Member Reviews

You can tell when someone—especially an actor—is directing their first action movie. The craft is more impressive than expressive. Sonu Sood’s Fateh, starring himself, has telltale signs. For instance, there’s that ambitious mirror shot in the beginning: The hero looks straight at his reflection but you can’t see the camera; it then floats through the glass like a ghost. There are the over-excited transitions and snazzy editing. At least twice, shots of spilled blood cut to ketchup on a plate; a cop ordering a steamed momo cuts to a villain eating a momo (“my long-time weakness”); a victim opens his mouth to scream and you hear a honking car. There’s an interval slate that reads “Brace yourself, you’ll need this break”. A pointless overseas sequence is inserted only so that a Hans Zimmer-composed track can be flaunted. A random close-up of a henchman’s ear is seen seconds before his severed ear is served on a plate.

Her father died nearly 11 years ago. About the same time, her fiance disappeared from her life and it seems from the face of the earth. And she is no ordinary woman but the dogged Detective Inspector Kat Donovan. Could the plot get thicker? Yes it does, often too thick. Indeed, the story unfolds with much intrigue if not cutting-edge tension. Kat, played by Rosalind Eleazar, is in charge of tracing missing persons. Why she has not cared to find out where her boyfriend vanished is as baffling as his sudden popping up on a dating site. Instead, she seeks the help of her friend, private investigator Stacey Embalo (Jessica Plummer), to track him down, actually do half her jobs, including finding her way into a prison hospital. Stacey’s job otherwise is to nail cheating husbands and wives. Amidst fishing in the woes of failing marriages, she plays agony aunt to Kat and directs her to a dating app.

Aparna Sen, movie star, ace filmmaker, successful magazine editor and active civil society leader, has had an incredibly eventful and diverse career. A documentary chronicling her life and times was long overdue. But that certainly isn’t the only reason why Suman Ghosh’s Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen, should be essential viewing. Straddling a wide gamut - from the personal and professional to the political and public - and employing a wide range of interviews and reminiscences of notable contemporaries, Parama: A Journey with Aparna Sen throws light on an accomplished filmmaker, her significant body of work and the complexities of the times that she lives and works in. Suman Ghosh, who cast Aparna Sen alongside Soumitra Chatterjee in Basu Poribar (2018), has produced a deft 81-minute cinematic document that encapsulates the varied facets of one of India’s foremost filmmakers. The female gaze and the primacy of films that put women at their centre are inevitably mentioned, but Ghosh, taking a cue from the subject’s stand on the matter, does not unduly foreground Sen’s gender.

Parama : A Journey With Aparna Sen is a lively portrait of an artiste, with conversations that the director conducts with his subject, and her subjects. It begins, aptly, with a sequence from Sen’s first directorial, ‘36, Chowringhee Lane’, a 1981 film that brings alive a slice of Calcutta long since vanished. Violet Stoneham, played unforgettably by Jennifer Kendal, is an Anglo-Indian-school teacher-spinster who lives alone. An accidental meeting with a former student and her boyfriend injects warmth and colour into her drab life, but the change is sadly short-lived. Ghosh and his team take Sen to the building — the kind in which the lifts didn’t work, the bare tangle of electricity wires hanging dangerously low over the staircase — in which the film was shot, and we hear her reminisce about how one of her best films, and one whose portrayal of loneliness still aches, came together.

Given the times we live in, it’s a source of constant intrigue that Hindi cinema’s politically aware film-makers have to be smart about expressing themselves. They have to be subtler and sneakier with their views, but also stay just as accessible. You see a push-and-pull balance with the more prolific storytellers like Hansal Mehta, Sudhir Mishra and Anubhav Sinha. But cult-status directors like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee have found it visibly harder. At times, their opinions are nearly too pure. You can tell that they have so much to say—there’s a lot of emotion, passion, cynicism and awareness—but they’re running out of commercial road.

The Pickle Factory is what happens when The Office (U.S.) and Better Life Foundation (India) reluctantly get married (arranged) and have a pious, Doordarshan-loving child that refuses to grow up. It’s the kind of stagey and adolescent workplace comedy that went out of fashion years ago. You want it to work, of course, for several reasons. The 10-episode show revolves around the quirky employees of a family-run pickle company; imagine the readymade Hindi ‘achaar’ proverbs.

If someone were to narrate the story of Identity, directed by Akhil Paul and Anas Khan, chances are that halfway through, the person will get lost in a maze of complicated side stories. It need not have been that way, for at its core, there is a fairly interesting and mostly uncomplicated storyline which holds up the film until the interval point. After that, one can witness the screenwriter being acted upon by the pressure to keep the audience guessing. For, by the halfway point, we almost get an idea of all the principal players and there is little left to uncover. It is at this point that the tedious work of the writer begins, building up elaborate plotlines for the villain’s true intentions and the hero’s real identity (which reminds one of such surprise reveals in quite a few other movies). Several of these plotlines are convoluted. It would require immense amounts of patience to untangle all the motives of the multiple villains in the narrative.

A long, icy road is the first shot of Kraven the Hunter, the sixth film in the infamous Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU). Given how all the other films, except the Venom movies, turned out to be fiascos, the very first shot of Kraven felt like a metaphor for the studio’s long and trying journey with Marvel’s IPs. After all, it’s not a lot to work with when you only have characters commonly associated with Spider-Man and you cannot even use the friendly neighbourhood superhero. Despite being far better than Morbius and Madame Web, Sony’s latest and possibly final superhero outing, Kraven the Hunter, still misses its mark by miles.

Filmmaker Paresh Mokashi’s Mukkam Post Bombilwadi is based on his own Marathi play of the same name. The story takes place in 1942 when World War II is in full swing. Adolf Hitler (Prashant Damle) is under pressure for not having won the war despite fighting it for years, especially from his wife Eva (Deepti Lele). Winston Churchill (Anand Ingle), the Prime Minister of Great Britain, is making things more difficult for him. Meanwhile, in Bombilwadi village in Maharashtra’s Konkan, Varvante (Vaibhav Mangle) heads a theatre group. He is struggling hard to rehearse for a play with the members of his troupe (Devendra Pem, Geetanjali Kulkarni and Ritika Shrotri). Vaidya Buwa (Sunil Abhyankar) and Bhaskar (Pranav Raorane), who are also a part of the theatre group, have made a bomb to blow up Britishers.