Member Reviews

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.

Dream projects often come with their share of self-indulgence and doses of obsession. Yet, somewhere one gets to feel things expressed right from the heart of the maker, who has immersed his soul in this idea for so long. What one misses amid all the plasticity of Barroz, Mohanlal’s dream project and his debut directorial, is such an expression which hits us right where it matters. It is no wonder then that one is largely left untouched by the fantasy drama that plays out over 150 minutes. Part of the reason for how Barroz turned out in the end could be the abrupt exit of Jijo Punnoose, the brilliant brain behind India’s first 3D film My Dear Kuttichathan, in the early stages of the project. One of his major grouses was the drastic tinkering with his original screenplay. His stand appears to be justified since one of the weakest elements of Barroz is its unimaginative screenplay filled with overdramatic dialogues that spoil every other scene.

Vetri Maaran’s Viduthalai Part 1, told from the perspective of a new police constable Kumaresan (Soori), posted in a rural hillside Tamil Nadu village, explored the story of an extremist organisation named Makkal Padai and its head Perumal Vaathiyar (Vijay Sethupathi). Makkal Padai has a history, but when we entered the world in the first part, the conflict was immediate as the terrorist organisation had just bombed a passenger train killing and injuring several lives. The premise answered both ‘why and why now’ of the film’s existence. It ended with the arrest of Vaathiyar, aided by Kumaresan, who is on the brink of getting disillusioned with the government’s propaganda against the organisation. The effective first part left us with many questions about Vaathiyar and how it will affect Kumaresan.