In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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Amole Gupte’s voice is a surge of warmth across the telephone line. “Reema..Reema..Reema,” he goes, summing up what he feels about his film’s review on this site. It is hard to sum up Gupte’s essence in a phrase, especially if it is a catchphrase. He is not this or that and he paraphrases a MS Sathyu film to say,” Kahan Kahan Se Guzre Hain, […]
After watching Amole Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba, you grasp one thing with absolute clarity. That Taare Zameen Par may have had Aamir Khan’s name but it had Gupte’s soul. It was Gupte’s intuitive empathy for a child’s world view, his understanding of what pains a child, what makes him smile and, his ability to disappear into a child’s tender, sunlit soul that made Taare […]
A train steaming desolately into the night. Carrying animals and humans, both equally desperate. Packed into cages, visible and invisible. The misery and the pain that creates the illusion of an “extravagant extravaganza” under the milky Big Top. A circus of miraculous animals who may be angry or hungry, clowns and performers who may have nothing to smile about, a shining showstopper leading a horse who may […]
Kathryn Shattuck, a writer with The New York Times describes Irrfan Khan’s widely acclaimed appearance in the HBO series In Treatment thus, “Mr Khan, familiar in this country from the movies The Namesake and Slumdog Millionaire, and something of an idol in his own, has applied his soulful gaze and talent for nuance to the role […]
Recently a small box in an entertainment supplement of a leading newspaper, claimed that actress Rani Mukherjee would be honoured with the Dada Saheb Phalke Award. Rani reportedly said, “I’m happy that people have loved my film (No One Killed Jessica) and my work. I have always let my work do the talking and I guess I have proved to […]
In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called Invisible Man about the existential invisibility of African Americans and how the ‘other half’ simply did not see them. Their stories did not matter because no one acknowledged them as real. Among many other unforgettable lines, were these, “I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. You often doubt if you really […]
Ramesh Sippy’s cinema. Hema Malini’s Geeta grinning with happy malice atop a ceiling fan. Sanjeev Kumar shooting at the handcuff linking Jai and Veeru during a train robbery. Shakaal grimacing in a surreal den. Dum Maro Dum‘s opening credits recall some of these moments and the one thing you understand as the film unfolds is this. That some of the biggest hits in […]
Anirban Dhar or Onir, as we know him now, makes disconcerting films that disturb the equanimity with which Hindi cinema is watched. They ask questions not all of us are willing to face or answer. The abiding sense of isolation running through his work is not romantic or self-indulgent. It instead takes us into the heart and mind of an ostracised AIDS patient in My Brother Nikhil… This was a film that […]
The poster for Memories in March read – “separated by memories… united by grief”. For little over 100 minutes of this Sanjoy Nag film, we see reflections of life refracted through the memories of Arati (Dipti Naval) who has lost Sid, her only son in a tragic accident, Sahana (Raima Sen) who was in one-sided love with Sid and a male colleague […]
Gore Verbinski’s Rango is bit like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. A story about a quest and coming home to ourselves and all that matters to us. There is the desert and the thirst but we will come to those later. The film begins at a point we all can recognise. A point where too afraid or too complacent to leave our terrariums, we play act […]
Okay, so what if that bus you missed or had to board, the detour you were forced into, the cup of tea that you spilled, the stranger you kept running into or the familiar face you kept running away from were all part of a big plan? What if, nothing was an accident? What if that […]
This April, Nazia Hassan would have been 46 years old and I am suddenly wistful for a wonderful summer in Dalhousie when I first heard her sing. It was around 1981 and my nani, addicted to Pakistani soaps like Ankahi had really no patience for Doordarshan but even she had to sit and watch when a Pakistani teenager, wearing […]