My Movies of the Year - I

My Mirror column:

A year-end list of the films I most enjoyed in 2018, in no particular order. The first of a two-part column. 

The season of lists is upon us, and so here I am with mine. But a caveat before I begin: this is not, repeat not, a list of the best films of 2018. I cannot make that claim, simply because there are too many 2018 releases I haven't yet watched – in Hindi, in English, in the many Indian languages, and in countries across the world. Instead, if you will all indulge me at the end of a taxing year, here is a list of films that -- in my eyes -- did their bit to redeem 2018.

Let me begin with the Hindi films, in no particular order.

Mukkabaaz: Anurag Kashyap began the year with a bang, giving us a zingy film about an aspiring boxer where all the real drama takes place outside the ring. The last time Kashyap used the poor-boxer-as-underdog-hero trope, Ranbir Kapoor's performance bit the dust along with the massive misguided missile that was its vehicle, Bombay Velvet. This time, the superb Vineet Kumar Singh (who is also the originator of the script) makes the sad-eyed struggler at the film's heart as credible as the desperate New India that surrounds him. Singh's performance as Shravan is more than matched by Jimmy Sheirgill's masterful turn as a casteist coach. Backed by a brilliant, addictive soundtrack, Kashyap crafts the caste and communal politics of Bareilly into a cinematic universe that is equal parts depressing dysfunction and joyful subversion.

Raazi: Meghna Gulzar's nailbiting thriller, based on the real-life tale of a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani army family expressly to scout out state secrets, was also the most marvellously subversive Hindi film in ages, playing around with popular assumptions about gender, religion and nationalism at so profound a level that you barely know you're being played. The doll-like Alia Bhatt as a spying dulhan who sweetly smiles her way into the innermost circles of the military establishment is a masterstroke, playing not just on the anxieties of the India-Pakistan relationship but the familial anxieties around the otherness of all bahus in all sasurals. Raazi also gives us a rare burka-clad heroine who needs no saving (unlike say, the two Muslim female characters in the otherwise praiseworthy Lipstick Under My Burkha, or the award-winning 2016 short film Leeches), and a rare India-Pakistan romance that is based on mutual respect for each other's patriotism. 

Mulk: Anubhav Sinha's response to the growing representation of India's Muslims as the enemy within is a moving portrait of a middle class Banaras family that's vilified and harassed after one of its members turns out to have perpetrated a terrorist attack. Rishi Kapoor, one of those lucky male stars to get his best roles after 50, is wonderful as the portly, bearded, devout Murad Ali Mohammad, who is suddenly reduced from the respected neighbourhood Vakeel Sahab to a man in the dock as a member of a hated community. Less feted but crucial to the film's sense of tragedy is Manoj Pahwa's superb portrayal of Murad's younger brother Bilal: a not-so-clever man whose absence of judgement can appear, in a courtroom and a country arraigned against him, as the presence of guilt. Mulk etches the ordinary mixedness of both mohalla and family with warmth and lightness, but its extended courtroom sequences are a bit overwrought. But given the bigotry tearing us apart, this is the bludgeoning we need.

Stree: Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (themselves directors, of Shor in the City fame) have crafted a rare creature: a Hindi genre film that subverts gender stereotypes while being clever enough to never be preachy. Stuffed with great comic turns (of which Rajkummar Rao's ladies tailor hero and Pankaj Tripathi's local faux-historian are the highlights), Stree combines the chills and thrills of a small town ghost story with effortless humour. Kaushik doesn't shy away from laughter in any direction, embracing both situational goofiness and the perfectly positioned political joke: a line about the ghost being able to identify people by their Aadhar cards, or the cameo by Vijay Raaz in which we're told that the Emergency has never ended.

Andhadhun: Sriram Raghavan returns to the screen with another film that proves his irreplaceability to contemporary Hindi cinema. The film's principal ingredients suggest a chef who's having a lot of fun: an attractive blind pianist, a fading Hindi film hero playing a version of himself, Tabu doing a brilliant riff on a character she has played before – Lady Macbeth. The performances are pitch-perfect for a film that is meant to keep us guessing: Ayushmann Khurrana is sympathetic but suave; the magisterial Tabu is somehow both controlled and manic. Add a sweet old woman who may not be that sweet, a nosy Parsi neighbour who gets her just deserts, and an even more nosy child who... let me not give it away – and you get a deliciously dark confection, with Raghavan's usual bonus layers for film buffs.

Badhaai Ho: Amit Ravindernath Sharma's film is a fine new addition to several growing genres: middle class comedies, Delhi films -- and most crucially, family films that want to talk about deep, dark, once-considered-top-secret topics, eg. sex, while making us giggle. Ayushmann Khurrrana as the son of a Northern Railways TT and Sanya Malhotra as his posh girlfriend are cute together, but Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao walk away with the honours for the warmest, most winsome couple of Hindi cinema this year.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.

Heart of darkness

My Mirror column:

With Mukkabaaz, Anurag Kashyap has gone where many might fear to tread, crafting a picture of present day North India whose zingy energy doesn't quite hide its depressing core.

The marvellous Jimmy Shergill as Bhagwan Das Mishra in Mukkabaaz

It would be a mistake to go into Mukkabaaz expecting a sports film. The hero might be desperate to win a boxing championship, but his real battles are not in the ring. For the talented small fish trying to make his way up from the bottom, the entire Indian food chain seems to consist of big fish that want to be fed – or they'll gobble him up. Director Anurag Kashyap seems so keen for us to understand this that he makes his Shravan Kumar pretty much invincible as a boxer: the self-proclaimed Mike Tyson of Uttar Pradesh knows he can beat all his opponents – and after a while, so do we.

So while the film's many boxing scenes are painstakingly crafted: taut, grimy, often gripping, all the drama in Mukkabaaz lies outside them. And the stage for it to unfold are the bylanes of Bareilly: a town that seems to have truly arrived in the country's cinematic imagination, with Kashyap close on the heels of 2017's Bareilly ki Barfi and Babumoshai Bandookbaaz. With Mukkabaaz the fictive possibilities of the contemporary UP small town are exploited in the best way -- by hewing as close to the headlines as its characters' realities will allow, and then digging underneath them for unvarnished truths that aren't seen as fit to print.

Much of the unprintable is spoken by the man who can only be called the film's villain: the superb Jimmy Shergill as the boxing-coach-cum-bahubali who plays God in this universe, acting under the deliberate name of Bhagwan Das Mishra. And much of it revolves around caste. “Sauda toh kar nahi rahe,” says Bhagwan in one scene. “Brahmin hain, aadesh dete hain. [I'm not making a deal here. I'm a Brahmin, I give orders.]” At another crucial juncture, he proposes that Shravan drinks his urine, calling it “amrit”.

Elsewhere, he humiliates a rival coach (Ravi Kissen, doing justice to a rare interesting role) with the pointed question “Sanjay Kumar what? Brahman ho, Kshatriya ho, Kayastha ho, kya?” And when Kumar straightforwardly states his caste as “That fourth jaat that you're unable to even name: Harijan”, Bhagwan makes sure to rub his face in it by calling for a separate water container for the Dalit. Shergill's menacing gaze through rose-tinted spectacles in this scene is a remarkable visual touch: the English metaphor for a too-optimistic view of the world is turned on its head.

Certainly this is not an optimistic film. It almost makes us believe that it is, by handing us an old-style unreconstructed love-at-first-sight narrative between a sad-eyed struggling hero we can root for – the brilliant Vineet Kumar Singh, who is also the originator of the script – as well as a heroine whose muteness thankfully doesn't ever prevent her from having her say (Zoya Hussain, also superb). That illusion is aided by conducting us through their courtship and Shravan's career with Kashyap's usual dizzying energy, with much of the action cut to an immersive, subversive soundtrack and clap-worthy lines crafted out of the everyday wit that the North Indian town uses to cope with its dysfunction. This must be the only film in which boxing moves have appeared on screen marvellously in tandem with hiphop at one point and the murkis in a gentle, almost Hindustani classical song at another. But this is an adrenalin high, not meant to be sustainable. This is a world that is, after all, controlled by Bhagwan, who is, in some ways, another version of the petty, power-hungry sarkaari sports official who unmystifyingly recurs in Indian films about sporting underdogs: think of Girish Kulkarni's character in Dangal, or Zakir Hussain's devious Dev in 2016's Saala Khadoos.

But the reason why Jimmy Shergill's Bhagwan seems more frightening than those men is that he represents the dark heart of the New India – which is unfortunately just an emboldened, lawless version of the old.

In an era when a film like Padmavat(i), with what appears to be its overt celebration of 'Rajput' valour and barely-disguised vilification of the meateating Muslim as uncivilised, somehow manages to be identified with courageous filmmaking, Kashyap's fearlessness makes one want to cheer. Mukkabaaz's fictional depiction of how gau-raksha and the spectre of beef are used to shut down inconvenient voices is both chilling and entirely credible. There is also another long-drawn sequence in which caste plays an overt role, and here it is an OBC character – a Yadav, to be precise – who decides to rub Shravan's nose in the dirt because he thinks he is Rajput. Kashyap's script leaves a deliberate loophole on the question of Shravan's 'real' caste.

Whatever one one thinks of this script decision, or of the fact that the Yadav character's attempt at caste payback earns him only nasty humiliation, Mukkabaaz deals with our darkest selves, head on. 

This is a world where the most soaring dreams must be dreamt without recourse to the rules of justice or fair play. Dysfunction is assumed, and incorporated into plans. Whether it is expressed in a don harassing a family by sending a henchman to keep cutting off their (permanent) illegal electricity connection (the “katiya” that was at the centre of the documentary Katiyabaaz), or in strategizing how to defeat an opponent whom one knows full well is on steroids but cannot report because the system will not listen, Mukkabaaz depicts a world beyond the hope of law. And in this world, to win can mean losing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.