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Movie Review: Woh Bhi Din The (2024)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Woh Bhi Din The on Zee5

Woh Bhi Din The went through quite a journey before its release. The movie was shot in 2013 and only just now made its global debut on Zee5. It’s a good thing it finally did, as it presents an accurate depiction of the emotional lives of teenagers.

The film opens with a cameo by John Abraham giving the least-inspirational speech ever by an alumnus to students at his old high school. Being back on the campus of Loyola School leads him to reminisce about his own colorful past with his rowdy friends in the late 1990s.

Cue a flashback montage of a bunch of teenage boys doing dumb teenage boy things. The young version of Abraham’s character Rahul is played by Rohit Saraf, who was 15 at the time of filming. His best friend is Joy, played by a baby-faced Adarsh Gourav. They are part of a larger group of boys who cause a little trouble but generally aren’t bad kids.

One huge point working against Woh Bhi Din The is that a homophobic slur is a regular part of the boys’ banter. And they say it a lot. Given that the movie isn’t otherwise malicious, I suspect/hope the term would not be used if the film were made today.

Loyola is the first school the boys have attended that is coed. Same for the girls in the class. The town where the story takes place is small and conservative, so the boys and girls keep mostly to themselves.

The exception is Malaika (Sanjana Sanghi), who prefers the nickname “Milky.” She’s new to town after having lived all over the world, so she’s more outgoing and comfortable crossing the informal gender boundary than her peers.

Rahul is initially put off by Milky’s free-spiritedness — he’s had an unrequited crush on his demure neighbor Shalini (Charu Bedi) for years — but when Joy befriends the new girl, Rahul realizes she’s actually cool. When she confesses her crush on Rahul, he’s smitten.

Having a first girlfriend should be a happy milestone for Rahul, but it’s actually the catalyst for his world falling apart. His temper gets shorter, he neglects his friends for Milky, and he starts policing her behavior. When she shakes another guy’s hand, he asks her, “Why don’t you just sleep with him?”

The emotional immaturity of the characters is spot on. Their relationships and reactions feel authentic. Teenagers are a rarity in Hindi films, especially as main characters, and seeing them portrayed with accuracy and compassion is a treat.

The main actors are very competent, especially considering how young they are. Gourav’s talent is readily apparent in a character that requires understatement. Saraf is a fitting leading man as Rahul faces the consequences of his selfishness. Sanghi is a delight as Milky, who’s a charming mix of bubbly and vulnerable..

Woh Bhi Din The is the directorial debut of Sajid Ali, who co-wrote the story with Saurabh Swamy. The pacing of the screenplay is a bit off, because it’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s overall a thoughtfully-made film. Kudos to Ali for taking a chance on working with teenage actors and doing right by them.

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Movie Review: Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Kho Gaye Hum Kahan on Netflix

Kho Gaye Hum Kahan thoughtfully explores relationship challenges in the age of social media. Debutant writer-director Arjun Varain Singh integrates smartphones into the lives of his characters organically, emphasizing their importance without letting the tech overshadow the humans at the heart of the story.

Three Mumbai twentysomethings have been best friends forever. Imaad (Siddhant Chaturvedi) can afford to pursue his dream of being a stand-up comedian, thanks to his rich dad (played by Rahul Vohra). Corporate consultant Ahana (Ananya Panday) shares an apartment with Imaad but is dating Rohan (Rohan Gurbaxani). Personal trainer Neil (Adarsh Gourav) lives with his working-class parents and wants to open his own gym.

Their love lives are rocky. Rohan asks Ahana to take a break but immediately posts suspicious cupcake photos to his Instagram and likes posts by a beautiful baking influencer. Neil is hooking up with another influencer named Lala (Anya Singh), who’s also one of his personal training clients — although Neil is convinced their relationship is more exclusive than it is. Imaad uses a fake name to meet women on Tinder, then ghosts them after they have sex.

Imaad’s romantic fortunes change when he meets Simran (Kalki Koechlin), a photographer working on an exhibition about Tinder users. She’s older and more mature than Imaad is, yet they have enough fun together for them to consider committing to one another.

Meanwhile, Neil is increasingly angry at Lala’s refusal to make their relationship public and for her flirting with a potential advertiser. Ahana posts racy photos to her own Instagram account in order to get Rohan’s attention. It works.

The trio also decide to go into business together and make Neil’s dream of owning a gym a reality. Ahana quits her dead-end office job to focus on a business strategy, and Imaad invests the money — although his dad warns him that money isn’t the only thing that can be lost when you start a company with your friends.

While the characters’ relationship problems aren’t new, Director Singh skillfully shows how constant access to social media adds a fresh layer of complexity to them. Smartphones have only been around for an eye-blink of human history, and it’s unreasonable to expect us as a species to immediately adapt individually and culturally to the profound emotional consequences of such technological advancement. Singh’s screenplay — which was co-written with Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Yash Sahai — offers a comprehensive snapshot of this moment in history for Generation Z.

The only real complaint about the writing is Imaad’s stand-up comedy material. Stand-up routines within movies are often uncomfortable to watch, and none of the writers are themselves comedians. That said, Imaad’s material sounds amateurish enough to befit his status as a comic who hasn’t hit it big yet. Chaturvedi does reasonably well given the challenge of performing the sometimes awkward material he’s given.

Neil is the most volatile of the main characters, and Gourav plays him within the perfect emotional range. When Neil takes revenge via social media, it reinforces the technological themes in Singh’s story.

Panday is so natural as Ahana that she disappears into the role, delivering a subtle and wholly believable performance. This should erase any doubts for those still skeptical of Panday’s abilities.

Kho Gaye Hum Kahan puts a modern spin on the classic problems of young adulthood. I’m excited to see what Arjun Varian Singh does next.

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Movie Review: The White Tiger (2021)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch The White Tiger on Netflix
Buy the novel at Amazon

“Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste.” So says a driver who realizes he has one chance to break out of the master-servant paradigm that has defined his life and kept him trapped in poverty.

Balram (Adarsh Gourav) narrates the story of his success via a series of emails written to Wen Jiabao ahead of the Chinese Premier’s visit to Bangalore in 2010. Ever the opportunist, Balram hopes to align himself with what he believes is the world’s rising power, as the influence of the West recedes.

The emails paint a clear picture of how social, economic, and political systems in India concentrate power and wealth. Balram’s family comes from a sweet-making caste in a small village north of Delhi. A third of the money everyone in town earns goes to the landlord, a stern man called The Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar) with a violent son known as The Mongoose (Vijay Maurya). Apart from a few rupees for incidentals, the rest of the money earned by the men in Balram’s family goes to Balram’s grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) — the only member of the large clan who doesn’t go hungry.

Through patience, observation, and quick wit, Balram secures himself a position as the driver for The Stork’s youngest son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), recently returned from New York with his Indian-American wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). The gig allows Balram to finally utilize the English language skills he picked up as a precocious kid. Ashok, Pinky, and Balram move to Delhi in order to facilitate some bribery on behalf of The Stork, with the threat that any misstep on Balram’s part could cause The Stork to murder Balram’s whole family.

In Delhi, it becomes apparent how the entrenched master-servant system limits the imaginations of those involved. Ashok doesn’t like when his brother and father hit Balram, but doesn’t try to make Balram a full-fledged employee with rights either. The expectation is that Balram will work hard for Ashok’s family for minimal pay until they decide to get rid of him. That’s it.

Even Balram starts to see how his upbringing has filtered his expectations. When Pinky asks him what he wants to do in life, it seems like an absurd question. He already achieved his goal of getting out of working at his family’s tea shop when he got this job. What else is there? Even if Balram had a bigger dream, he has no money or connections. The only people he knows who could help him are Ashok and his family, and they’ve made it clear they’d never do that.

Dangerous circumstances force Balram to choose whether to continue viewing himself as disposable the way that his bosses do, or to assert his right to self-determination. In order to overcome what he calls the “servant mindset,” Balram needs the fortitude of the rarest of creatures: the white tiger.

Director Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s novel is thorough in its world building but lets Balram’s particular viewpoint set the tone of the film. Balram is a loner, so something like collective action never crosses his mind. His choices, for good or ill, make sense for who he is, especially as defined by Gourav’s terrific lead performance.

Chopra Jonas — who co-produced the film — hits it out of the park as Pinky, a woman who wants to do good but doesn’t have the full context for the situation or the agency to make significant changes even if she did. With Rao’s history of playing likeable characters, it’s all the more frustrating when Ashok won’t stand up to his dad and brother to demand better treatment for Balram. Then again, he’s as much a product of his environment as everyone else, which is exactly the problem The White Tiger examines.

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