Member Reviews

Hindi cinema’s pathological obsession with Pakistan is so consistent that I just take it as a given now. Sometimes a film so virulent and stupid comes along—Gadar 2 (2023), Fighter (2024)—that it breaks the surface, but mostly it’s a lot of forgettable posturing and flag-waving. On some rare occasions, a film will introduce notes of doubt, or grace. I’ve come to expect it from Yash Raj’s action films, which treat cross-border matters with a strange mixture of cartoon villainy, human feeling and grudging respect. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, like the recent war film Sky Force, which starts off strident but deescalates as it goes along.

धारा नाम की एक बच्ची ऊटी में अपने पापा और नाना के साथ रहती है। कमाल का डांस करती है सो ‘इंडियाज़ सुपरस्टार डांसर’ नामक शो में भाग लेने के लिए मुंबई जाना चाहती है। पापा मना करते हैं तो डांस-टीचर उन्हें समझाती है कि पेरेंट्स दो तरह के होते हैं-एक वो जिनके बच्चे उनके ड्रीम्स जीते हैं और दूसरे वो जो अपने बच्चों के ड्रीम्स जीते हैं। बात पापा को लग जाती है और ये लोग पहुंच जाते हैं मुंबई। लेकिन यहां कुछ ऐसा होता है कि सारे ड्रीम्स एक तरफ हो जाते हैं। तब पापा कहता है कि मैंने धारा को कभी गिरने नहीं दिया है, आज भी गिरने नहीं दूंगा। कहानी बढ़िया है। एक बच्ची, उसका ड्रीम, कभी आड़े आया पिता जो आज उसके साथ है। यह धुकधुकी कि अब उसका सपना सच होगा या नहीं…! लेकिन यह कहानी एक पैराग्राफ में ही बढ़िया लगती है क्योंकि फिल्म कहानी पर नहीं, उस पर फैलाई गई स्क्रिप्ट पर बनती है और इस फिल्म की स्क्रिप्ट न सिर्फ ढीली व कमज़ोर है बल्कि इसमें से वह भावनाओं और संवेदनाओं की खुशबू भी लापता है जो इस किस्म की फिल्मों की जान होती है। वह खुशबू, जो दर्शकों के नथुनों से भीतर जाकर उसके ज़ेहन में जगह बनाती है, उसे उद्वेलित करती है और अंत में भावुक करते हुए उसे भिगो जाती है। इस फिल्म में यह खुशबू बस कहने भर को है जो एक-आध दफा महसूस होती है और फिर हवा हो जाती है।

After playing the chronically ill father of a young girl in I Want to Talk, Abhishek Bachchan plays a different kind of dad in Be Happy. In this dance-drama, streaming on Amazon Prime, the actor plays a widower raising a daughter who has an unshakable passion and talent for dance. Helmed by choreographer-director Remo D’Souza, Be Happy, written by D’Souza, Kanishka Singh Deo, Chirag Garg and Tushar Hirandanani, is built on the foundations of a father-daughter relationship and dance.

Remo D’Souza’s latest dance film Be Happy revolves around the relationship between a straitlaced single father and his imaginative daughter. Together, through the medium of dance, they learn to live life to its fullest. While much of the Hindi film is focused on young Dhara wanting to achieve her dream of appearing on the dance reality show India’s Superstar Dancer, Be Happy is much stronger when it rests on the father-daughter bond. The dance portions of the film are unnecessarily stretched. Dhara (Inayat Varma) lives with her father Shiv Rastogi (Abhishek Bachchan) and grandfather Mr Nandar (Nasser) in Ooty. But her real dream is to join Maggie Teacher’s (Nora Fatehi) top dance academy in Mumbai and appear on India’s Superstar Dancer. The musical drama follows how she manages to fulfill her wishes against all odds. Along the way, Shiv also learns to be a little less rigid and protective as a single father after the death of his wife Rohin (Harleen Sethi).

Dilruba, the romance-action drama starring Kiran Abbavaram, Rukshar Dhillon and Kathryn Davison, has a fairly intriguing premise. To make amends for a misstep from the past, an ex returns to her former boyfriend’s turf and helps him reconcile with a current lover. Yet, debut director Viswa Karun’s film struggles to develop this idea into a cohesive narrative and stuffs it with subplots that feel unnecessary, across genres. The film opens with a pompous quote that valourises the protagonist Siddu’s (Kiran Abbavaram) character — ‘strong men have a character, never an attitude’. Siddu is an archetypal good-for-nothing hero one would find in a Telugu film. Having been dumped by his childhood sweetheart Meghana (Kathryn Davison) over a misunderstanding, he gives up on his graduation midway. Upon his mother’s insistence, he resumes the course, only to be chased by another girl, Anjali (Rukshar Dhillon).

Ooty-based schoolgirl Dhara (Inayat Verma) is happiest when dancing. Single parent Shiv (Abhishek Bachchan) loves her to bits, but is not mad about her wanting to go off to Mumbai to focus on her moves, even when well-known dancer-teacher (Nora Fatehi) dangles an inducement to attend her sought-after academy. Things start falling into place, and then one day, trouble strikes. Can sheer will and determination win the day? Can dreams really come true?

Filmmaker Shivam Nair’s The Diplomat tells the real story of an Indian lady Uzma Ahmed (Sadia Khateeb), a single mother. She falls in love with a Pakistani national Tahir (Jagjeet Sandhu) while working in Malaysia in 2017. He promises to marry her and help treat her daughter, who suffers from Thalassemia. However, after she lands in Pakistan, she sees the real face of Tahir. He takes Uzma to the deserted land of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where she realizes that he is already married and also has a few kids. But that’s not all. Tahir repeatedly physically and sexually abuses Uzma before forcing her to marry him. Once by chance, Uzma gets to know that the only way to escape from there is by somehow reaching the Indian embassy in Islamabad and ask for help. She makes Tahir take her to the Indian embassy through some pretext and, when he and his friends are away, barges inside the embassy and begs for help. But JP (John Abraham), the Deputy High Commissioner at the embassy, doubts her intentions.

A bit of googling tells how terminal erection or death erection is an actual condition that’s very much as shocking as it sounds. It is also the core idea behind director Ilango Ram’s Perusu, the remake of the director’s Sinhala-language comedy-drama Tentigo, which bagged multiple accolades. In Perusu, Halasyam, a much-revered elderly person, dies unexpectedly. But his sons Samikannu (Sunil) and Duraikannu (Vaibhav) barely have the time or space to mourn as their father’s corpse, instead of developing rigor mortis where the muscles stiffen, gets a rigor erectus, causing the dead person to have an erection — or priapism as it’s technically called in which a penis remains erect for hours. As the family — which includes the heirs’ wives Shanthi (Niharika) and Nila (Chandini Tamilarasan), Halasyam’s wife (Nakkalites Dhanam) and her sister (Deepa Shankar) — believes this to be a travesty that the villagers and relatives cannot get a whiff of, they try everything in their power to um… bring things under control.