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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There is a telling scene in Ritesh Batra’s film Photograph (playing on Amazon). Two scenes in fact that mirror each other. In both, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra marvellously exuding a contained wistfulness) is at a shop to buy a dress. The first scene shows her standing noncommittally before a mirror while her sister and mother argue […]
There is a scene in Rahul Dholakia’s Raees where Vijay, the symbol of conscientious idealism in Salim Javed’s cinematic universe of the 70s, appears for a few seconds on a screen in an open air theatre to take a greedy capitalist to task for a coal mine that has caused poverty, death and persecution of […]
Soon after the completion of this year’s sleeper hit Masaan, actor Richa Chaddha told Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi, “Say bye bye to anonymity.” Prophetic words in retrospect and Shweta relearns their truth everytime she wants to retreat to anonymity. She smiles, “This is an industry where appearance matters and there is no denying that. It’s […]
He is Farhad, cutting through a taciturn mountain with clenched tenacity. And Forrest Gump fuelled by an impossible to bear grief, traversing long distances like a messiah and being followed by agenda seekers. Or Gandhi who will be the change he wants to see in the world. And Aron Ralston, trapped between a rock and […]
The imperishable memories Shweta Tripathi gathered while playing a small-town girl in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan include the night when she sobbed over the end of a beautiful story. She recalls, “I cried not for what was happening to my character but for what was happening to her story with Deepak. I just lay, looking up […]
One thing a Sriram Raghavan film does not ever lack is atmosphere. Remember the menacing rats in 2004’s Ek Hasina Thi or the crazily inventive heist in Johnny Gaddaar (2007) or the shootout that starts from a baby’s pram in Agent Vinod (2012)? In Badlapur too, the home of a young couple is inhabited by […]
There is this moment in Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox where Irrfan Khan’s Saajan Fernandez says a name aloud for the first time. And it reminds one of Jess C. Scott’s famous quote, “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.” He […]