Member Reviews

The story of Kanguva has a lot of similarities with SS Rajamouli’s Magadheera (2009), which laid the foundation for the Telugu icon to make Baahubali: The Beginning. The Ram Charan-starrer is about a street bike race, who realises that he is a reincarnation of an ancient warrior who couldn’t join hands with his love of life. He meets her again in the new life, but the villain of yore is also born again. So, the old scores get settled in an entertaining watch. In Kanguva, the romance gets replaced by a father-son bond only that the son and the father are not related by blood but much stronger drama.

By now, plasticity has become a sort of director Karthick Naren’s style. A sense of juvenility creeps in with the premise and setups of the director, despite a fairly decent execution and technical competence. A sample of such contrived writing comes even at the beginning of the first act when one of the protagonists, Sri (Dushyanth Jayaprakash), argues with his parents to let him own a mobile phone. The deliberation to establish that the character doesn’t have a cell phone is to thwart the audience from finding any logical loopholes. The problem with such writing renders Nirangal Moondru staged and artificial, distancing the audience from the characters and their stakes.

Zebra, the film’s title, could denote the game the characters play with black and white money (they call it sugar) throughout the film. It could also mean the colour grey you get when the two stripes of the animal are mixed–which would be the moral tone of almost all the characters in the movie. Incidentally, that’s how you feel about the film as well. It is neither a smooth entertainer nor a problematic drag. In essence, Zebra is an over-the-top heist thriller that is more about entertainment and less about logic and other rational thoughts. As it gets the entertaining part right, it overshadows even its worst flaw.

“The funny thing is… on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook, “Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says with his sarcastic wit which leaves Red (Morgan Freeman) cackling in one of many incredible scenes of The Shawshank Redemption. Pathiban (RJ Balaji) says almost the same lines in Sorgavaasal but no one’s laughing here, because Sorgavaasal is a bleak world with no room for such humour. Here things are bloody and violent, and unlike the Hollywood classic, there’s no room for home in the pessimistic world of Sorgavaasal.

The first 20 minutes of Sookshmadarshini may be used as a textbook to learn the art of writing a setup. Writers Athul Ramachandran and Libin TB are preparing their viewer for a film that falls into an unusual genre but instead of rushing towards the plot, they take their time to focus on establishing their protagonist: Priyadarshini (Nazriya), a 20-something mother who admits to feeling bored of domesticity. She lives in a regular middle-class neighbourhood, filled with regulars who know everything about each other.

It’s not fair to call Lijin Jose’s Her, written by Archana Vasudev, an anthology. On the surface, these are the stories of five women taking place across five households in and around Thiruvananthapuram. The timelines are jumbled and these stories are set across different genres with at least one comedy, one satire and parts you can broadly call drama, each with its own mood and theme. Yet you feel conflicted by the thought of calling it an anthology because it never stops feeling like a unified whole, with the narrative smoothness of a well-written feature film (it’s edited by Kiran Das).

There couldn’t have been a more fitting title for the film that Sorgavaasal has turned out to be. When translated, it could be read as “At Heaven’s Gate”. This isn’t merely ironic, given how almost the entire film is set within the walls of a high-security prison. But the idea of being at arms length from heaven, as close as you are far, gives Sorgavaasal the illusion of it taking place in some sort of a purgatory. For some inmates, this idea of heaven is the day they’re released back into the outside world. For others, the exit sign points only towards death. But then there’s the third kind, like the man they all lovingly call ‘Cooker’ (Balaji Sakthivel), whose belief falls somewhere in between. When Parthi (RJ Balaji, as never seen before) cooks a delicious meal for the inmates, he asks Cooker why this isn’t the norm. Cooker replies, “If you start enjoying the food you’re being served here, you will feel no need to leave.”

Shoojit Sircar’s recent film work has been preoccupied with mortality. Shiuli’s freak accident and subsequent state determine the course of October (2018). Gulabo Sitabo (2020) is a comic look at death, with an ageing man hoping for the demise of his even older wife. And Sardar Udham is death-haunted, not just the historical fact of the protagonist’s execution but the guiding hand of the ghosts of Jallianwala Bagh.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) establishes its Mumbai DNA early on. A visibly-tired Anu (Divya Prabha), an upstart nurse in a city hospital, is jotting down details of a patient. Age? “24… oh no sorry, it’s 25,” a young woman says, holding on to her child. “Pfft!” reacts Anu, showcasing her mild annoyance for having to strike out what she’d written earlier.

“Will you dance at my wedding?”, a young Reya (Pearle Dey) asks her visibly-ill father, Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan), sitting in their backyard. Arjun used to be a high-flying, pragmatic, proud ad executive in Los Angeles, till one day he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. It’s a loaded question – especially for a still-squeaky voice. The initial prognosis gave Arjun 100 days to live. But he’s somehow lived his way through a few months, maybe even a year. While he awaits future surgeries, many things hang in the balance for Arjun, preventing him from giving Reya an answer. The scene ends with the father-daughter’s heavy silence, staring into a distance.