Amar Singh Chamkila Review

Amar Singh Chamkila is an interesting film. It is as much a story of the titular Chamkila as it is of its filmmaker Imtiaz Ali, as much a story of 1980s Panjab as it is of modern-day India, and as much a story of casteism as it is of censorship. Most of these – especially the latter – do not make sense together, and yet under Ali, the story of the Panjabi singer finds a political voice missing from Ali’s filmography hitherto.

The story of Amar Singh Chamkila is inherently political in nature (like every other story in this world, one might argue). It is impossible to ignore the politics in the rise and fall of this maverick singer. But unlike in movies like Rockstar or Highway where Ali limited the political commentary to a song (‘Sadda Haq’ in Rockstar) or a dialogue (Randeep Hooda’s monologue in Highway), here he goes a step further. There has always been a reluctance in Imtiaz Ali’s cinema to confront the inherent politics of the stories he tells. Here, too, he does not go as dark and deep as other filmmakers might have, but there is a sense of ownership of the world of Chamkila, the complex, intrinsic relationship between his caste (a Dalit) and his lyrics that comes from the world he is from, the world he has seen around.

In the very first scene, we are introduced to the paradox that was Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh). A wildly popular singer is murdered along with his wife Amarjot (Parineeti Chopra) minutes before a performance. The action is immediate and impactful and works because as a biopic, it makes little sense to keep the assassination a third-act reveal.

What follows is the chronicling of Chamkila’s rise to fame by different narrators, placing the different pieces of the puzzle together. In essence, this is similar to how a journalist (Aditi Rao Haideri) tries to assemble the life of Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor) together. Here, the writing is better, the protagonist more likable, and the love story between him and Amarjot more subtle. The somber, softness of Chamkila as a person almost works as a paradox to his crude lyrics, often objectifying women. There is an honesty in him, despite the nature of his songs, that makes him likable.

It helps that Dosanjh plays him in a simplistic way that makes you find a heart in his vulgar lyrics. He instills Chamkila here with the kind of humane quality that sits right between seeing him both as a misguided young man and a martyr for art and freedom of speech. The movie makes you understand him, not root for him. All it does is show the viewers a mirror, reminding us that an artist is a product of their society, and their work a reflection of everything they see around. To ask, then, if a work of art is corrupting society is invariably calling the world that artist came and learned their craft from, corrupt.

A big section of the movie tries to tackle the question of immorality, and the responsibility that an artist holds in society. But the Ali brothers problematize this debate fascinatingly with the added complication of Chamkila being a Dalit. At one point in the narrative, he refuses to sing his controversial songs and instead steers towards devotional songs. But therein appears the Shakespearean fatal flaw in Chamkila. He cannot refuse the demands of his audience. He returns to his old songs because, despite his success, he sees his listeners as his masters and turns himself into their servant. It is a dynamic rooted in the casteist history of India. Chamkila is a Dalit, and his service to his fans is deeply connected to his sense of inferiority that he secretly battles behind his loud, voracious songs.

Amar Singh Chamkila is in many ways an extension of previous Ali movies, sharpening the questions films like Rockstar and Tamasha asked. It blends truth with story, and the truth-teller with storyteller. It turns the idea of art into a mythical balm in times of violence as well as a cause for violence in a turbulent society. It is a story of paradoxes that exist even today. Thankfully, the filmmaking allows the thematic chaos to penetrate the storytelling. The editing by Aarti Bajaj is especially penetrative, constantly cutting into paradoxes and parables, doing things that many previous Ali films attempted to do but failed to achieve eventually.

Amar Singh Chamkila is a lot more than the return in form for Imtiaz Ali. It is a reminder of the wondrous, warped relationship an artist shares with their audience. It shows the toxicity of fandom, obsession with people-pleasing, and ultimately a society that was too broken to let its inner thoughts percolate into a song lyric, too fragile to let a man and woman survive on the fame of their songs. It is a movie of a country that was, and still does a complete disservice to its many truthtellers who exist in the garb of artists.

Streaming on Netflix

The Archies Review

The Archies is a movie that you get when you mix nostalgia with the sensibilities of Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. It is a sweet, soft, often indulgent movie that works more in its friendship and revolution and less as an exploration of a love-triangle between three young individuals.

An official cinematic adaptation of Archie comics, the movie tells the story of a fictional Anglo-Indian town named Riverdale that seems like a piece out of the Wes Anderson cinematic universe. The buildings are in pastel colors, books, cafes, set to perfection. It is a dreamland, similar in its escapist allure to Barbie-Land in Barbie.

This makes The Archies a beautiful movie to watch, but it also makes every stake the characters face seem small. There is no real threat to the beauty of Riverdale, no danger of things not working out for our young rebellions. And yet, there is something that the Akhtar siblings and Reema Kagti bring to the coming-of-age genre that is special.

I must admit, I am a sucker for this genre. It gets me emotional in ways those melodramatic tear-jerkers do not. Zoya Akhtar aced this genre in the brilliant Gully Boy, here she walks on a tighter rope. She tries to blend the nostalgia of the original comics, its quintessential love triangle, and her own sensibilities, making a movie that works in parts before reaching a climax that is all heart and smiles.

The Archies uses the primary comic characters of Archie (Agastya Nanda), Betty (Khushi Kapoor), Veronica (Suhana Khan), Reggie (Devang Raina), Jughead (Mihir Ahuja), Ethel (Dot.) and Dilton (Yuvraj Menda) to deliver a musical that does more than meets the eye. It is an eye-candy of a movie that surprises you with its politics.

Of course, all this is set around a confused Archie oscillating between Betty, his childhood friend, and Veronica, the privileged new girl in town he is clearly smitten by. In a soft, simple scene he says to Jughead how he wished he had two hearts to love both the girls. Of course, he doesn’t, and he inevitably drags himself in murky territory. This romantic track, infused with some peppy music, the most memorable being the grandiosely staged ‘Va Va Voom’, forms the movie’s most forgettable section. This is especially sad because the romantic tension between the three leads forms a big part of the allure of comics, finding its roots in the Indian cinematic culture in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. The perfection of the set refuses to give their raw vulnerability to take centre-stage. It doesn’t help that in these early minutes of the movie Suhana is especially pale, feeling more plastic than privileged.

Thankfully, this changes as we come close to the hour mark, where the movie starts to pick momentum. As the business of adults – H. Dawson (Vinay Pathak) and Hiram Lodge’s (Alyy Khan) underhanded dealing for the latter to take over the havened central park of Riverdale – becomes the reason behind all the youngsters coming together and raising a voice against the abuse of nature for capitalist greed.

In a wonderful song sequence Archie’s friends perform a musical piece for him essentially telling him that everything is politics. It is a rare and glorious sight to see a Hindi film in the times of blatant hate and violence talk about the importance of politics in the mundane of life. It reminded me of the far-superior ‘Humko Usse Kya’ from Jagga Jasoos. But unlike that Basu directorial, Akhtar here is more driven to make her movie’s primary conflict political. These are kids of another generation, one that decades later would vote for Narendra Modi, recognizing their political voice for the first time.

Like in their previous collaborations, Kagti and Akhtar excel in depicting intimate conversations between their characters. A beautiful scene between Dilton and Reggie is the perfect example of how these women are in total control of these moments. Another wonderful moment belongs to a powerful scene between Betty and Veronica, where their friendship triumphs over everything else they’re going through.

It is in moments like these that The Archies shows glimpses of what it could have been had it tapered over some of it flaws. The end product is still a charming affair, but it also makes you wish for more. The un-villainizing of Hiram Lodge especially stuck to me. This is easily the least effective Zoya Akhtar movie. But a half-decent Zoya Akhtar movie is still a pretty solid movie.

Streaming on Netflix

Trial By Fire Review

At the risk of making a major statement early in the year, Trial By Fire might just be the revolution we need to tell real-life tragedies in an emotional, empathetic and holistic way. The reason for that is a series of masterful, bold creative decisions taken in the seven-episode-long affair of incredible storytelling.

At the core, like any well-serving narrative around a tragedy, are the grieving underdogs. Here that is Shekhar (Abhay Deol) and Neelam Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande), a young couple we first meet in 1997, a few hours before the infamous Uphaar Cinema Fire. This incident is a well-documented one. During a show of J. P. Dutta’s directorial Border, a short circuit led to a deadly fire at South Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema owned by the Ansal brothers, killing fifty-nine people.

Krishnamoorthy couple, whose book by the same name becomes the basis for the show directed by Prashant Nair and Randeep Jha, become our entry and exit point into this tragedy and its aftermath. They lost both their children in this accident, triggering a twenty-year-long legal battle, attempting to punish the Ansal brothers for what happened at a cinema hall they owned and profited from.

This makes it sound like another underdogs-trying-to-fight-injustice narrative. It is a familiar path that works if done well. But the creative minds behind Trial By Fire are attempting to go beyond the normal expectations of this structure. Instead, they realize that the real protagonist of the story cannot be the parents of the two victims, but the incident itself.

It is a rich and respectful way of memorializing an incident that continues to stand as a tall reminder of hypocrisy in the face of Ansal Plaza’s thriving story, Delhi’s first mall that the Ansal brothers made months after the Uphaar incident. So, as we move past a moving opening episode where a tearing Deol makes a case for a show that will focus on the couple’s long and lonely fight for justice, the story is shaken up for the first time.

We meet an impoverished, elderly man who has lost seven of his family in the fire, the youngest being his six-month-old granddaughter. As we see his struggle to give them a fitting funeral, one realizes that fighting for justice and establishing AVUT (Association of Victims of Uphaar Tragedy) is a privilege that is rare too.

This is when the show expands beyond the fight by Krishnamoorthy’s while remaining loyal and present to their narrative. The show uses non-linear storytelling to keep the tragedy as the central focus even as the court case distances the Krishnamoorthy couple from the year of the incident.

We see an elderly couple with a military background battling their inner demons as they walk out for the fateful show of Border, there’s an insignificant employee who is made the scapegoat to save the bigger fishes in the pond, all stories finding their connecting roots in that fire where the final episodes culminate in a visual depiction of dread that reminded me of that overlong but incredibly moving Jallianwala Bagh section from Sardar Udham.

Beyond this, the show also does something interesting with the idea of avenging an accident. Taking forward the legacy of critiquing the idea of revenge from An Action Hero, Trial By Fire depicts families of the lost shifting their focus in a pivotal moment during the latter half of the season. Their fight, like the show itself, becomes more than just avenging the deaths of their loved ones. The fight takes a deeper responsibility of ensuring that the system that failed those at Uphaar cinema in 1997 is mended. AVUD, then, becomes the face of a social cause beyond its original attempt of bringing justice, and in the arc of Trial By Fire finds a space to excel in that most stories centered around real-life tragedies fail to access.

Trial By Fire is a structural marvel with top central performances by Deol and Deshpande. There is enough here to make you teary, not in a way that is manipulative but in simpler ways than a tragedy like this demands. But what makes it an exceptional show is its ability to hold rationality over sentimentality, seeing loss as a collapse of an institution than of personal void. In doing that it surprises the audience into a gripping exploration of the Uphaar Fire instead of a meek, indulgent narrative of tear-jerking melodrama, that may still have worked but would have rendered a lesser tribute to the fight and might of the Krishnamoorthy couple.

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Darlings Review

The dictionary meaning of the word ‘darling’ is quite simple – a person who is very much loved or liked – Cambridge Dictionary tells us. But in Jasmeet K. Reen’s directorial Darlings the word has a deeper, complex, meaning which is deeply rooted in how the English language interprets and moulds words to suit South Asian sensibilities. It looks at it as a word that coaxes abuse and normalizes a husband seeing his wife as a gullible child in the relationship.

This is important because, like its title, the film is deeply rooted in the Indian subcontinent. Reen, who has also written the film with Parveez Sheikh, roots the film in a particular lower middle-class Muslim milieu of Mumbai allows her to compose a narrative that’s in equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious.

Darlings follows the life of Badru (Alia Bhatt) from when she is dating Hamza (Vijay Verma). Once married to the man she loves, Badru lives in the same chawl as her widowed mother Shamshu (Shefali Shah). We meet Badru in a scene set outside a movie theatre. It is an interesting moment to meet a romantic dreamer like Badru. Outside one of the many movie theatres that sell dreams of the kind of love that Badru pictures for herself and Hamza.

Three years later, her reality is poles apart from those movies. Badru finds herself domesticated in a physically abusive relationship with a man who is a Railway TC on paper but is berated by his boss at work. Shamshu, aware and deeply pained by her daughter’s marriage, pushes her to take revenge. She is the kind of person who does not blink an eye in saying that Badru should kill her husband. It is not an ignorant response written for laughs. It reflects how revenge is portrayed in Hindi cinema. The only difference in what Shamshu is suggesting is that she wants a woman to take the bloodied step of revenge. Around them is Zulfi (Roshan Matthew), their neighbour who finds himself in the mix of their domestic chaos.

The first hour of Darlings plays out as a tussle between Badru’s inability to let go of Hamza, repeatedly falling for his sweet-husband act the morning after he brutally assaulted her, and Shamshu’s inhibited response. Sheikh and Reen blend the seriousness of the matter with a touch of dark humour wonderfully. At every turn, you fear that the film will collapse. It is an incredibly thin rope that it trudges on, after all. It is a millimeter away from becoming insensitive to the dark theme of physical abuse, and a touching distance from drowning in the darkness of its subject.

While the writing remains consistently good, it is the performances that truly make Darlings successful in trudging this tricky path. Bhatt in her first venture as a producer is incredible as Badru. After playing the unflappable Gangubai earlier this year, we see Bhatt playing a character who feels like a distant extension of Safeena from Gully Boy. Given that, Verma’s casting here as her husband is quite interesting. Like his Moeen in that Zoya Akhtar directorial, Verma plays Hamza with a vulnerability that makes him appear as more than a misogynistic stereotype. Their chemistry, both when the latter is the bicchoo and when the former turns the tables, is brilliant and therefore terrifying to watch. Shefali Shah as Shamshu is reliably good, the kind of expected strong performance by her that goes unnoticed just because you expect her to be this good always. Her second brilliant performance this year after Jalsa.

Darlings is a brave movie. It is the kind of movie that promises a lot and delivers on most of what it promises. A few missteps do taper the movie off briefly, especially around the time when an important transition happens in the way Badru looks at the world and her husband. But Bhatt handles that moment well enough to keep us invested, and what follows in the second half is a wonderful, hilarious story of revenge and redemption. The movie is as much about the tragedy of being unable to escape a toxic relationship, as it is about the urgency to respect yourself. It is as much about the absurdity of a life marred by the darkness of reality, as it is about telling a story that transcends genres and historical, systematic misogyny to come out as a refreshing retelling of an under-represented reality of life.

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Jaadugar Review

There is a point in Jaadugar when the film gives up the initial idea of a magician trying to find
“magic” in life that he has learned to produce on stage. He tries to visualize a life with the grandeur of an elaborate, extravagant magic show. Sadly, the movie he finds himself in lacks both the extravagance and magic to make his story worth investing in.
Meenu (Jitendra Kumar) is a magician by profession and burdened by a legacy of a dead father by destiny. He is a terrible footballer and a decent magician. But when his girlfriend dumps him at a railway station (in what is one of the few good moments of the film), he is aimless until he meets Disha (Arushi Sharma), an ophthalmologist, and falls in love how only heroes in a Hindi movie fall in love. So far not bad.
The film, though, seems hellbent on making it a bigger story. So we have an uncle (Javed Jaffrey) who wants to fulfill the dying wish of his brother – win a local football tournament. It is an underdog story with contrivances that you can predict from a mile away. We are forced into an ordeal of a poorly choreographed and shot football tournament where we are barely introduced to the eleven players of the team, and yet are expected to cheer for them.
Jaadugar would have done well to be a light-hearted love story of Meenu and Disha, but the film has larger, stranger ambitions of being a sports drama. Written by Biswapati Sarkar and directed by Sameer Saxena, the torch-bearers of The Viral Fever’s original rise to success, the film fails to find the essence of what makes them artists we like to keep a track of.
Here they test themselves with a cross-genre hybrid that tries to be both – a light-hearted rom-com, and a coming-of-age sports drama. Eventually, it becomes a mishmash of ideas at the centre of which is a despicable, morally compromised protagonist who keeps doing irredeemable things while the writing keeps attempting to carve a redeeming arc for him.
There is a lot of talent on display here. Javed Jaffrey is in predictably good form, as are Jitendra Kumar and a largely endearing Arushi Sharma. But the film never rises to its potential. The writers try to tell a story of an unlikely marriage between love, magic, and football. But all it becomes is a poorly made film with moments that are neither consistent nor too memorable to make up for the bits that make it a 167-minute bore.
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Stranger Things Season 4 Vol. 2 Review

During the final moments of Vol. 1 of season 4, Stranger Things took an important step in the right direction. We finally came closer to unpuzzling the mystery around who Vecna was and got a brief understanding of the history of the Upside Down. It was a narrative call that felt a season late but timely nonetheless.

After two solid seasons (albeit that terrible attempt at a spin-off) Stranger Things had the kind of forgettable third outing that makes you wonder if the creators had just one trick up their sleeves. Chaos, another monster from the Upside Down, and El (Millie Bobby Brown) coming out on top after a season full of challenges. The third saw the untimely demise of Hopper (David Harbour), but a quick turn-around where we were introduced to a storyline set in Russia, where Hopper was alive.

The show seemed to have come to a natural dead-end after doing pretty well with the build-up part of the narrative. Vol. 1 had the pressure to shift gears into the next phase of a story like this. Solving the puzzle. In what was an incredible mid-season finale, we got Vecna’s backstory and the first hint of getting some answers. Vol. 2 continues the trend with a blend of soft, emotional moments and blockbuster action sequences, and gory visuals that are true to the legacy of Stranger Things.

In essence, Vol. 2 of the fourth season is like watching two movies. Divided into two episodes of 90 minutes and 150 minutes, these are humungous episodes with lots happening. Not all of it works, but there is enough action here to make this a largely worthy successor to the final two episodes of Vol. 1, that saw Stranger Things return to top form after a season-and-a-half of a lull.

Following multiple storylines, Vol. 2 had to bring them all to a satisfactory end. That seemed tougher for some than others. A road trip involving Will (Noah Schnapp), Mike (Finn Wolfhand), and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) seemed to be a strangely meandering track that finds two important moments here. The much-talked-about homosexuality of Will is hinted at in two wonderfully written scenes, and with their track merging into Eleven’s narrative at a crucial juncture in the plot, their prominence to Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Saddie Sink), Steve (Joe Keery), Robin (Maya Hawke) and Erica’s (Priah Feguson) narrative of fighting off Vecna from within the Upside Down.

What makes Vol 2. Work beyond the incredible visuals and high-octane moments is its ability to understand the trauma that these characters are going through. In an incredible scene, we see Max in a trans and Lucas and El being equally powerless in the face of a potentially fatal crisis. It is a scene made special by Brown’s brilliance as an artist, who continues to be the shining light of the narrative.

It is obvious that the budget for this season is significantly thicker, but the Duffer Brothers know how to make good use of that money. Vecna’s hell is a benchmark in grand, gothic storytelling. Another scene involving what can best be described as a “7.4 magnitude earthquake” in Hawkins is another reminder of the visual brilliance of the show.

Stranger Things is a blockbuster show, and it was good to see the creators building on its grandeur this season. Luckily, the writing became grand too, making the visual brilliance feel worth it and not a cheap cop-out in the face of an exaggerated budget. Vecna’s arc and its complex relationship with Eleven is the kind of strong writing on the back of which you can take a show to the next stage of its natural progression – placing the puzzle.

We now know the truth of Mind Flayer, and who/what Will feels the presence of when he scarily touches the back of his neck. Season four was a grand case of questions being answered, and most of them landed well. There is more to look forward to in its fifth and final season than there was at the beginning of the fourth, and that is always a good thing to say about a show’s penultimate season. Stranger Things Vol. 2 is a grand visual treat. But moreover, like when at its best in season 1, it is a human story of a few young kids (now growing thick and fast) who are trying to experience the little normalcies of life amidst greater calamities that are thrown at them.

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Stranger Things Season 4 Vol. 1 Review

Stranger Things was an incredible phenomenon in its debut year. The world of Hawkins pulled us in and before we knew Upside Down became part of pop culture. Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lukas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) formed the most adorable cast of the show. A wonderful homage to the 1980s America that worked well even if you did not care for the easter eggs.

But 2019 saw the show slump to its worst season yet. In its third outing, the show found itself in an estranged loop despite some interesting new characters like Max (Sadie Sink), Billy (Dacre Montgomery), and Robin (Maya Hawke). It felt like the series was being unable to do something that most lasting stories do – reinvent itself in a way that is both fresh while also retaining the essence of what worked for the story originally. The writing started to lack depth in its understanding of adolescent psychology and it felt like the audience was being tricked into Hawkins on the assumption that no one would notice the obvious mediocrity on the back of two powerful seasons.

Season 4, divided into two parts with episode lengths longer than ever, comes on the back of serious questions being asked of the show beyond its initial success. We begin with the major players in different places. Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will, Eleven, and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) are in California. Eleven is being bullied in school, while she lies to Mike about it in letters while things seem to go quietly after the fatal climax of the previous season, still not having her powers. Max is having nightmares about Billy’s death and has broken up with Lukas.

The season takes its time to pick momentum, like a sportsperson struggling for form before finally picking themselves. Duffer Brothers spend two episode-and-a-bit in world-building and introducing us to a world of teenage love, teenage brats, and possibly unexpressed romantic interest of one character in another. Clearly, this is not their comfort zone and it shows. The audience, much like the show itself, is itching to get to the darker parts. It takes some time to get there but once the creative team commits to the primary idea of this season, it does not hold back. This makes the fourth season of the show both frustrating and immensely rewarding with probably the best twenty minutes in the history of Stranger Things reserved for the seventh episode.

The new antagonist – Vecna – finds a place in the world of the show quite accurately. As different characters embark on separate journeys – Joyce and Murray (Brett Gelman) are off to Russia to save Hopper (David Harbour), while Eleven tracks old paths to regain her power and confront a particularly daunting memory; Dustin, Steve, Nancy (Natalie Dyer), Max, and Robin are on an incredible adventure of their own while Will, Mike and Jonathan are curiously left to do quite less this season.

Unlike the previous season, this one is an extremely rewarding experience. With a clear hike in the budget-making for some incredible visuals, the show submits itself to the horror genre after flirting with it all these years. A scene in the fourth episode involving Max and another with Steve much later is both disturbing and wonderful filmmaking.

The multiple storyline structure does have its drawbacks, and the Russian track does not always fit in the narrative. But apart from that one (which I am hoping to have a stronger arc in Vo. 2), every other arc gets an incredible finale in what are the best twenty minutes of web-series viewing this year.

As we leave the show for now with two giant episodes ready to be dropped in July, Stranger Things is well and truly back in form. The stakes are higher, the sets and character arcs are amplified, and there is still something beautiful about Eleven’s somber innocence, Dustin’s nerdy presence, and Steve’s continuing growth as the most improved characters of the show.

Until Vol. 2, Stranger Things remains one of the best things on Netflix.

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Thar Review

In the last few years, Hindi cinema has come up with some exciting stories that are as much a part of the American Western genre, as they are a subversion of it. If Sonchiriya was a breathtaking reminder of how the dacoits that the cinema of the 1970s and 80’s demonized had a horrified, humane side to them, Thar subverts one of the most iconic Hindi films – Sholay – in asking us an interesting question. Who is the real antagonist?

Writer-director Raj Singh Chaudhary develops this hybrid-genre narrative where the idea of an antagonist is more a case of perspective than actions. He does that by taking elements of a Western and blending them with the revenge-drama genre. The results are not always on the right pitch, but the film gets a lot of what it is trying to attempt right.

In its wonderful opening few minutes, Thar begins with Inspector Surekha Singh (Anil Kapoor) giving a voiceover. He establishes the setting of the That desert (near the Pakistan border) as the protagonist. This is established a number of times through the exquisite camera work of Shreya Dev Dube, who captures the geography of the film not just as a character, but as the soul that defines the film.

Singh is on the verge of retirement and is greeted with a “bhawandar” just before his retirement. He is accompanied by Bhure (Satish Kaushik), his professional junior and friend, as Siddharth (Harshvardhan Kapoor), a new mysterious man enters their town just as a body is found hanging by the tree, dismembered, and theft of drugs takes place amidst an air of deceit around an arranged marriage.

These are untrustworthy people with a questionable moral radar. Everyone has deep insecurities and hidden agendas, but the narrative remains loyal to Siddharth as his brooding, mysterious-new-man image grows into an antagonistic presence. Amidst a lot of torturing and traumatizing sequences is Chetna (Fatima Sana Shaikh), the wife of one of the three local men who are employed under Siddharth.

The film remains an intriguing watch while Siddharth remains an unknown presence. Chaudhary builds the tension intelligently, making a growing romantic track between Siddharth and Chetna seem like an inevitable tide towards doom that seems as natural as it looks uncomfortable.

He interjects these visuals smartly, juxtaposing the actions of the protagonist, and his love-making with this subordinated, silenced woman to keep whispering to us that this is going to end in an unhinged heartbreak for Chetna, the one character who seems to be untouched by the harsh greyness of the terrain that is her home.

The problem with Thar is its unsatisfying final act. After all the agonizing violence and almost inappropriate obsession with graphic details, the pay-off is not worth it. I understand how it may have looked like a good end on paper, but the execution feels quite damp. The only person you care for during those final few minutes are Chetna, who is never given the center stage in the narrative until that point.

There is a shot towards the end of the film of people lying dead on the sandy terrain, unmistakably similar to each other. A voiceover (written by Anurag Kashyap along with the rest of the dialogues) talks about the futility of revenge. An underlying theme of the absence of any value to life in a lawless, rugged world appears cursorily, but the film fades away before making its point land with the needed poignancy.

In another world, Thar would have been a worthy successor to Abhishek Chaubey’s brilliant directorial Sonchiriya, but this one falls a few crucial points behind. That is not to say that Thar is not a good film. It works in ways that few films do and stays with you like an uncomfortable mirror of life around us – a look at a lawless place from the past that speaks of the law-bound reality of our now. And yet, steers away from being a truly compelling cinematic work.

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Mai Review

Netflix’s new crime-thriller, Mai, is a strange one. It runs dangerously close to being ruptured in its cliched premise but also has the promise of being one of the most wonderful shows to come out of Netflix India, if not the entire Indian webspace. And as it reaches the final few moments of its six-episode first season, it disappoints on both accounts.

The easiest way to describe the show would be to call it an unremarkable, above-average crime show. There are moments of deep poignance that work in ways that you are immediately hooked to the narrative before a creative call to the side towards a political conspiracy ruins its chance of becoming a truly special show.

The show stars Sakshi Tanwar as the titular ‘Mai’, a woman who is firmly determined to find the truth behind her mute daughter (Wamiqa Gabbi) after she is killed by a rampaging truck. Sheel (Tanwar) is an underdog through and through. Tanwar, in an absolutely brilliant central performance, gives Sheel a sense of simplistic vulnerability that seems to come naturally to the character.

And yet, director and show-runner Atul Mongia makes her shift from being a docile homemaker to a vengeful mother quite believable. Unlike Mom, starring the late Sridevi, Mai gathers momentum, not by its star power, but its understanding of the world it belongs to. In that, it becomes a story of a woman thrashing through gender norms and societal expectations from a woman without ever thinking of the larger implication of her actions.

There is a moment when Sheel uses a rod to hit a man repeatedly. It quickly reminds you of the climax of NH10 where Meera (Anushka Sharma) went on a rampage towards the climax of the film. That was the first film produced by Clean Slate Filmz. Mai is their second show after the brilliant Pataal Lok on Prime. There are parallels that are impossible to miss. A production house breaking down generations of gendered roles one story at a time.

This also explains why the show is set in Lucknow, a city that has been accused of abusing women, subverting their rights, and submerging their voice in the name of culture and Tehzeeb for centuries. In the world of Mai, there is no place for tehzeeb. Sheel has to be brutal, rowdy, and a tactical mastermind – everything that a woman is not expected to be. Her husband, Yash (Vivek Mushran), is himself pawned by his elder brother. A case of layered subjugation that Sheel is determined to break for the sake of her deceased daughter.

In its best moments, the show is pensive and introspective. A scene involving the husband and wife discussing their daughter’s love life is written and performed so beautifully that it makes you want to see this turn into an emotional drama. This is more because the crime part of the show – especially away from Sheel – is poorly written and unengaging.

Mai could have been a great show. It still falls well up in the list of mother-revenge dramas that have come out in the last few years, right after the brilliant Ajji. It is a good show with some terrific performances. But is pulled down by moments of uninspired, convenient storytelling that halt the emotional frequency at which it aspires to operate.

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Dasvi Review

Somewhere in the muddled madness of Dasvi, there is a character played by Nimrat Kaur that is full of potential. A subdued wife of a corrupt Chief Minister who is forced to become the CM after her husband is sentenced to jail over a corruption charge the film makes little to no attempt to elaborate on. Sadly, the film is focused on a less-interesting Ganga Ram Chaudhary (Abhishek Bachchan) and his unlimited shenanigans at being a better version of himself.
Dasvi is the kind of film that does not waste your time. It quickly tells you that this is a bad film and everything that follows after the first fifteen minutes of its runtime only assures you of the tottering tragedy that it is. Take for example the character played by Yami Gautam Dhar, a police constable who is hard on a foul-mouthed, arrogant Chaudhary, and is shown in the narrative to be a part of his change in the second half of the film. A catalyst works only if you spend time building their character too. Your protagonists’ transformation would matter only if you allow characters around them to be more than just a one-dimensional presence on screen. Sadly, Dasvi, written by Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah, is too involved in gathering multiple themes under its two-hour-long umbrella to care for character development.
This is sad because, in Bachchan, Kaur, and Dhar, the film has a trio of competent actors that director Tushar Jalota has no clue how to make the best use of. The same is true for the primary theme of the film. An uneducated CM deciding to complete his 10th is a decent enough idea. It also has enough fodder for a good political satire. But everything is botched into a saddled story that is too incoherent, and cowardly to attempt its hand at a brave genre that it tries to belong to.
Dasvi could have been a decent film if Jalota allowed the film to be more rooted in its socio-geographic space and not muddle it with a Bollywood-ised understanding of North India. The film may have had some potential as a logline, but when you see the final product, you realise that everything that you see on screen reflects that the film was fated to doom soon after that logline was drafted into a synopsis.
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