'Sherni': review

A bit of wordplay sets up Sherni beautifully. Bansal (Brijendra Kala), the head of the forest department in the sleepy outpost of Bijashpur, introduces a local teacher to his new divisional forest officer, Vidya (Vidya Balan), telling her in Hindi that the man is an expert on butterflies. “Moths,” the teacher, Noorani (Vijay Raaz), corrects him in English. “Maut (death)?” asks the confused Bansal. “Lepidoptera, patanga, parwana,” Noorani tries to explain. Bansal latches on to the last word, reciting a poem on parwanas. He and Noorani argue over whether the author is Ahmed Firozabadi or Faridabadi. Vladimir Nabokov, a connoisseur of both butterflies and cross-vernacular punning, would have approved.

This droll scene is Sherni in a nutshell: the fate of Indian wildlife being decided by stakeholders of wildly varying competence, the kind who know what lepidoptera means and ones who don’t distinguish between a moth and a butterfly. Amit Masurkar’s film is dotted with conversations like this, people talking at cross-purposes about the best way to stop a tigress who’s killed a few locals and is evading capture. Vidya and Noorani want it tranquilized and transferred to another jungle. The politicians want it taken care of, and bring in a private hunter, Pintu Bhaiyya (Sharat Saxena), to do the job. Bansal doesn’t care as long as his superiors are happy. The villagers have no good options: they're afraid to venture out, but they also need to earn a livelihood.

Though Bijashpur is a new posting, Vidya is nine years into the job, and tiring of it. She talks to her husband, who works in the private sector, about quitting, but he tells her to keep her head down and keep collecting a stable government salary. Yet it’s clear she isn’t that kind of person—she might complain, but she's incapable of phoning it in (to the extent that when her cook brings a stray kitten in, Vidya initially protests, saying she doesn’t like cats—a funny detail, given the film's built around her pursuing a tiger—but she's soon taking care of it).
The picture that emerges of wildlife departments in India is just as convoluted and compromised as that of Indian elections in Masurkar’s last film, Newton (2017). There's a lot that links the two films, structured as they are around low-ranking, principled civil servants who come to remote outposts and find their work impeded by corruption and government interference. Both films are alive to the intricacies and politics of the settings they inhabit, though both also have the outsider-saviour as protagonist (while Newton had a local viewpoint in the teacher Malko, Sampa Mandal’s villager here feels more like an afterthought).

One difference between Masurkar's second and third films is that, unlike election officer Newton, who’s schooled by Malko and strung along by the CRPF commander, Vidya is entirely competent and needs no lessons. She isn’t sanctimonious or a killjoy like Newton, yet the part of the journey where the audience grows in awareness along with the protagonist is missing. The gulf between capable (Vidya, Noorani) and incapable (Bansal, Pintu) is emphasized to the detriment of the film, most blatantly in a scene where the men get drunk by a campfire and start making animal noises.

Vidya is even-tempered and measured of speech, serious but not forbidding. Balan plays within herself, something she’s always done well. She’s deft in the small human moments: when her mother-in-law suggests she start a family, Vidya bats this away with practiced firmness. Still, a little boldness in casting might have been welcome. Balan as a smart, determined achiever, Neeraj Kabi as a smooth-talking morally compromised sort, Saxena as an angry pile of testosterone—these aren't bad choices, but they are unadventurous.

Sherni is at its best when trying to entangle the knots of Indian bureaucracy. Early on, Vidya tells Bansal that the land where villagers used to graze their cattle now has a teak plantation on it, which is forcing them to venture into the jungle. He tells her they have to plant one lakh trees every year by government decree, and this is the only fertile land. Cattle-grazing simply isn’t their problem, he explains. Aastha Tiku’s screenplay brings in a lot of detail—from environmental impact assessment studies to the intricacies of tiger tracking—but Masurkar and cinematographer Rakesh Haridas also find telling visual hints, like when Bansal is hiding from local politicians in a room filled with dusty, cobwebbed files, ordered by generations of babus just like him.

Sherni ends on a sombre note, as is only fitting. It’s always an uphill battle for those who seek to protect India’s natural heritage given the wavering commitment—and, often, direct interference—of its political masters. As the end credits roll, there are a series of closeups—exhibits of wild animals in a natural history museum. The import is clear: if we don’t change our ways, tigers will soon exist only in memories and rooms such as these.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

'The Human Voice': Coming apart in style

Apart from a few people at a hardware store, Tilda Swinton plays the sole visible character in The Human Voice. Her lover of four years has called to say he’s leaving her. We see the conversation from her end—by turn angry, mournful, distraught and pleading as she wanders through her delectably appointed apartment. To see great actors listen and react has its own pleasures but there’s a special excitement in seeing them alone on screen, holding stage and—because this is a Pedro Almodóvar film—buying an axe.

The Human Voice was supposed to go into production before covid-19 hit. Yet, because of its timing (it premiered in October last year) and its largely single-location setting, this film—the first by Almodóvar in English—can be seen as a pandemic-era work. The artificiality of the set is a reminder that our own homes have become, under lockdown, stages where dramas play out, expensive clothes are worn for no good reason, and relationships fray. Swinton’s character has been waiting by the phone for three days, and a sally into the outside world has come to assume larger-than-life proportions, as it did (or still does) for us. “Escape, go out—what does it matter?” she says. “It’s the same thing.”

From the delightful opening titles, with household objects standing in for letters, to the bright primary colours, this is an instantly recognisable visual and aural universe. One striking frame has an array of anxiety pills, beauty products and a bottle of Chanel No.5—a typically Almodóvarian mélange of fashion and mood-management. His regular costume designer, Sonia Grande, puts Swinton in a series of striking ensembles: a red crinoline dress, a black dress, a turquoise suit, an orange-red knitted outfit, a velvet robe, and finally, a leather jacket with gold lamé pants. Swinton’s anguished solo act notwithstanding, the chief pleasure of The Human Voice lies is its surface dazzle, the matching of couture to décor. (Almodóvar told Sight & Sound the film came about as a "caprice". "I didn’t think it was going to be released," he said, "so I thought of it as an experiment, an exquisite chamber piece to be seen by very few people.")

As always with Almodóvar, tributes are very much the point. The film is an adaptation of a play by French writer and director Jean Cocteau, which also inspired his 1988 film, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. There are DVDs and books that Swinton rearranges on a table: Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Tender Is The Night, two films by Almodóvar favourite Douglas Sirk, Written On The Wind and All That Heaven Allows, and some recent ones—Phantom Thread, Kill Bill—that offer a clue to the revenge-drama ending of the short (since Jackie and Shoplifters are also glimpsed, it’s quite possible that these were just DVDs Almodóvar was watching in isolation at the time). There are tributes embedded in the action too. As Swinton says “vertigo”, she walks in front of a green curtain, which makes you think of the colour in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film. “The law of desire, the rules of the game,” she tells her lover: the first phrase the title of an Almodóvar film, the latter a Jean Renoir classic that he included in his list for the Sight & Sound best-of-all-time poll.

Swinton’s next film, Memoria, premiering at Cannes, is directed by Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She has been a muse for arthouse film-makers for almost four decades now, working with Derek Jarman, Bong Joon-ho, Luca Guadagnino, Béla Tarr, Jim Jarmusch and Lynne Ramsay. “Women of my age are fashionable again,” her character in The Human Voice says wryly. While this is a dig at Hollywood’s ageist attitude towards female stars, it is shaded by the fact that, for Almodóvar, older women have always been in fashion, and Swinton today is probably more sought-after than she was 20 years ago. It’s a pairing to die for: a director obsessed with surfaces, and an actor with a luminous unknowability.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Twice removed: 'State Funeral' and 'The Death of Stalin'

On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR, died following a stroke. The national mourning, during which thousands of citizens poured into Moscow to look at him one last time, was known as “The Great Farewell”. A film of the same name on the funeral proceedings was shot by four directors. Though intended as tribute, it was banned by the authorities and never released. But the hours and hours of footage remained in the archives and were resurrected in a remarkable film by Sergei Loznitsa called State Funeral (2019), now streaming on MUBI.

Loznitsa is an Ukrainian director whose work, in both fiction and non-fiction, takes a critical look at moments of historical tumult: the Holocaust in Austerlitz, the German occupation of Belarus in In The Fog, the protests of 2013-14 in Ukraine in Maidan. State Funeral resembles one of his earlier documentaries, The Trial—about a show trial in Moscow in 1930—in that it’s composed entirely of existing footage.

The thing we most often credit directors with is images imagined and then captured. But with this part already decided in State Funeral, it shines a light on the next step in the process: the sifting through image upon moving image to find the exact one required, and the assembly of these images in a manner that speaks to the viewer. And Loznitsa really does need the images to “speak”, because the film has no narration, and no screen text apart from names of cities and a few key individuals.

The film begins with the news of Stalin’s death spreading through the USSR: images that are most likely B-roll shot by the 200-odd camerapersons who filmed the events leading up to the funeral in 1953. They give a sense of the sheer breadth of the Soviet empire back then. We see crowds gathered in villages in Ukraine and Tajikistan, on an oil rig in Azerbaijan, in the mountainous Altai region of southern Siberia. Loznitsa overlays these with speeches which played on the radio in the hours and days following Stalin’s death—though the impression the viewer gets is of announcements made in town after town.

The film winds up in Moscow, where a stream of people walk past the body of Stalin in a red coffin and Central Committee leaders give speeches (Loznitsa switches between black and white and fetching Agfacolor footage— often in the same scene). Unlike the images, all of which already existed, the sound of the film had to be invented. Everything from the tinkling of a reindeer sled to the blare of traffic was created and matched with the images. If someone sniffles or coughs or waves a paper on screen, there’s a corresponding noise on the soundtrack. The two-hour film is a wonderfully creative example of sound design, especially since nearly everything is made to sound diegetic, emerging from the action of the scene.
It’s fitting Loznitsa studied at the same school where Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein once taught, for State Funeral is above all a feat of editing. Yet, his approach is entirely different to the Soviet montage practised by these directors. There’s little rapid cutting or schematic juxtaposition, just a slowly building picture of life in the Soviet Union in those days. It would be misleading to say this is a gripping film—its two-hour runtime consists of endless variations of a few scenarios—or one that serves up a ready critique. Rather, one is left free to read as much or as little as one wants into the proceedings. People look genuinely moved but was the mourning a sort of national hysteria, as Loznitsa said in an interview? Were the gatherings in town after town a competitive display of grieving for the benefit of judging authorities or a spontaneous outpouring?

State Funeral makes its feelings known through an intertitle at the end, reminding viewers that 21 million died in Stalin’s reign. But it’s in another film that one can find what Loznitsa’s repurposed footage could never show. The Death Of Stalin (on Amazon Prime) is a comedy by Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci (The Thich of It,Veep). After Stalin has a stroke, the party top brass—Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin)—bicker and try to grab power while everyone else—soldiers, doctors, concert pianists—tiptoe through their lives for fear of giving offence and being executed. It’s obviously an exaggerated account, yet Iannacci keeps it close enough to real life to have the ring of truth. If the film wasn’t so funny, it would be horrifying.
In State Funeral, I was confused to see a group of priests among the thousands paying respect to Stalin in the Kremlin. And so I was delighted when Krushchev exclaims in The Death Of Stalin, during a recreation of the same moment, “Jesus Christ, who invited the Bishops?”—a moment worthy, Palin would surely agree, of Monty Python. State Funeral is extremely serious, and Iannucci’s film is anything but, yet the two enhance each other and sharpen our impression of that time. The Death Of Stalin even fills in a historical gap that Loznitsa—rather disappointingly—leaves unmentioned, like how the masses entering Moscow for the “Great Farewell” resulted in a stampede that killed over a hundred (the unofficial count is much more). This omission should be weighed against the gun salute and sirens going off across the Soviet Union, crowds taking their caps off in respect, one of the most poetic scenes in State Funeral.

“Rather overwhelming, isn’t it?” says Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, to Beria. “And nobody’s making them do this, are they?” Beria’s “no, no” is immediate and unconvincing. The same doubt kept surfacing in the 15-odd minutes dedicated to teary-eyed mourners passing Stalin’s open coffin in Loznitsa’s film. Wonderful as State Funeral is, I would urge anyone attempting the double bill to watch it before Iannucci’s film. Satire is tragedy plus time, Lenny Bruce once said. State Funeral and The Death Of Stalin both have the benefit of time and a sense of the tragic, but only one buries Stalin.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Arooj Aftab's 'Vulture Prince': Ghazals in the key of life

The first song I heard by Arooj Aftab was the first one she became famous for: a hushed cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, recorded when she was in Lahore, in the early 2000s. I hadn’t kept up in the years since, so it was a pleasant shock to hear, on her new album, that same haunting voice, but smokier, richer. Vulture Prince, released on New Amsterdam, is a stunning collection of seven tracks: a ghazal album, in a broad sense, but with the spirit of jazz in its arrangements.

This is not to suggest that Aftab, who lives in Brooklyn, is attempting some tired fusion experiment— there’s no scatting or overt jazz chords. Instead, she sings slowly, insistently, over hushed arrangements of harp, violin, guitar and upright bass. The first track, Baghon Main—a reworking of a song from her debut album, Bird Under Water (2014)—begins with Maeve Gilchrist’s harp playing for almost a minute (in an interview with Pitchfork, Aftab called the harp a “lead instrument” on the album and said, “I was into this idea of taking the instrument out of its comfort zone and making it darker-sounding, playing really strange chords and throwing in some dissonance”). Petros Klampanis’ double bass joins in, followed by Aftab’s vocals, stretching out the words, finding the purchase in every syllable. Darian Donovan Thomas’ violin saws gently in the background, adding little frills to the harp’s shimmers.

Guitarist Badi Assad guests on the next track, Diya Hai, plucking a stark acoustic figure over which Aftab sings and wintry strings play (this was the last song Aftab performed in person for her brother, who died in 2018, and to whom the album is dedicated). The words on this track, and most of the others, will be familiar to anyone with an interest in Sufi music: Diya Hai has lyrics by Mirza Ghalib, Inayaat by Sudarshan Fakir, Mohabbat by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. But Aftab’s arrangements of these standards are uniquely hers. In Suroor, which closes the album, she takes the exultant Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai, rendered most famously by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and transforms it into a modal, mysterious track, the harp lending an almost Renaissance feel.

All the tracks are in Urdu, though Last Night starts off as an English translation of a Rumi poem. Last night my beloved was like the moon/so beautiful, Aftab repeats, harmonising with herself. A surprising quasi-reggae beat kicks in. Aftab sings a thumri, in Urdu, then sings “So beautiful like the moon” in English several times with different inflections. Repeated phrases recur through the album, most memorably on Saans Lo, where she sings the title five times in a row at the end, as if searching for the truest rendition of the thought.

I would recommend listening to Vulture Prince on headphones, without other distractions. It will be easier to appreciate the small things that make the album special: the drawing of breath by Aftab before a phrase, the thrum of the bass, the subtle layering of the instruments. This is a record that asks you to lean in. After Aftab has sung a verse or two on Mohabbat, there’s an instrumental passage. It begins with ethereal Brian Eno-like synth over acoustic guitar picking and percussion. This sharpens into a muted howl of feedback before the harp re-enters, and then Aftab. It sounds Eastern, Western, old, new, and just right.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Karnan's song sequences: Dance me to the end of love

Mari Selvaraj is only two films old as director but he has already developed a unique vocabulary, making startling, charged works about the grim workings of caste oppression in Tamil Nadu. His first, Pariyerum Perumal (2018), was about the relationship between a young man from a backward caste and his upper-caste classmate, and the systematic oppression he faces. His second, Karnan, released last week on Amazon Prime, is about a village called Podiyankulam, historically discriminated against because of the caste of its residents; they have to beg for government jobs and can’t even get buses to stop nearby.

The film follows in the wake of caste-critical works like Sairat (2016) and Kaala (2018) in using mainstream devices to present the simmering resentment of its protagonist, Karnan (Dhanush). Of particular interest are its song sequences, Selvaraj teaming up again with Santhosh Narayanan, perhaps the most vital Indian film composer today. As with Pariyerum Perumal, the songs in Karnan aren’t interludes but little explosions of vivid storytelling.

Kandaa Vara Sollunga

The film opens with a bird’s-eye view of a young girl lying on a highway, vehicles passing on either side. We hear the high wordless wails of folk artist Kidakkuzhi Mariyammal, which leads into a series of incandescent images: women rocking babies at dusk, a man drawing on the wall with fire, flash zooms on silhouetted figures, close-ups of wizened faces, hands, tattooed backs, animals, insects. If you see him, tell him to come. Someone fetch Karnan at once, Mariyammal demands repeatedly, to the accompaniment of urgent drums. From time to time, Selvaraj shows the reason for her distress—a man in police custody, blood dripping, face covered. The song ends with the finished drawing of Dhanush’s face, even as his real face remains hooded. At once defiant and despairing, it’s a stunning variation on a staple of Tamil cinema: the hero entry number—minus the hero.

Thattaan Thattaan

A lilting love song in the A.R. Rahman mould, Thattaan Thattaan starts out as a rural counterpart to Pariyerum Perumal’s Potta Kaatil Poovasam before a brilliant turn away from the romantic in the third verse. Temporarily shelving the happy frolicking of Karnan and Draupadi (Rajisha Vijayan), Selvaraj focusses on an elderly woman listing the virtues and hardships of the farmer clan. Our ancestors lost the uplands, our forefathers lost the farmlands, Meenakshi Elayaraja sings. It reminded me of Arivu imitating his grandmother in Enjoy Enjaami, his recent hit single with Dhee. That track too was composed by Narayanan, and shares with Thattaan Thattaan a common vision of rural pride and historical injustice (I planted five trees/ Yet my throat remains dry, Arivu had sung in that).

Manjanathi Puranam

A funeral in the village provides the setting for this folk number. As Karnan sulks after a fight with Draupadi, his older companion Yeman (Lal) sings about his wife, Manjanathi, who died of cholera. Here, too, their societal status is invoked, almost matter-of-factly (The wretched people of our castes/ Would come after us with swords). In Pariyerum Perumal, mourning prompted the haunted Karuppi. This is a more upbeat track, beautifully performed by Lal and shot without his normal cutaways by Selvaraj, with a fluid one-take movement late in the song as Dhanush explodes into dance.

Breaking Point

As the title indicates, this instrumental track is where the film turns both literally (it’s where the interval would have been) and narratively, as Karnan and a few of his fellow-villagers wreck a bus. The provocation is extreme, but Selvaraj knows how the destruction of public transport is usually spun by dominant powers, and films it with no triumph and a lot of foreboding. The music matches this: pounding drums, wails of electric guitar and mournful blasts of trumpet. Even the release promised by the visual at the start of the scene—Karnan freeing a donkey with its feet tied together—is dispelled by the final image: an eagle frozen in flight.

Uttradheenga Yeppov

After Karnan and a few others free their companions from the police, the village knows retaliation is imminent. A classical night-before-the-fight montage follows—plans drawn, weapons readied, prayers said. The words are heavy (Come, stop those cyclical wheels that trample us) but the choice of music is curiously light—not the sort of pounding anthem you would expect but a dance number with a bouncy beat, sung by the cool-voiced Dhee. The nature of the track—a village preparing for a clash with a stronger enemy—can’t help but bring to mind the Chale Chalo number from Lagaan (2001).This ties in nicely with Karnan’s thematic and stylistic similarities to the 2019 Brazilian film Bacurau, whose director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, mentioned Lagaan as a reference point.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The waking dream of 'The Underground Railroad'

The Underground Railroad was the name given to the complex clandestine network of abolitionists, Quakers, activists and former slaves who helped spirit African-Americans to safety in the 1800s. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead imagined it as an actual railway line on which Cora, a runaway from the deep south, travels, pursued by the terrifying slave catcher Ridgeway. “If you want to see what this nation’s about, you got to ride the rails,” one of the 'conductors' tells her. “Just look outside as you speed through and you’ll see the true face of America.”

The true face of America—cruel, enterprising, grotesque, optimistic—is vividly rendered in Whitehead’s novel, and now in Barry Jenkins’ miniseries (on Amazon Prime). This adaptation tells the story of Cora in 10 'chapters', from her flight from a Georgia plantation to a very different sort of farm in Indiana. The magnificent opening sequence, with past and future mixed up in a hallucinatory montage, is a clue to the mythic qualities which Jenkins will imbue the story with, and a reminder of the particular kind of magic he can work with cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, his collaborators on Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk.

The series is largely faithful to the novel, yet also makes a few intriguing deviations. In the first episode ('Georgia'), Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) asks to meet Cora (Thuso Mbedu) on the plantation, as her mother, Mabel, had once escaped him and he’s curious to see her daughter. This meeting isn’t in the book but it makes dramatic sense, yoking the two principals together before the chase has even begun. After a horrific killing executed as lunch theatre for white spectators, Cora decides to run off with fellow-slave Caesar (Aaron Pierre). The episode ends with them boarding the train to South Carolina.

This first episode is close to the standard Hollywood slavery narrative—producers Plan B were also responsible for Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, the epitome of this sort of approach. But as the series progresses, it starts alternating between stark realism and something more dreamlike. The South Carolina episode has the eerie quality of a Twilight Zone episode, Caesar and Cora stumbling on to a conspiracy behind a humanitarian programme run by white doctors and administrators for the black population. And Jenkins breaks from Cora’s story for an episode to show us Ridgeway’s tortured path from apprentice blacksmith to slave-catcher, with Fred Hechinger playing the teenage Ridgeway and Peter Mullan, commanding as ever, as his father. (The one instance where this reordering of chronology falls through is the final episode.)

It’s when Ridgeway catches up with Cora that the show really stretches out. Episode 5 has the two of them, and Ridgeway’s partner, a young black boy named Homer (Chase W. Dillon), travelling through the apocalyptic, burning wasteland that is Tennessee in the midst of a yellow fever pandemic. There is less sense of a plot moving forward, more of characters being given time to despair and lose their minds. Britell’s work is especially strong here, from the blasted sirens at the beginning to mournful horns. An episode later, there’s the biggest deviation from the novel—a short episode dedicated to a new character, a young black girl named Fanny Briggs (the name pops up in Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist).

When Whitehead asked Jenkins if he had any slavery movies as models for the series he would make, the director told him he was thinking more along the lines of There Will Be Blood and The Master. Both the series and the Paul Thomas Anderson films are cracked-lens views of the making and unmaking of America. In The Underground Railroad, when Caesar asks a station agent about who built the railroad, the man replies, “Who builds anything in this country?” But Ridgeway has his own vision of the country’s origins, in which the settlers are the builders. “The only spirit worth its salt is the American spirit,” he tells Cora drunkenly. “The one that called us up from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilise. And lift up the lesser races…well, if not lift up, subjugate. If not subjugate, exterminate, eliminate.”

In a piece on Whitehead’s novel in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz wrote that the institution of the Underground Railroad is “one of the few slavery narratives that feature black Americans as heroes—which is to say, one of the few that emphasize the courage, intelligence, and humanity of enslaved African-Americans rather than their subjugation and misery”. This is even more pronounced in the series, where Jenkins reduces the number of white characters. Except for Ridgeway’s father (a good man but not heroic), the slave hunter is the only white character of force and prominence—aided by Edgerton’s tortured, scary performance. But there are instances of black heroism everywhere: Caesar and Royal (William Jackson Harper), the two men who love and help Cora; John (Peter De Jersey) and Gloria (Amber Gray), owners of Valentine farm, the black Eden where Cora ends up; Mingo (Chukwudi Iwuji), the pragmatic orator who debates John in a scene that’s like a church revival; Mabel (Sheila Atim), whose determination and sense of justice Cora inherits; Cora herself, stumbling from one hell to another, yet enduring.

The flammable sheen of Laxton’s camerawork helps set apart The Underground Railroad from other filmic visions of slavery, which tend towards the stark and grim. Each state looks different—the urban polish of South Carolina, the burnt earth of Tennessee. Lens flare is deployed frequently, sending rainbows and prisms across the screen. This visual heightening is in step with the air of surrealism Jenkins maintains. In one extended dream, Cora finds herself at a station. She wants to buy a ticket and move on but she hasn’t yet given her ‘testimony’. “The train is leaving, and you have not found your words,” the ticket-seller tells her. Slavery is the nightmare from which America is yet to awaken, Jenkins seems to be saying. All that anyone can do is keep striving to find the words.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Review: Radhe: Your Most Wanted Bhai

Most Salman Khan films now are just a bunch of references to earlier, slightly better Salman Khan films. These are interspersed with fight scenes with (one imagines) a well-paid team of body doubles for the 55-year-old star, who does less and less with each successive film, unless he has Ali Abbas Zafar pushing him to try something, anything. Radhe: Your Most Wanted Bhai has in-jokes about Khan's Bandra home, his record of releasing films on Eid, his long-running gig as Bigg Boss host. It repurposes lines from his Mountain Dew ads (“Darr ke aage... zindagi”) and the 2009 action film Wanted. “Ek baar commitment kar di toh main apne aap ki bhi nahi sunta,” Radhe growls, before adding, “I will clean this city up.”

Radhe is post-criticism, post-intelligence, post-caring. It’s barely a film—but that’s not surprising coming either from Khan or director Prabhudeva, whose last collaboration was the mind-melting Dabangg 3 (2019). Radhe is mercifully under the two-hour mark; perhaps the film was cut down from standard theatre length when the makers realized people would be watching it at home. Khan plays the now-familiar figure of the Bollywood killer cop—97 encounters, 23 transfers—called in to put an end to the drug-peddling of Rana (Randeep Hooda) and his associates. Khan does this singlehandedly, as you’d expect, with time in between to romance Disha Patani, an actor three decades younger than him.

This is an acknowledged remake of the gritty 2017 South Korean gangster film The Outlaws; it takes the story, some of the fights, and the score. But Khan doesn’t have the intensity to do brutal action anymore—he’s barely credible jogging in the park. Everything about the film feels hurried and cut-price. The action has the flat, jerky look of digital. The screenplay is fight dance fight dance sermon fight. Jackie Shroff, playing Khan’s superior officer and Patani’s older brother, looks fetching in a slinky red skirt (don’t ask) but puts in about as much effort as Khan, which is to say no visible effort at all (the scene where the two of them have to act surprised to see each other, but have obviously forgotten how that complex emotion is portrayed, is a classic of sorts).

It’s nice to see city streets on screen, even if it’s a ghost Mumbai. But apart from these glimpses, and moments when the stupidity prompts a chuckle (Khan shouting ‘Undercover!’ as he starts to dance), Radhe is a supreme drag, and another outing for the trigger-happy enforcer cop in Hindi cinema. It’s not as concerned with flag-waving, thankfully, as other recent cop films. The only time the nation is invoked is when Khan repeats the ‘I will clean up the streets’ line and then says ‘Swachh Bharat, jai Hind.’ Had he added ‘Stay home, stay safe, get vaccinated’, this would at least have given Radhe a reason to exist.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.