Johar, is perhaps the one least obviously ‘about cinema’.

Yes, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) is the editor of a filmi gossip mag called Mumbai Masala, her television news anchor husband Dev (Randeep Hooda) is a Hindi film music aficionado with a “special room” that’s a shrine to old songs, and Avinash (Saqib Saleem) – the new intern in Gayatri’s office – often climbs up on a railway overbridge to listen to a little street child sing “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh”. But really, this is a tale about truth and love and sex and selfhood, and Johar leavens a clichéd gay coming-out narrative (which does exist) with more brutal honesty than one could have hoped for.

Of course, since this is still Johar, his ‘ordinary people’ are all rather too fetching – but he gets many things right. The actors are perfectly cast, and we’re right there with them from the word go. There’s the early shot where the husband and wife, dressing for work, look into the same mirror. Rani’s Gayatri is dressed to kill, her low-slung sari blouse revealing a shapely back. She looks longingly into the mirror, no longer at herself but at her husband, but he barely seems to see her. In the next scene we see her walk into her office and become the cynosure of all eyes. That appreciative glance that comes her way from a male colleague now seems to us her due.

The other thing Johar nails is the casual sexual banter upon which Avinash’s relationship with Gayatri is forged. A milieu in which a newly-arrived intern can greet the boss-woman with a remark like “Gale mein mangalsutra, aankhon mein kamasutra” may seem a little much, but it taps into the deliberate sluttiness so often cultivated in the new liberal workplace, with sexuality played up partly for laughs and partly to establish coolness.

But it is the little girl on the railway bridge who’s the scene stealer. There is something so intensely pure and true about the quality of her voice as she breaks into “Lag Ja Gale” that one is willing to buy completely into her later dialogue about honesty, however trite. And here Johar cottons onto something that really does exemplify Hindi cinema: the undeniable pull of the song lyric, the sense one so often gets of it’s being the truest thing you’ve ever heard, even if – perhaps especially when? – it comes wrapped in a cloud of emotional excess of the sort that is no longer allowed.

A child and a song also lie at the heart of Zoya Akhtar’s offering: a little boy who is obsessed with “Sheila ki Jawani”. But not in the way you think. This is a boy who gets a persistent furrow in his brow when he’s pushed onto the football field by his unseeing bully of a father (Ranvir Shorey), a boy who likes nothing better than gazing lovingly into the classroom in which his female schoolmates are being taught to dance. When his favourite Katrina Kaif – whom he really only knows as Sheila – comes on television, she seems to be speaking directly to him. Follow your dreams, she says, but keep them secret from those you know will be unsupportive. It is a narrative that brings to mind the wonderful 1997 Belgian film Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink). It is marvellous to see a story like this – unfolding all around us and yet an absolute taboo topic for discussion in most Indian families – finally being told on the Hindi film screen. Akhtar draws superb performances from her child actors (particularly the dreamy-eyed, little Naman Jain), and their conversations are studded with lines whose casualness sometimes belies their eerie profundity. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the little boy asks his elder sister. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing?” he asks again. “Nothing. But I want to travel the whole world.” “Oh, so you want to be an air hostess?” “No,” says the girl, “I want to be a passenger.”

Anurag Kashyap’s film was the one by which I was disappointed. The premise is pleasurably cinematic: a young man from Allahabad comes all the way to Mumbai to make Amitabh Bachchan taste his mother’s murabba (sweet pickle) on his dying father’s bidding. He waits for days outside the Bachchan bungalow (the aptly-named Pratiksha) befriending the watchmen, the omelette-seller and the Amitabh-impersonator alike – but fails to meet the star. So far, so realist. What Kashyap does next – allowing the young Vijay, as the hopeful Ilahabadi is named, to actually meet Bachchan (and Bachchan another chance to trot out his carefully cultivated benevolent persona) – seemed to entirely dilute the until then powerfully documentary effect – and affect – of the film. There is a quicksilver change of tone attempted here (and later in the train sequence), jolting us deliberately between high tragedy and comedy. But it ends up neither here nor there.

The standout film, by far, is Dibakar Banerjee’s masterful reworking of a famous Satyajit Ray short story called ‘Patol Babu Film Star’. Banerjee takes only the central premise of the original: a very ordinary man who once had a passion for the theatre suddenly finds himself picked to do a scene in a film. Instead of Patol, the 52-year-old Bengali middle class man in a Calcutta of fifty years ago, though, we get Purandar, a 30-something Nawazuddin Siddiqui; a jobless family man in a present-day Bombay chawl. Right from the first scenes – Purandar lying unblinkingly awake much before his phone alarm rings out at dawn with a plaintive ‘Jaago’ and the sound of a cock crowing, the presence of a pet emu in his cramped little home – the film establishes a strange, surreal mood. That surreality is fully realized by the centrepiece of a scene in which he tries to prepare for his shot in the film: we see Nawazuddin from a great distance, surrounded by the gleaming, tall, white buildings of some fancy highrise, rehearsing the dialogues he has spent his whole life learning and will never need. And then, at the moment of greatest turmoil, he finds himself talking to his dead father, in whose theatre troupe he had once acted.

It is pure pleasure to watch the great Sadashiv Amrapurkar berate his (cinematic) son from beyond the grave – as my father said as he watched the film with me this morning, no-one is better at taana maarna than Amrapurkar. Siddiqui, of course, is superb – and the layers of cinematic meta-ness here are wonderful, as Bollywood’s latest poster-boy for acting plays the anonymous struggler he so recently was.

What Banerjee’s film achieves is a powerfully real sense of why the cinema feels like a vehicle of fate. The man of the crowd, picked out seemingly at random, might suddenly find himself illuminated – and yet it is entirely ephemeral. As the camera zooms out from Purandar’s room, he is back to being one of the tens of thousands of little people – framed ever so briefly in a flash of light, before being returned to the anonymity of the crowd.

This review was published in Firstpost.