Member Reviews

For a man who has delivered the simplest of the stories in the most heartwarming films, Shoojit Sircar falters a bit with his latest I Want To Talk. The film, based on a real person, talks of a man’s relentless pursuit to live despite the medical challenges that life keeps throwing at him. The film highlights the journey of Arjun Sen (Abhishek Bachchan) through years of medical misfortunes and surgeries and his constant ability to fight back. It also highlights his evolving relationship with his daughter over a few years. I Want To Talk deals with loneliness, illness and impending death - themes that Sircar has deftly handled before in films like October and Piku. But unlike the previous films, Sircar’s latest doesn’t leave a defining impact - despite Abhishek Bachchan delivering one of his finest performances in recent years.

Payal Kapadia’s enchanting ode to sisterhood and the glaring contrasts of Mumbai has a tranquil charm to it. There’s a certain tenderness and ease to the flow in storytelling that makes you see the city in a new light, even if you have been a Mumbaikar all your life. Watching Kapadia’s three protagonists setting themselves free from societal and psychological shackles to embrace their desires, gives you that warm fuzzy feeling.

A woman leans on a pole in her compartment, for support, for balance, swaying with the rhythm of the train. She looks exhausted, after a long day at work. We take in, like she does, the way the city looks at night, bars of refracted light and darkness dancing across her face. This image, which comes early in Payal Kapadia’s lyrical ode to working-class Mumbai and female friendship, becomes a marker of the themes the film explores, and it stays with you.

All We Imagine As Light opens like a non-fiction film about a city of grand fictions. We see a dark Mumbai — the factory of dreams — in which its survivors and victims imagine light. Invisible migrant voices play over a montage of traffic, streets, beaches, stations and hope. A pregnant housemaid jokes about being fed well by her employer. A veteran from Gujarat refuses to call it home because he’s afraid he might have to leave any moment. A dockyard worker recalls the fishy smells from his first night; he speaks like the stink has gone, but it’s his nose that adapted. A woman credits the place for making her forget a breakup. They all sound like stories from the “Spirit of Mumbai” handbook — it’s hard to tell their fate from their faith. The film seamlessly transitions from the generic to the specific by the end of this montage. The camera settles on one such story in motion: two Malayali nurses on the train back to their tiny apartment.

बॉलीवुड की फिल्मों में मुंबई को हमेशा खूब रोमांटिसाइज किया गया है। मसलन, बड़ी-बड़ी इमारतें, बाहें खोले समंदर, चकाचौंध भरी जिंदगी, प्यार का अहसास दिलाती बारिश, लेकिन इस सारी चमक-दमक के बीच यहां बहुत से ऐसे लोग हैं, जो अपने हिस्से की रोशनी के लिए रोज संघर्ष करते हैं। जो यहां की तमाम भीड़ में भी अकेले हैं। ये वो हैं, जो रोज उठते हैं, काम पर जाते हैं और लौटकर आ जाते हैं। इनकी जिंदगी इस भागते शहर में भी ठहरी हुई है। पायल कपाड़िया की कान फिल्म फेस्टिवल में प्रतिष्ठित ‘ग्रां प्री अवॉर्ड’ जीतकर इतिहास रचने वाली फिल्म ‘ऑल वी इमेजिन एज लाइट’ रंगीनियत से परे वाली इसी स्याह मुंबई के नाम प्रेम गीत है।

There’s a Bengaluru that has slowly been invisibilised in pop culture. It’s almost like they’d like you to believe India’s Silicon Valley is all about skyscrapers and pubs, people with laptops waltzing into swanky hotels and coffee shops, and health-conscious folks ordering flour from chakkis. But, there’s another Bengaluru, the one that was once the mainstream and is now the outlier — made up of locals and migrant workforce, all of whom fall under the broad category of the middle class — whose members walk hesitantly into star hotels, drink happily in open-to-the-sky bars, who stand in a queue to grind flour in a machine, and who struggle to pay their loans on time, every single month. The kind of people who wear unbranded inner garments and smell of sweat, as a character in Maryade Prashne says. The only thing they have for themselves is maryade or self-respect. What does one do when that is questioned? When intent is rubbished? That’s what Nagaraj Somayaji’s taut two-hour-long Maryade Prashne is all about.

On Nayanthara’s 40th birthday, Netflix unveiled a documentary series, Nayanthara: Beyond the Fairy Tale, chronicling her journey in the film industry. The series opens with her disappointment over not securing permission to hold her dream wedding at the Tirupati temple and transitions to her eventual wedding at a picturesque beachside glasshouse, attended by the who’s who of Indian cinema.

Once a purveyor of Bollywood entertainment, director Nikkhil Advani of late is exploring drama surrounding real, epochal events – life-altering situations where the decisions are not made based on right and wrong, but on the pretext of consequences. A slippery ground to navigate, he got it right in Mumbai Diaries set against 26/11 terror attacks in the metropolis and doesn’t disappoint in Freedom At Midnight either.