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.

Taking back the country

My Mirror column:

Mulk addresses the subject of Islamic terrorism with not just heart but honesty. It doesn’t shy away from the real tough questions.

Two trailers were shown in the Delhi cinema in which I watched Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk. The first was of Vishwaroop II, which marks veteran Tamil actor Kamal Haasan’s return to the tale begun in Vishwaroop I, where he played Vishwanath, a Kathak teacher in New York who turns out to be an ex-RAW agent named Visam Kashmiri.

The second trailer was of a film called Genius, which is Gadar: Ek Prem Katha director Anil Sharma’s launch vehicle for his son Utkarsh, featuring Sharma Junior as an orphan brought up by priests in the Krishna Janmabhoomi terrain of Mathura-Vrindavan. His two passions are science and Hinduism: when he isn’t reciting Sanskrit shlokas, the IIT engineering student with a photographic memory is — yes — a RAW agent. Both films appear to be fantasies of the self generated by the same New India drug: a potent cocktail of supposed technological genius and Hindu high culture, shaken together with an aggressive patriotism.

I’m not suggesting, obviously, that Mulk was made with an awareness of these particular films. But films like Vishwaroop and Genius do represent the zeitgeist, and it’s clear that the zeitgeist has defined Muslims as the unspoken other. Haasan’s character in Vishwaroop II says such things as “Musalmaan hona gunaah nahi, lekin aap jaisa insaan hona haraam hai” and “Main mazhab nahin mulk ke liye khoon bahaata hoon”. Watching Mulk right after makes it hard not to see Rishi Kapoor’s Murad Ali Mohammad as a response.


Anubhav Sinha, who has previously made such films as Dus (2005) and Ra.One (2011), moves into very different terrain here. A Banaras boy himself, Sinha crafts a portrait of the mixed mohalla life that feels both affectionate and authentic. Once replete with the sights and sounds of a Banaras morning —which include the ‘Ram Nam Satya Hai’ of a Hindu funeral procession as much as the azaan from the city’s mosques — we are introduced to the portly, devout and bearded Murad Ali Mohammad, addressed by his neighbours as Vakil Sahab.


Part of Murad Ali’s morning ritual is to walk back home from his morning namaaz, stopping at his neighbour Chaubey’s shop for a cup of tea. As long-time residents of the neighbourhood, Hindus and Muslims of the same age-set have warm, cordial relationships that allow for banter — even on topics that are increasingly being labelled ‘sensitive’. So at Murad Ali’s birthday celebrations, Chaubey gulps down some kababs on the sly — but must suffer in silence when Murad takes a bowl of the mutton korma tantalisingly past his nostrils, because he is still vegetarian in front of his wife. Sinha is sharp enough to allow for differential degrees of integration — one Hindu lady at the gathering is heard to say quite unselfconsciously to another: “Naachne gaane ke liye toh thheek hai, khana nahi khate hum inke ghar par.”


This particular Muslim family also has a Hindu daughter-in-law called Arti (Taapsee Pannu), who happens to be visiting from London when events take a sudden turn into catastrophe. Murad’s nephew Shahid (Prateik Babbar) turns out have been one of the bombers involved in a terrorist attack that kills 16 passengers on a bus and is soon thereafter killed in a police shoot-out.


The rest of the film unfolds in a courtroom, in which Shahid’s father Bilal, who is Murad’s not-so-bright younger brother, is accused of having foreknowledge of the terror plot. As the media gets to the case, the whole family is tainted by association. Even Murad Ali must move from being the old lawyer defending his brother to someone who is put in the dock himself. The film shows the enormous pressure placed on inter-communal relationships in today’s India, and how easily they can break: the same Chaubey who has known Murad for decades can turn around and berate him in public as treasonous, based on his nephew’s image on TV. Friendship across religion is not the only tie that’s tested — another Muslim family abandons the Mohammads rather than take the risk of their son getting embroiled in the case.


Where Sinha scores is in creating a world in which there is not only one kind of Muslim. Murad Ali may remain standing even under pressure, insistent both on his constitutional rights as a citizen and his religious rights as a practicing Muslim. But we also meet those Muslims who meet Murad in the mosque, for whom the growing suspicion and abuse directed at the community is a reason to come together to treat Shahid’s death as a form of martyrdom. And alongside, we have the figure of police officer Danish Javed (Rajat Kapoor, effective as always), whose response to crimes by his co-religionists is one of overcompensatory punishment. As emerges in one of the film’s slightly overwrought court scenes, Javed’s mercilessness comes from a desire to make an example of the rotten apples — before they infect the whole basket.


Mulk does not provide flawless answers, but it has the courage to ask the right questions. The real question is not how every Muslim is to prove her love of the country. The real question is whether punishing a whole community for the crimes of some individual members is really the way to rid us of the rot. Or is that only helping the infection spread, producing more real wounds that the country may never be able to heal from?


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Aug 2018