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Two years into the pandemic, it’s not surprising that Hindi cinema played it safe in 2022. As cinemas reopened and audiences grappled with their post-Covid anxieties, few films were in the mood to experiment or challenge viewers. However, if the industry was hoping that delivering formula-friendly films would bring in profits, that wasn’t to be. This year, we saw a lot of films fail at the box office, which is always disheartening, but more worrying was the lack of intent. More Hindi films took the tried-and-tested path, trying to replicate the success of pan-India blockbusters from the Southern film industries. The calls to boycott, trending hashtags and free-for-all first information reports (FIRs) about the most banal details didn’t help.
Fortunately, there were a few films that stuck to their conviction and swung for the fences. Some landed, while others failed (often spectacularly). Which is fine. At least they tried and for what it’s worth, we were here to witness them. In a year when Hindi cinema played it safe, here’s my toast to 10 of the most fearless creative leaps taken in mainstream cinema, in 2022.
Most Hindi films struggle with writing one satisfactory ending. Director and co-writer Harshavardhan Kulkarni proved to be Bollywood’s overeager front-bencher with Badhaai Do, which had three concluding scenes stacked one after the other.
The first ending had Shardul (Rajkummar Rao) coming out to his family. Then, in the second scene, we hear Amit Trivedi’s “Hum Rang Hai” and see Shardul visibly discomfited while supervising a bandobast for a pride parade. The glorious cinematic sweep comes in the form of Shardul borrowing a pride mask and wearing it like a superhero coming into his own, wiping the smirks off his subordinates’ faces. Finally, the last of the trio is a scene in which Shardul and Sumi are part of a ritual for their adopted baby. When the priest asks the parents to sit together, Shardul and Sumi are accompanied by Rimjhim (Sumi’s partner, played by Chum Darang). Rimjhim moves away the moment Shardul’s boss enters the room, conveying with pointed silence the facades that queer couples are forced to set up in order to be accepted in society. However, Kulkarni turns out to be a member of Team Happy Ending — he has Sumi’s father (Nitesh Pandey) tell Rimjhim to go sit next to Sumi. “Maa ka hona zaruri hota hai (The mother must be there),” he says, making it clear that this three-parent setup has the patriarch’s blessings. Just like that, the judgmental attitude of Shardul’s boss has no place in this room.
In a less sincere film, these three scenes could have felt laborious and preachy, but credit to Kulkarni and his co-writers Suman Adhikary and Akshat Ghildial. The multiple endings don’t feel overdone and instead make a point about the bittersweet compromises most lavender marriages in India are built upon while also giving us a standard happy ending.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s love letter to the famous Bollywood trope of a ‘sex worker with a heart of gold’ was lavishly mounted as a feminist saga, but it’s also perched on little more than broad-stroke emotions. Yet in the middle of all the glossy artifice, there’s one scene in which Bhansali and cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee manage to distil the grief and horror of Kamathipura, the red light area where Gangubai Kathiawadi is set. After Kamli’s (Indira Basu) passing, her corpse is made to sit upright. For one last time, her colleagues groom her, dressing her up as their last farewell present. The framing of the scene is hauntingly perfect, with people standing on either side of Kamli establishing a symmetry that wordlessly communicates that strength and loyalty of Kamli’s community. We hear eulogies and stories about a difficult life lived with resolve. Then the camera cuts away to Gangu (Bhatt), who is sitting with Kamli’s baby in her arms. “Tie her legs tightly, the men cannot be trusted,” she says, cutting the beauty of the scene with a reminder of the ugliness of their reality. There’s shock value to this scene, yes, but it’s also grounded in poignancy. Bhansali’s opulence, old-school dialoguebaazi, and Bhatt’s wise-beyond-her-years performance all come together in a way that’s unexpected.
Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment produced Shanker Raman’s Love Hostel, which is about interfaith marriages in an increasingly intolerant society. The film starring Sanya Malhotra and Vikrant Massey styles ‘new India’ as the wild west, where a fanatic (Bobby Deol) hunts interfaith couples down. Arguably one of the most topical films to have slipped under the radar — especially with “love jihad” being a much-raised topic in the Indian political discourse — Love Hostel feels defiant not just for the progressive politics of its plot but also because Khan, who has an inter-faith marriage, has seen both adoration and trolling in the recent past for his worldview. For instance, weeks before the release of Love Hostel, Khan was trolled when certain sections of the internet claimed he’d spat at Lata Mangeshkar’s funeral when in fact, Khan had been making a dua (prayer). The Hindi film industry’s determination to avoid controversy and be political by being apolitical has often been criticised, but there’s a case to be made for Red Chillies Entertainment making its stand quietly, through its work rather than through worded statements. In 2022, the company backed Love Hostel and Darlings, both films that address social issues and bat for liberal values over regressive politics and conservatism.
As one of the few truly timeless actors — how many can lay claim to a career that spans over five decades! — Amitabh Bachchan has rarely been positioned as an everyman in a film. Nagraj Manjule flipped audience expectations by pulling the spotlight away from Bachchan and turning him into a bystander in Jhund. Manjule’s film focuses on the kids, who are from the wrong side of the tracks, and doesn’t make the mistake of using them to prop up Bachchan’s character (even though he’s named Vijay, a name that Bachchan made iconic in his Angry Young Man years). You can see Manjule’s priorities in the refreshingly low-key introduction that Vijay gets in Jhund. After picking a fight, Don (Ankush Gedam) and Sambhya (Akash Thosar) sprint through a narrow lane where they bump into Vijay, who tries to break up the scuffle. That’s it. They literally bump into an icon, but the focus remains on the kids fighting. In the film, Vijay is a sports teacher on the verge of retirement. He introduces Don and his friends to the discipline of a team sport and Manjule uses Bachchan’s mythical on-screen presence to make sure the children’s stories are heard. He knows with Bachchan’s face on screen, people will surely listen.
For a debutante, director Hitesh Bhatia really swung for the fences when he decided to proceed with a film partly shot with Rishi Kapoor as his lead actor. Sadly, Kapoor passed away while the film was in production. In the past, body doubles, make-up or visual effects usually come to the director’s rescue. In some unfortunate cases, projects have had to be shelved. Bhatia chose to do neither. Refusing to replace the scenes he had shot with Kapoor, Bhatia hired Paresh Rawal to finish the film. The end result is an odd tribute to Kapoor (this was his last on-screen role) and the differing acting schools of Kapoor and Rawal. While the former had a grumpy-yet-warm presence, the latter is grating and dry. If the intent of ‘good’ filmmaking is to build an illusion, Bhatia even goes so far as having Rawal in a ‘viral clip’ as Kapoor looks on with bewilderment. It’s a hard choice, depending on the generosity of audiences to really take the leap with the filmmaker, to imagine two very different performances coalescing into one character.
R Madhavan’s Rocketry: The Nambi Effect continued the tradition of hagiographies disguised as biopics and ‘science’ films that talk down to their audience. Much of the film is told through a track where Dr Nambi Narayanan (Madhavan) is recounting his story to actor Shah Rukh Khan during a live television interview. Narayanan and his family were embroiled in a strange case in which he was accused of selling state secrets, but was ultimately exonerated. Unfortunately, it took several years for the courts to officially clear Narayanan’s name. It’s an emotionally-charged moment towards the end of the interview, when Khan gets down on his knees and apologises to the scientist on behalf of the nation. What Madhavan does next is absolutely baffling. He replaces himself with the ‘real’ Dr Nambi Narayanan in the scene. After that, Dr. Narayanan says a few dialogues in Madhavan’s voice and then gets up to walk off into the distance. You can perhaps admire Madhavan’s intent on paper, but this decision to blur reel and real is one of those bizarre moments that make you wonder “Did they really just try that?”
Anand Tiwari’s social drama sees Madhuri Dixit-Nene playing a closeted lesbian going through the beats of a middle-class suburban housewife in Gujarat, which as a premise seems both bold and promising. It’s a massive undertaking on the part of a 55-year-old actor, to play a queer protagonist in a mainstream film, eons ahead of her male counterparts. Unfortunately, the film relied too heavily on contrivances. Like an innocent camcorder entering a bedroom at the exact moment when someone is sharing a secret with a loved one. The film also makes some baffling choices: Rajit Kapur, Sheeba Chadha and Barkha Singh play Manhattan residents with overly-exaggerated accents. Clearly Tiwari’s intent was to mock the conservatism of non-resident Indians (NRIs), which is quite a departure from the way NRIs have been idealised ever since Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and the discovery that the diaspora is an audience to be cultivated for worldwide earnings. Maybe the over-the-top performances may prompt a few laughs, but they quickly detract from the film because the simplistic steals the spotlight from Pallavi (Dixit-Nene). When Pallavi is delivering what hopes to be a stirring monologue about a woman’s agency, the last thing you want to be distracted by is Kapur, Chadha and Singh’s accent.
Advait Chandan’s remake of Hollywood classic Forrest Gump (1994) was always going to fall short of the inventiveness with which director Robert Zemeckis wove his protagonist into some of the most iconic moments in American history. However, one of the points at which Chandan may have outdone the original is in his version of the anecdote which, in the original, had Forrest inspire Elvis Presley. In Laal Singh Chaddha, young Laal befriends a young Shah Rukh Khan (zero points to the VFX team whose attempts to deage Khan turned him into a strangely plastic bobblehead). It’s a bold choice not just for how culturally relevant Khan is for the period of the film (1980-2020) and even though the final effect is eerie, they did go out on a limb with the computer-generated imagery. You’ve got to laugh when you realise what Khan got from Laal. It’s one of the truly transcendent moments in a film that otherwise seems unsure about the liberties it can take while recounting a nation’s journey over the last 40 years.
Since Chandraprakash Dwivedi was the creative producer of this film, no one should have been surprised that Ram Setu championed the idea that the Ramayana was fact-based history. However, the film pulled a fast one on audiences in the first 30 minutes when it introduced Akshay Kumar as Dr. Aryan Kulshreshtha, an archaeologist who starts off as being breathtakingly sensible. Aryan relied upon facts, disagreed respectfully with those who tried to browbeat him, and even had Pakistani friends. Who’d have thunk. Unsurprisingly, all this changes, but the film’s real power move isn’t Kumar’s character, but that of Aryan’s wife, Gayatri (Nushrratt Bharuccha), a History professor who is a proud Hindu and disapproves of her husband’s belief system. “Remember, when some people made the mistake of asking for Lord Ram’s birth certificate?” she tells Aryan. It’s not surprising that the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya (and perhaps the communal violence that erupted afterwards) is invoked, but the undisguised threat of violence is dangerously discomfiting to witness. On the face of it, Gayatri is someone to be respected — a teacher of history, no less — and she’s making a rational argument. Except she’s almost literally a mouthpiece for the Hindutva brigade. (However, it’s worth noting that by the end of the film, Gayatri’s practically mute and does nothing except look terrified while the action swirls around her. A portent of the fate that awaits brainwashed academics? We live in hope.)
Everything about Anirudh Iyer’s directorial debut felt like a risk simply because we’re not used to seeing clever, meta stories in Bollywood. However, all its social commentary and meta-ness aside, one of the strongest portions of An Action Hero is Akshay Kumar’s cameo. Kumar has starred in the last two films that producer Aanand L. Rai has made, so you would be forgiven to think his presence is supposed to be a superstar flex. However, An Action Hero is a lot cleverer than that. Kumar is written as a wry, self-aware and self-deprecating star. It’s a complete departure from the kind of roles Kumar has played on screen and we see him introspecting on his own flakiness, even confessing to cowardice. In a film that seems to be an addition of some very intricately thought-through choices (especially given how a star’s patriotism becomes the punchline of this film), Kumar’s cameo feels more significant. It’s ironic that Kumar shows more acting chops in An Action Hero than he has in his multiple releases from the rest of the year. The tiny but memorable performance reminds us of Kumar’s excellent comic timing (a phenomenon of the 2000s) and how effective he can be while parodying himself. Remember Om Shanti Om (2007)?