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You might have reached a saturation point with the term ‘pan-Indian film’, and how liberally it features in our culture writing landscape, but the relevance of and thirst for muscled bravado and over-the-top stakes that travel the cultural distance was cemented with the humongous box-office collections of films like Jawan and Animal. If this year’s hits forced us to rethink what we consider ‘good’ films, many also gave us gorgeous and nuanced portraits of looking inwards, while others dug up the past to reveal something new.
On one hand, compiling this year’s best films was a task in frustration. To find even five films that would showcase poignancy and cast wide resonance turned out to be a laborious enterprise. Still, the ones on our final list give us reasons to feel optimistic because they managed, in a bland and bleak year, to both surprise us and hold out a sense of hope. One is about negotiating how to love on equal terms while wearing designer outfits; one is an ode to a superstar whose filmography dignifies the gaze of the women who love him; one is a gentle investigation into the past by a woman who has dementia; one is a loving portrait of the ugly beautiful city of Mumbai and one is a tender portrait of a couple falling out of love.
Here are our top five films of 2023, listed in the order that they were released, since we love them all and can’t bear to rank them in order of preference.
When a couple elopes in a movie, their love becomes a story. And this story is often immortalised by the tragedy that awaits them. The romance is fuelled by a sense of shared rebellion. It shines until there’s someone to defy — society, family, bigotry, history. But what if there’s nothing left to fight?
The beauty of Parth Saurabh’s film is that it stays rooted in the emotional ambiguity between remission and relapse; adolescence and adulthood; a pitstop and a return. As in Sairat (2016), the newness of a big city might have sustained the pressure to be together. But it’s the familiarity of a hometown that creates the pressure to be themselves. The obligation to justify their love as an act of resistance starts to fade. Slowly but steadily, both Sumit (played by Abhinav Jha) and Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha) get restored to their default setting; to the individuals they were before they turned plural. Romance was the parachute that helped them jump, but now that they’re back, the parachute has nowhere to go; it is bereft of use and identity. There’s a curated distance between the camera and its frames, which implies that the characters are somehow the foreground, and backdrop, at once. It’s an effective way to show that the heart is rarely tamed by the aspect ratios of hope, and the film does a wonderful job of contextualising the tension between who they are and who they think they should be.
The film marked Karan Johar’s 25th year as a director, and starred Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh in titular roles. Rani (Bhatt) works for a news channel, Rocky (Singh) works out at a gym — and also for his grandmother’s (Jaya Bachchan) laddoo company, Dhanlakshmi Sweets (named after her). This would be the second big-budget film this year with a gorgeous, ab-inflected Punjabi hero in Delhi working — barely — at his parent’s company, thumbed under a matriarch, falling in love with a woman cut from a culturally different cloth, far more ambitious than he is (the other being Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar).
This is the thing about Johar’s cinema: From Mohammad Rafi to Diljit Dosanjh, it draws on so much, so widely, and yet is never derivative. If you flip this sentence around, however, and chew over its implications, you can see the chinks emerging. How can a film both play an ode to the past and ground itself firmly in the present? Does it not smell of cultural anxiety — to be relevant to as many people as possible, casting a net so wide that it has nothing to do but snap? Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, though, never snaps. It soars, endlessly, because it energises — not defines — itself with these references.
Jawan (“soldier”) is not just any social drama. It’s a drama based in a country so embattled that the only mantra left is: When in doubt, Shah Rukh Khan. The leaders have failed, the system is corrupt, and a superstar has decided to take matters into his own hands. This intervention is disguised as one of the most enjoyable, pulpy, ditzy and progressive entertainers in recent memory.
A mass movie is a vessel, but it’s an empty one without the liquid to hold. Masala is hot, but it’s only ground dust without the dish. The ‘hero-entry moment’ is a legacy, but it’s only a stranger striding in slow-mo if we don’t know who he is. Atlee’s Jawan celebrates the identity of this stranger. He is an overflowing vessel, but he’s also the dish of the year. When he asks “Main kaun hu? (Who am I?),” it’s a question in the shape of a reminder. The reminder is not just trapped by the big screen. It’s everywhere – it’s in his name, his narrative, his fatherhood, the interviews he’s stopped doing, the loyalty of his fans, the cheekiness of ‘Ask SRK’ Twitter sessions, the venom of his trolls, the boycott hashtags, the stoic nationalism, and a decade-long comeback in the making. If Pathaan was the first line of that reminder, Jawan is the whole punchline. And what a punchline it is.
Avinash Arun’s film has Shailaja Patankar (Shefali Shah), a middle-aged woman at the onset of dementia, overcome by the urge to revisit a small Konkan town from her past. Shailaja’s husband (Swanand Kirkire) accompanies her on this week-long trip – a return to her beginning, but also a pilgrimage to a time she worked hard to forget. She seeks out her old school, home, friends, food and feelings before it's too 'late'. She seeks out a man named Pradeep Kamat (Jaideep Ahlawat) – once an incomplete childhood love – who becomes her tour guide through the chiselled remains of their history. He shows the couple around, follows her, watches her, and sees his hometown through her last-ditch gaze. There is no resistance at any corner. Shailaja is welcomed with open arms, almost as if everyone is conspiring to grant her this wish.
Three of Us plays out like a no-frills funeral conducted by a person who is about to die. It isn't a narrative of memory, but the cinema of life itself. It’s a story of reclaiming and letting go at once. This is not the director’s most bottomless work, but it doesn’t need to be. The film represents the sobering classroom that grown-ups learn to accept. It is an ode to the anticlimactic grammar of living. After all, adult spaces are defined by the breaking – rather than the making – of a spell. And the act of reminiscence need not define the desire to remember.
Directed by Vijay Maurya, Mast Mein Rehne Ka is a love letter to Mumbai that romanticises the city without losing sight of its ugliness. The film has four protagonists at different stages of their own stories and is powered by the infectious energy of its cast, led by Jackie Shroff as the mousy, retired Kamath who takes it upon himself to “survey” other solitary oldies like himself after his house is burgled. Both the younger actors – Abhishek Chauhan and Monica Panwar – transcend the formulaic nature of their characters. Panwar, in particular, has striking screen presence, lending Rani the sort of tough-tender duality that drives the unlikely bond between her and the tailor Nanhe (Chauhan).
The casting of Rakhi Sawant as a version of herself – a quintessential striver in a sea of posers – is a masterstroke. She fits into the Mumbai of this film perfectly, without being patronised or judged. On the contrary, the film becomes a tribute to many like her. A way of processing the characters in the movie is to look at them as manifestations of the city’s relationship with Bombay cinema. Given the cinematic compatibility of Mumbai, it’s no surprise that its stories look to other stories for inspiration – life is simply a byproduct of its telling.
With inputs from Rahul Desai, Deepanjana Pal and Prathyush Parasuraman.