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Movie Review: Amar Singh Chamkila (2024)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Amar Singh Chamkila on Netflix

Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila is an all-time great music biopic and one of the director’s finest works. His use of varied storytelling techniques makes for a riveting exploration of the life of a controversial celebrity.

In the 1980s, Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh) and his duet partner and wife Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra) ruled the music scene in Punjab with their cheeky, catchy tunes. The movie opens with the couple’s assassination on March 8, 1988, along with two members of their band.

As their bodies are ferried away, a song begins, and performers akin to a Greek chorus sing about Chamkila’s life as seen from different perspectives. Some of the singers are characters who will be important to the film going forward, while others stand in for the masses who adored Chamkila.

The montage cuts between groups of singers, all of whom emote directly to the camera with abandon. Rival musicians are hostile, while the older guys who sing about Chamkila being a “horny” guy give some great lascivious looks. Same for the saucy ladies who confess to listening to Chamkila’s music secretly. It’s so effective and so fun. (Ali brings the ladies back later for an excellent, raunchy number performed with maximum sass.)

The film’s present-day action takes place on the evening of the murders, as those who worked closely with Chamkila narrate flashbacks to his beginnings. His drunken former friend Tikki tells everyone in a restaurant how he found Chamkila working in a sock factory. Entourage member Kikar Dalewala fills the cops in all the folks who wanted Chamkila dead, from conservative religious groups who considered him a corrupting influence to rival singers whose livelihoods were damaged by his success.

What made Chamkila so popular was his willingness to write about the stuff of neighborhood gossip, things like a brother-in-law spying on his sister-in-law while she bathes, or randy old men. He wrote them as duets: a back-and-forth between a man and a woman. The first singer he works with, Sonia, is reluctant to sing dirty lyrics until she sees the crowd go wild for them.

Dosanjh is a wildly popular singer in his own right, and he infuses Chamkila’s lyrics with his own energy and charisma. The casting of the women singers in Amar Singh Chamkila is brilliant. While Sonia and others are good, they don’t sound right with Chamkila — until Amarjot comes along a few years into Chamkila’s career. Then everything falls into place. Chopra had never sung on a film soundtrack before, and she absolutely nails the part of Amarjot. Being tutored by the legend A. R. Rahman — who wrote original music for the film with lyricist Irshad Kamil — undoubtedly helped.

Throughout the movie, Ali intersperses images of publicity photos and album covers featuring the real Chamkila and Amarjot, often alongside recreations by Dosanjh and Chopra. It’s a reminder of how careful Ali and his co-writer Sajid Ali were when telling the couple’s story.

A note at the start of Amar Singh Chamkila clarifies that some liberties were taken for the sake of the movie. Nor is it meant to be comprehensive. While Chamkila sang about violence and drugs, most of the songs in the movie are about sex, including hits like, “Brother-In-Law, Check Out My Booty.” Still, the movie does a good job placing Chamkila’s career and his social importance within the context of Punjab during a time of rising violence and economic hardship.

The film’s greatest success is showing just what made Chamkila a superstar. His music is really catchy. The give-and-take between him and Amarjot is fun. Their songs and performances lifted people’s moods when there was plenty of reason to be down.

Chamkila has been referred to as the “Elvis of Punjab,” and the comparison is fitting. Both grew up in rural poverty. Both became bigger sensations than they could have dreamed, inspiring an insatiable voracity in their fans. That adoration was offset by critics who viewed them as obscene. There was no way either singer could stop being who he was, and they both died young as a result. It’s no surprise that both artists inspired truly great biographical films: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2022 and now Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila. Both deserve it.

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Movie Review: Three of Us (2023)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

A woman diagnosed with early-onset dementia returns to an important place from her youth in the quiet, thoughtful drama Three of Us. It’s a gorgeous film that gives its characters all the time they need.

Shefali Shah plays the woman in question, Shailaja. She’s married to Dipankar (Swanand Kirkire), and their son is away at college. Shailaja’s increasing forgetfulness necessitates an early retirement from her government job processing paperwork for divorcing couples.

She asks Dipankar to take her to visit Vengurla, a small town on the Konkan coast where she attended school from fifth through eighth grade. It’s not a place she’s ever mentioned before, so he’s surprised by the request but obliges with a week-long trip.

Old classmates and teachers recognize Shailaja immediately, even though she’s been gone almost thirty years. Most importantly, her childhood sweetheart Pradeep (Jaideep Ahlawat) is still in town. He’s happy to see her and takes off work to guide the couple around the area.

Elements like Shailaja’s past reluctance to talk about Vengurla or the boy she left behind could easily be the setup for a thriller or romantic drama, but Three of Us isn’t that kind of movie. Pradeep introduces Shailaja and Dipankar to his wife and kids right away. Shailaja has her reasons for not dwelling on her time in Vengurla until it becomes clear that, someday, she won’t be able to remember those days at all.

Everyone in Three of Us is nice. The story is packed with emotion even though no one yells, deceives, or fights. The conflict is with a force that can’t be fought, as Shailaja’s memories slip away and as she and the people she love ready themselves for the changes that will bring.

Shah plays Shailaja with subtlety. When she loses her place or gets overwhelmed, she clams up and quietly retreats. If we didn’t know about her diagnosis, she might just seem shy. Ahlawat’s Pradeep is a steadying presence, which might have been why Shailaja liked him in the first place. Kirkire is the workmanlike hero of the film, playing Dibankar exactly like a guy who’s hanging around with his wife’s old classmates and feeling a bit like a third wheel should be played.

Throughout all, director Avinash Arun — who also co-wrote and served as director of photography on the film — resists rushing the characters, letting us observe them as they just exist. It’s soothing.

Arun made his name in the industry as a cinematographer, so it’s no surprise that Three of Us is stunning to look at. He knows how to perfectly frame shots, position the characters in space, and follow their movements. The natural scenery around Vengurla is breathtaking, but the built environment of a small town slowly decaying is melancholy and evocative as well.

As if this weren’t enough beauty, Arun includes a scene where Shailaja returns to the dance studio where she learned Bharatnatyam. The school’s current star pupil Manjiri (Payal Jadhav, the film’s choreographer) gives a jaw-droppingly beautiful performance that alone would make Three of Us worth watching. Add that to the sweet story and pitch-perfect performances, and you’ve got yourself a really charming little film.

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Movie Review: Alienoid (2022) & Alienoid 2 – The Return to the Future (2024)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future opens in North American theaters January 26, 2024
Alienoid is available to rent on Amazon Prime or stream on Kanopy

I’m venturing out of Bollywood for this review because I love the Alienoid movies so much. I’m combining Alienoid and Alienoid 2 in to a single review, because they tell one complete story and were filmed together–kind of like Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2.

Writer-director Choi Dong-hoon’s duology Alienoid and Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future defies genre, because the films contain elements of nearly every genre. Calling them historical-action-fantasy-thriller-sci-fi-martial-arts-comedy-time-travel-family-dramas comes pretty close. Choi pulls off his audacious project with incredible finesse.

In the version of reality that Choi presents in the films, Earth serves as a jail for prisoners from an alien civilization. The aliens implant their prisoners into the brains of humans who live their lives unaware of their cranial stowaways. When the humans die, so do the prisoners, who can’t survive more than five minutes in Earth’s atmosphere.

Occasional breakouts happen — resulting in the violent alien controlling its human and rampaging outside its human cage (in five-minute bursts) — so a Guard (Kim Woo-bin) stays on Earth to recapture escapees and minimize casualties and witnesses. Prisoners are sequestered in different time periods, so Guard uses his shape-changing computer/vehicle/doppelgänger sidekick Thunder (also Kim, trust me, it makes sense) to travel wherever and whenever he’s needed.

The story begins in a Korean village in 1380. Guard and Thunder battle and capture an escaped prisoner whose human host dies in the melee, leaving behind an infant daughter. They bring the baby with them to the present — Seoul, 2012 — and raise her, naming her Lee Ahn.

Ten years later — Seoul, 2022 — and perceptive 10-year-old Lee Ahn (Choi Yoo-ri) suspects that her “Dad,” Guard, isn’t human and that his car might be sentient. Her curiosity puts her in danger when the deadly alien prisoner The Controller is brought to Earth, and his lackeys attempt to free him. After a devastating attack on the city, Guard and Thunder grab Lee Ahn and travel back to 1391 to trap The Controller in the past. But things don’t go as planned.

The story cuts between scenes in contemporary Seoul and a Korean town circa 1400, where the main character is a magician named Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol). There’s a big bounty for something called The Divine Knife, and Mureuk wants to find it and cash in. But men far more dangerous than Mureuk are also looking for the knife, as is a beautiful thief (played by Kim Tae-ri). Soon enough, Mureuk is in over his head.

With all the aliens, robots, and spaceships, you’d think director Choi would content himself to stay in the realm of science fiction. But magic is very real in the world of Alienoid, and the characters who wield it are some of the best, funniest characters in the movies. Mureuk himself is hilarious thanks to Ryu’s deft physical comedy. Mureuk’s two sidekicks — Left Paw (Lee Si-hoon) and Right Paw (Shin Jung-geun) — are a pair of cats who live in his magical fan and can turn into humans (trust me, it makes sense).

Then there are the Sorcerers of the Twin Peaks, Heug-sol (Yum Jung-ah) and Cheong-woon (Jo Woo-jin), the film’s most reliable comic relief. Like Mureuk, their laughs typically come from the unintended consequences of their own spells. While they are great in the first movie, they’re complete scene-stealers in the second.

Lee Hanee also deserves praise for playing the flirtatious single aunt of one of Ean’s school friends.

The first film does the heavy lifting from a plot standpoint, which makes sense with a story this dense. The second movie provides some different viewpoints on events from the first and introduces an important new character: a blind swordsman played by Jin Seon-kyu, who also wants the Divine Blade.

Both films successfully blend comedy, character growth, and action to maintain story momentum. There isn’t a dull moment in either Alienoid movie. Action sequences range from comical hand-to-hand combat to large-scale scenes of destruction that feel more tangible and impactful than much of the city-wide carnage in recent Hollywood superhero films.

Alienoid 1 & 2 are totally immersive, but they’re also something to marvel at from a meta perspective. As giddy as I was while watching, it was hard not to wonder at how Choi manages to make all the disparate elements of the story work together so seamlessly. But the mechanics of how he does it ultimately don’t matter, when the movies are so darn much fun.

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Movie Review: Jaane Jaan (2023)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Jaane Jaan / Suspect X on Netflix

In Jaane Jaan (also known as “Suspect X“) — filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh’s adaptation of the novel The Devotion of Suspect X — Ghosh showcases the same gifts for establishing atmosphere and directing actors as he displayed in 2012’s brilliant thriller Kahaani.

Much of what made Kahaani so engrossing were the subtle interactions between characters, like the tender way Officer Rana looks at pregnant Vidya, the woman he’s helping search for her missing husband. He’s smitten with her, even though he (and we) know they can never be together. Jaane Jaan is full of poignant glances and meaningful expressions that command the audience’s attention even more powerfully than a flashy action sequence.

Kareena Kapoor Khan plays Maya, a single mother living in the West Bengal hill town Kalimpong with her 14-year-old daughter Tara (Naisha Khanna). One day, the nightmare Maya has feared for almost fifteen years comes true: her husband Ajit (Saurabh Sachdev) — a sleazy Mumbai cop who dabbles in human trafficking — finally tracks her and Tara down. Though Maya assumes that Ajit is there for her, his intentions are more sinister.

Maya’s next door neighbor Naren (Jaideep Ahlawat) — a respected but aloof mathematics teacher — is reticence personified, but he’s a keen observer. He puts some clues together (thanks in no small part to their apartment building’s paper-thin walls) and determines that Maya is in trouble. He knocks on her door at a crucial moment, offering mother and daughter an unexpected but desperately needed lifeline.

Days after Ajit’s arrival, another stranger comes to Kalimpong: dashing Mumbai police officer Karan Anand (Vijay Varma). He hopes to find Ajit and use him to bring down the human trafficking racket he’s a part of. Soon enough, Karan figures out Maya’s connection to Ajit. And he’s surprised to meet his old college buddy and fellow martial artist, Naren.

By the time Karan arrives, Ajit is nowhere to be found. The three characters engage in a delicate dance, careful not to disclose more information than they should while trying to figure out what each other knows. It’s a dangerous situation because Naren knows how smart Karan is, and it won’t be long before he assumes Maya is involved with Ajit’s disappearance. Complicating things further is that both men are attracted to Maya.

All three of the main actors give some of the best performances of their careers in Jaane Jaan. Varma moves Karan through the world with the easy confidence of a man with looks, brains, charm, and authority. He instantly befriends his new partner on the local police force, Sundar Singh (Karma Takapa). Even when Karan is focused, he’s physically relaxed.

Karan is the opposite of Naren, who Ahlwat plays with imposing rigidity and minimal expressions. Ahlawat’s job is to convey the complexity of Naren’s feelings through microscopic movements of facial muscles and barely perceptible changes in appearance. It’s a daunting challenge, but Ahlawat pulls it off beautifully. Naren is a fully realized character of great emotional depth, even though those around him can hardly tell. He’s misjudged, but he also engages in some problematic behavior, so he’s more complicated than just a sympathetic underdog.

Kapoor Khan is excellent in guiding Maya through the storm that upends her life when Ajit and Karan come to town. Whether Maya is afraid, resolute, standoffish, or vulnerable, Kapoor Khan executes everything that’s asked of her with precision.

The masterful acting isn’t limited to the main three characters and their battle of wits. Sachdev’s Ajit is a total slimeball. Khanna is wonderful as a young teen forced to shoulder unfair burdens. Characters like Officer Singh and Maya’s well-intentioned but nosy co-worker Prema (Lin Laishram) are delightfully performed and give Jaane Jaan a real sense of place.

Kalimpong is the perfect location for a mystery, full of twisting roads, hidden alleys, and towering hills. Low-hanging clouds obscure and conceal, yet its beautiful vistas and lush forest invite exploration. With Jaane Jaan, Sujoy Ghosh shows again that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

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Movie Review: RRR (2022)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

*This review is of the Telugu version of RRR on Zee5. A Hindi-dubbed version of RRR is streaming on Netflix.

Filmmaker S. S. Rajamouli is the master of the “what if…” scenario. The plot of his latest epic RRR ponders what might have happened had two real-life Indian revolutionaries from the early 20th century met and become friends. Rajamouli’s style pushes the boundaries of “what if…,” showing us the delightful possibilities that can only happen thanks to movie magic.

N. T. Rama Rao Jr. plays Komaram Bheem, a leader of the Gond tribe. He makes it his mission to rescue a girl named Malli (Twinkle Sharma) who’s been kidnapped by the British regional governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson). The sequence in which Scott’s wife Catherine (Alison Doody) coolly asks to bring the girl home for her entertainment is infuriating.

Bheem’s rescue plan is audacious and relies upon his affinity with the natural world. An early scene in which he tries to trap a tiger in a net gives a preview to the wild action RRR has in store.

The British know that Bheem is in Delhi looking for Malli, but they don’t know where he is. They’re also scared of what might happen when they find him, given his fearsome reputation. Only one man is brave enough to track Bheem down — Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian Imperial Police officer known for his tenacity and an unwavering dedication to his job.

It so happens that Bheem (in disguise as a Muslim mechanic named Akhtar) and Raju meet while saving a boy from a fiery train wreck. They find in one another a kindred spirit: someone brave and strong enough to risk his life for the sake of others. They become friends, with Raju going so far as to help shy Bheem meet Governor Scott’s beautiful niece Jenny (Olivia Morris), who is as sympathetic as her aunt and uncle are cruel.

Given that Bheem and Raju are secretly working in opposition to each other, it’s inevitable that they’ll wind up in conflict. When they finally do during a party for the Governor, it comes in one of the most fantastical action sequences ever brought to the big screen, including the reappearance of the tiger Bheem faced off with earlier.

RRR is larger than life, and Rama Rao Jr. and Charan take full advantage of the scope they are given (especially since the film is by no means biographical). Their characters can jump higher and run faster than normal men. Their muscles are bigger and stronger. Their gifts aren’t superpowers but a kind of idealized masculinity with heavy emphasis on physical strength.

Rajamouli uses the considerable resources at his disposal to make bombastic action sequences that are a joy to watch. Realism is not the point, and why should it be? RRR is a great reminder that a cinematic world need only be consistent with itself to be believable, not that it need conform to the rules of our world.

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Book Review: This Place | That Place (2022)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Buy This Place | That Place at Amazon

*This Place | That Place will be released on June 14, 2022

The innovative format of Nandita Dinesh’s This Place | That Place, along with its timeless subject matter, make her debut novel an absolute must-read.

Dinesh’s background in theater and the study of protest movements informs how she constructs This Place | That Place. The novel is primarily a dialogue between two characters, organized to read almost like a screenplay. The conversations are supplemented with other documents, including excepts from a guidebook and a developmental materials for a curriculum, along with notes from the character reviewing the document. The inclusion of these materials reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

The (sadly) evergreen subject of This Place | That Place is military occupation. Conversations between the two main characters — a man from the occupied country and a woman from the occupying country — take place inside his house during the first few days of a surprise military curfew.

In order to make her novel as universal as possible, Dinesh doesn’t assign names to either the countries or the characters. The book could be about Ukraine and Russia or Palestine and Israel, etc. Yet the setting is clearly inspired by Kashmir (“This Place”) in 2019, when India (“That Place”) revoked Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 and cut off access to the outside world. Fans of Hindi films will appreciate the characters’ discussion of a “Shakespeare adaptation” set in the region, clearly referring to director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet.

Conversations between the main couple tend to focus on limits: practical limits on the movements of people under curfew; the limits of her ability to understand his experience of living under occupation; limits on the ability of individuals and groups on either side to change the terms of the occupation. The pair deliberately avoid addressing the romantic tension between them in order to delay the most frustrating discussion of all: the limits the occupation places on their possible future as a couple.

The woman from “That Place” is in “This Place” to pilot a (secret) course to deprogram occupying soldiers, similar to tactics used to deprogram cult members. The goal is to get soldiers to question their orders, rather than follow them blindly and to view the local citizens as people, not enemies. It’s one of an array of interesting resistance tactics discussed in the book. Editorial notes attached to the woman’s curriculum give further insights into the characters.

Perhaps of most interest to those of us lucky enough to live outside of a military occupation is the man’s document on how to endure prolonged periods of curfew. Most of the man’s solutions involve taking control of time — the only thing one has in abundance when locked inside one’s house — or at least the perception of it.

As the book explains, despite an outsider’s best efforts to empathize, it’s almost impossible to truly understand what it’s like to be trapped with no access — physical or virtual — to the outside world for days or months. Dinesh does a wonderful job guiding the reader to empathize with the situation right up until the point when the reader realizes that it can’t really be done without personal experience. It’s a an effective call to action.

Dinesh uses her wealth of experience to craft a thought-provoking novel that doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Rather, This Place | That Place invites further exploration and provides a new lens through which to see the world. As one character states: “One of the things that people without the experience of curfew don’t understand, is how easy it is to keep entire nations subjugated when its citizens cannot access information.” That’s a warning all of us should take to heart, no matter where we live.

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Movie Review: Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (2021)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar on Amazon Prime

In 2012, Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra made their lead debuts in the romantic thriller Ishaqzaade. They made an excellent duo, turning in nuanced performances in a story that tackled a number of thorny subjects. Reunited nearly a decade later in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar (“Sandeep and Pinky Have Absconded“), Kapoor and Chopra remind us that they might be at their best when they’re together.

Writer-director Dibakar Banerjee’s chilling opening scene sees a car full of rowdy bros gunned down as the opening credits come to an end. Shortly thereafter, we learn that their murder is a case of mistaken identity.

The real target is Sandeep “Sandy” Walia (Parineeti Chopra), a high-ranking executive at Parivartan Bank. She’s dating her boss, Parichay (Dinker Sharma), and is pregnant with his child. As Sandy waits at a restaurant for her boss/boyfriend, a messenger — Satinder “Pinky” Dahiya — arrives with a note from Parichay asking her to accompany Pinky to a different location.

Pinky is trying get his suspension from the police force overturned by doing jobs for a well-connected goon named Tyagi (Jaideep Ahlawat). Pinky assumes he’s been hired to turn Sandy over to some thugs who will scare her (he doesn’t care why). When he realizes Tyagi intended to have him killed along with Sandy in order to cover up her murder, Pinky reluctantly takes Sandy to a border town where they can cross into Nepal.

Pinky’s emotional arc is pretty conventional and self-contained. He needs to shed his tough guy self-image and learn to care about people other than himself. He does so first by realizing the special considerations Sandy has to take to protect her own health for the sake of her unborn child. Pinky’s progress is also helped along by Munna (Rahul Kumar), a young man who looks up to Pinky and needs a shoulder to cry on. Pinky’s compassion toward Munna — however grudgingly it’s given — yields dividends when Tyagi shows up in town.

Sandy’s arc is more complex and ties in with the film’s themes about misogyny, double standards, and capitalism. Sandy’s just as morally flexible as Pinky, if not more so — comfortable with both large scale corruption and simple interpersonal lies — but she’s often pressured to act by external forces. Parichay convinces her that the only way to save the bank is for her to do something illegal, so she acts in a way that saves her company and her relationship with him at the expense of faceless customers she thinks she’ll never meet. When she needs a clean place to stay, Sandy convinces an older couple — known simply as Aunty (Neena Gupta) and Uncle (Raghuvir Yadav) — to rent a room to her and Pinky even though they have no money. It’s an understandable act of deception for an expectant mother worried about her health.

The world as presented in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar allows women no margin for error and gives men full discretion over the terms of their existence. Sandy climbs the ranks in her field through hard work but becomes disposable once she asks for something for herself. She makes a mutually beneficial deal with a local bank manager (played by Sukant Goel) who abruptly changes the terms, then resorts to violence when she refuses to comply. Uncle values his pride more than Sandy’s safety.

Aunty tells a story to Sandy and a group of other women about being so angry at Uncle that she packed a bag and left the house. He followed her out and asked where she was going to go. Realizing she had nowhere else she could go, she turned around and went back in the house. Everyone laughs, but the truth of the story is incredibly sad. All of the options for women in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar are bad.

The only woman with a chance of making things right is a lawyer named Sejal (Archana Patel), hired by Parichay to track down Sandy. Like Sandy, Sejal is smarter than the men around her, so Parichay withholds information from her about the reasons why Sandy fled and what he plans to do with her when she’s found. Though at first she seems like another pawn working to preserve the power of capitalism and patriarchy, Sejal is Banerjee’s way of introducing hope into the story. Sandy didn’t see Parichay’s true colors in time, but if Sejal can, maybe she can balance the scales of justice a little bit.

Every performance in the movie is spot-on, down to the smallest roles. But boy do Chopra and Kapoor do an amazing job of reminding you just what they are capable of, especially when they’re working with a great director. Banerjee’s story — co-written with Varun Grover — heads in unexpected directions but never feels like it’s being clever for its own sake, and it does so at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow. Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar is totally engrossing and dense enough to merit a second viewing.

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Movie Review: Bulbbul (2020)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Bulbbul on Netflix

With her first go as a feature film director, screenwriter and lyricist Anvita Dutt proves herself a master of atmosphere in the gorgeous gothic horror movie Bulbbul.

The story begins in 1881 somewhere in the Bengal Presidency at the wedding of Bulbbul (Ruchi Mahajan), a precocious 5-year-old who doesn’t really understand what’s happening. She is reassured in the carriage ride to her new home by Satya (Varun Buddhadev), a boy a few years older than her that she assumes is the person she’s been married to. Only upon arriving at the lavish estate of Lord Indranil (Rahul Bose) does she learn that her husband is not Satya but Indranil himself, Satya’s much older brother.

While Indranil waits for his child-bride to grow up, Bulbbul and Satya become inseparable companions. He regales her with legends of the “demon woman,” a witch who prowls the trees at night on feet turned backwards, hoping to find the little princess and gobble her up. They share the palace with Indranil’s identical twin brother Mahendra (also Bose) — who has an intellectual disability and an unsettling fascination with Bulbbul — and Mahendra’s beautiful but jealous wife, Binodini (Paoli Dam).

Two decades later, Satya (now Avinash Tiwary) returns home after several years abroad to find his home radically changed. Mahendra was murdered, Binodini lives in a colony with other widows, Indranil left the palace, and Bulbbul (now Tripti Dimri) rules in his place. The bookish, demure girl Satya remembers has become confident and aloof. She lounges, fanning herself with an ostentatious fan made of peacock feathers. Satya asks Bulbbul, “Where did the sweet little lady I knew disappear? What did you do with her?” “I gobbled her up,” she teases.

Something is clearly wrong in the jurisdiction, but what is a matter of opinion. Satya wants to solve a series unexplained murders, including Mahendra’s. There’s also the matter of the blood-red night sky and sense of foreboding that pervades the woods around the palace. But Bulbbul and her close confidant, Dr. Sudip (Parambrata Chattopadhyay), are more concerned about domestic issues, like the suspicious injuries sustained by Master Dinkar’s wife.

Violence against women is a theme throughout the film, and a couple of scenes are quite brutal. Not the scenes of violence themselves, but shots of the grisly aftermath. Dutt is careful not to make the violent acts in any way titillating. The scenes are simply sad, accompanied by a heartbreaking musical theme from composer Amit Trivedi.

Rather than focusing on the violent acts themselves, the story highlights a key mechanism that allows such violence against women to go unchecked: the otherwise good men who refuse to see it, as personified by Satya. He’s not violent, but he won’t believe that the men around him are. When Bulbbul and Sudip bring up Master Dinkar (Subhasis Chakraborty), Satya’s first reaction is to call him “a fine man.” Satya is so ensconced within the ruling patriarchy that he assumes that the way other men treat him is the way they treat everyone, and he’s willing to accept their version of events without question. Satya is more suspicious of those who challenge his perception of reality — especially an outsider, like Sudip.

Tiwary is successful at portraying Satya as a nice enough guy who just doesn’t get it, but whose ignorance has devastating consequences. Dimri’s ability to convey how much Bulbbul adores Satya amplifies the significance of those consequences.

Dimri has to play essentially two characters: Bulbbul before Satya leaves, and Bulbbul after he returns. She’s so good at both, but she’s particularly fun to watch as Bulbbul the ruler. The film’s best scenes are between Bulbbul and Sudip, Satya’s foil. Chattopadhyay is terrific when he plays the sidekick to a powerful woman, as he did in Kahaani.

Bulbbul‘s most memorable element is its color palette. Dutt uses filters liberally to set the mood of scenes, deploying super saturated tones for specific effect. The red night sky is discomforting, but it’s surprisingly bright. By contrast, the interior of the palace after dark is a heavy blue that allows shadows to proliferate. It doesn’t have the same unnatural quality of the sky outside, but it feels more dangerous. Dutt’s bold and effective use of color in Bulbbul sets a high bar for her next project — one that she seems more than capable of reaching.

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Movie Review: Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (2018)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

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By the time most of us reach adulthood, we’ve figured out that society is unfair and you only get as much justice as you can pay for. But what if you grew up without that knowledge? What if you truly believed that you could fight the bad guys and win?

Such is the case for Surya, the hero of Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (“The Man Who Feels No Pain“, MKDNH, henceforth). Born with a congenital insensitivity to pain, young Surya (Sartaaj Kakkar) spends most of his childhood indoors. His father Jatin (Jimit Trivedi) wants to protect his son not just because of his unique condition, but because he’s all that remains of Jatin’s wife (played by Shweta Basu Prasad), who died in a mugging days after Surya’s birth.

Jatin’s father-in-law lives with them, and he too wants to keep his daughter’s memory alive through Surya. Rather than keep the boy wrapped in cotton wool, Grandpa (Mahesh Manjrekar) encourages the boy to emulate his mother’s feisty streak (which we see through flashbacks as Surya imagines the mother he never got to know). Grandpa and grandson binge watch martial arts movies on VHS, with Surya acting out the moves and Grandpa teaching him how other people experience pain, so the boy can disguise his condition to the outside world.

An energetic boy with heroic instincts and an inability to accurately judge risk is a force to be reckoned with. [My nephew is basically Surya with pain sensitivity, so I speak from experience.] When the neighbors deem the 9-year-old wannabe vigilante a menace to society, the family moves away — separating the boy from his tenacious best friend Supriya (Riva Arora) and leaving her at the mercy of her abusive, drunken father.

Fast forward twelve years, and 21-year-old Surya (Abhimanyu Dassani) is ready to head out into the world. His mission is to reunite with “Supri” (Pataakha‘s Radhika Madan) and meet his hero: one-legged martial artist Karate Mani (Gulshan Devaiah). When Karate Mani’s evil twin brother, Jimmy (also Devaiah), steals Mani’s locket, Surya is finally able to put his training to the test — against the pragmatic advice of Supri and Karate Mani himself.

MKDNH is a nostalgic action comedy. It is to martial arts movies of the mid-20th century what Super 8 was to old monster movies. MKDNH‘s stunts are all the funnier for the ways reality intrudes upon them. Surya envisions the way fights will go, only for them to play out in sloppy and un-cinematic ways.

Underneath all the flying fists and high kicks is a touching story about families. Jatin wants to protect Surya physically but emotionally, too, long after Surya has become an adult. There’s a compelling subplot about Supri’s dysfunctional family and whether she will follow her in her mother’s (Lovleen Mishra) footsteps and tolerate abuse for the sake of protecting someone she loves. Mani’s conflict with Jimmy is the continuation of a lifelong battle for their father’s approval.

Yet MKDNH is never maudlin. Writer-director Vasan Bala trusts the audience to feel the story’s emotional weight and connect with the characters while always being an out-and-out comedy. It’s a difficult feat that is executed to perfection.

I don’t think there’s any way to improve upon MKDHN. It feels like the fullest possible realization of Bala’s vision, from the music and costumes to Jay I. Patel’s cinematography and Prerna Saigal’s editing. Every one of the actors is tremendous, with Devaiah and Manjrekar making the most of their delightful supporting characters without overshadowing Madan or Dassani, in his very first film role.

I absolutely loved Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota.

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Movie Review: Tumbbad (2018)

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4 Stars (out of 4)

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Hindi-film fans in the United States had to wait until Tumbbad made its streaming video debut to finally catch the horror movie that captivated audiences in India and at film festivals around the world. But boy was it worth the wait! Filmmaker Rahi Anil Barve’s fable eschews metaphor in favor of shockingly literal depictions of its underlying mythology. It is a cautionary tale of the dangers of greed — with consequences presented in brutal detail. That the film’s protagonist forges ahead, knowing full well what doom awaits him, highlights how all-consuming the desire for more can be.

Broken into three chapters, Tumbbad begins in 1918, in a fading village bearing the same name as the title. Tumbbad’s governing family gained its wealth by worshiping Hastar, the disgraced son of the Goddess of Prosperity, imprisoned in his mother’s womb for stealing her gold. Legend has it that there is a treasure hidden in Tumbbad’s mansion, but the aged lord of the manor (played by Madhav Hari Josh) won’t divulge its secrets — not even to his mistress (Jyoti Malshe), with whom he fathered two sons: Vinayak (Dhundiraj Prabhakar Joglekar) and Sadashiv (Rudra Soni).

The lord’s mistress is tasked not only with meeting his carnal needs, but also keeping alive his ancient grandmother (played by Piyush Kaushik), while making sure she never wakes up. The mistress’s family lives in the same house as the scary old lady, and though the kids don’t know the details of her curse, preteen Vinayak is pretty sure his grandmother knows something about the treasure. A series of tragedies give the boy his chance to ask Granny directly — a mistake that nearly costs him his life. Saved by Mom, they flee to Pune.

Chapter Two picks up fifteen years later, in 1933. With Mom dead, now-adult Vinayak (Sohum Shah) is freed from his promise to her never to return to Tumbbad. Their old house still stands, and Granny is, to put it politely, in bad shape. Her appearance reminded me of something out of Lars Von Trier’s Danish TV series The Kingdom, which gave me nightmares for weeks. Granny gives Vinayak the information he needs to find the treasure, calling him a “greedy bastard.” “It’s my only quality,” he replies.

Tumbbad‘s straightforward dialogue makes it highly memorable, like Granny’s ominous warning: “Not all that is inherited should be claimed.” In Chapter Three, Vinayak’s 14-year-old son Pandurang (Mohammad Samad) tells his mother, Vaidehi (Anita Date), that his father doesn’t actually like anything, despite having accumulated a massive fortune. Vaidehi asks, “Then what’s the point?”

That’s Tumbbad‘s ultimate lesson: succumbing to greed means surrendering one’s will to a desire that can never be sated, leaving you miserable and mean as a result. The lure of unlimited treasure makes Vinayak willing to take risks that seem insane, given that he knows how horrible and immediate the consequences are, with Granny as his example. Chapter Three is set in 1947, and with age catching up to him, Vinayak is compelled to train Pandurang in the family business. It’s an act of unthinkable cruelty that takes advantage of the boy’s desire to win his father’s love. Poor Pandurang doesn’t understand that his father has no love to give.

Setting the film in the first half of the 20th Century allows for interesting parallels to India’s national independence, and the limited reach of electronic technology creates a chilling atmosphere. Atmosphere is where Tumbbad really excels, after all. Eerie locations and sets are awash in supersaturated colors, the dark mood enhanced a fantastic, menacing score by video game composer Jesper Kyd. All the acting performances fit so perfectly into the world of Tumbbad, as well. The longer I ruminate on the movie, the more impressed I am by it.

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