Film – The Wire

RSS Disrupts Udaipur Film Festival Objecting to Tribute to Palestinian Children and G.N. Saibaba

Despite the disruptions, the organisers managed to conduct the festival at a different venue.

New Delhi: The ninth Udaipur Film Festival, a three-day event from November 15 to 17 at the Rabindranath Tagore Medical College was disrupted by members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on Saturday, November 16.

The festival, jointly organised by Cinema of Resistance and Udaipur Film Society, was dedicated to the late rights activist G.N. Saibaba and Palestinian children killed in Israel’s ongoing strikes.

Speaking to The Wire, Sanjay Joshi, the national convener of Cinema of Resistance, said that the festival organisers had submitted the required application and fees, and obtained permission from the college administration. At around 2.30 or 3 pm during the post-lunch session, RSS members disrupted the event, prompting the college principal Vipin Mathur to summon the organisers and the RSS members for a meeting.

The principal questioned the Udaipur Film Festival convenor Rinku Parihar about the intention of the festival. The Wire tried to reach Mathur but he was unavailable for comment.

Joshi said that the festival featured banners and posters paying tribute to Saibaba and Palestinian children, to which the RSS objected. The RSS members also branded Saibaba a “terrorist,” Joshi added.

“The RSS members questioned me, ‘What about people dying elsewhere?’. We offered to extend this tribute to victims of all genocides but refused to apologise as demanded by the RSS members,” said Joshi. The organisers were forced to proclaim that they were against “Naxals and Maoists”.

“The representatives of the Udaipur Film Society said that they consider every single act of genocide a human tragedy and are ready to pay homage to all the victims of such acts. However, they refused to agree to the conditions presented by RSS volunteers – that the society must apologise for dedicating the festival to Palestinian children,” Parihar said.

Allegations of misbehaviour

Initially, about five RSS members entered the venue but their numbers soon doubled. The group misbehaved and pressured the organisers to stop the event. Eventually, the college administration forcibly stopped the screenings.

In a statement, Parihar said, “On the second day of 9th Udaipur Film Festival, due to pressure and terrorising of RSS activists, the RNT medical college administration forcefully stopped the film screenings.”

Also read: Elgar Parishad Prisoners’ Hunger Strike Marks a Momentous Victory for Prison Rights

Joshi also claimed that Facebook blocked advertisements related to the festival. No action was taken against the RSS members who disturbed the peace of the festival, Joshi also said.

The organisers were advised to escalate the matter to Udaipur district magistrate and district collector Arvind Poswal. When they tried to contact him initially, he was unavailable. Later, at around 7.45 pm, they met Poswal, who questioned the organisers instead of addressing the disruption and expressed his inability to take action. He asked the organisers to file a first information report. The Wire tried to reach Poswal but did not receive any response.

“The irony was the ball-passing game between the district collector and the college administration; both of them seeking permission from each other. Note that when the festival was illegally and forcefully stopped, the local police’s representative was himself present there,” Parihar stated.

Despite the disruptions, the organisers managed to conduct the festival. They arranged a new venue near Sandeshwar Mahadev temple to continue the event. “There were National Award-winning filmmakers among us, who stood in solidarity throughout,” Joshi said.

The new makeshift venue. Photo: Sanjay Joshi

Parihar said, “It is tragic that when the festival venue was barged into by these miscreants, Shabnam Virman’s film Had Anhad was being screened. The film has become an anthem for communal harmony in documentary cinema and carries the message of the poet Kabir.”

Also read: Even at 100, RSS Remains Unwelcome in National Imagination

The Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (CPIML) also condemned the hooliganism by the RSS. “The CPIML unequivocally condemns the cowardly disruption by RSS goons of the screening of Had Anhad at the Udaipur Film Festival. This brazen attack on democratic spaces and progressive art reflects the growing attack on freedom of speech under the fascist regime, which seeks to stifle any voices critical of exploitation and injustice,” the party announced in a statement.

“The CPIML stands in firm solidarity with the Udaipur Film Society in its brave stand against fascist intimidation. The refusal of the organisers to remove their dedication to Palestinian children and professor Saibaba is a courageous assertion of democratic rights,” the statement mentioned.

This is not the first time such an incident has occurred, says Joshi. In a previous edition of the festival in 2016, the organisers faced a similar disruption when activists belonging to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS, objected to tributes for Rohith Vemula and a minor Dalit girl who was raped and killed. Joshi condemned the incident in the strongest terms and said that neither cinema nor any form of art can be stopped by such elements.

Horror Comedy, the Essence of Our Times

Beneath their paradoxical twists and turns, Bollywood’s horror com films offer us an ineffably human magic of an age great and sick at the same time.

By now, ‘the world is changing’ sounds a trite cliche. But how and why? There is little sensible analysis available on that – only a few hints, which gleam as cursors do on our screens, and are also like them in that they herald the shape of the beast lurching towards the world.

In 1921, barely a few years after the Russian Revolution began, the Czech writer Karel Capek (in his play RUR) first narrated a scary story about an extremely disciplined and insensitive man-made group of robots eliminating mankind and establishing their own order on Earth. In Prague, around the same time, another group of writers began to write darkly comic stories about the hidden, menacing and morbid face of totalitarianism and progress.

In 2024, with young Indians turning away from print to audio and video, our republic of Bollywood is becoming a hall of mirrors reflecting the intimate secrets of Vishwaguru India’s soul. Surprising! So far it has been largely insulated against high literature or the secret goings-on between plutocrats and politicians to pull down democratically elected governments.

But suddenly after a long drought, it has started delivering blockbusters based on the strange genre of horror comedy. Beneath their paradoxical twists and turns, these films offer us an ineffably human magic of an age great and sick at the same time.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

I have been binge-watching some old horror comedies and two recent remakes of old super-hit films in Hindi: Stree (1 and 2) and Bhool Bhulaiyaa (1 and 2). It was partly out of a writer’s curiosity to see how the two essential classical rasas (hasya and raudra) could be yoked together and create narratives that resonate within India and among diasporan Indians alike.

Truth be told, the genre had hit our screens with Bhoot Bungla, a cult film created by the gifted and irreverent comedian Mehmood. For a long time after that, the genre had no takers. The Ramsay Brothers in the ‘90s tried to revive horror solo, but after some initial successes, they failed to evoke the larger public’s interest.

In 2007, as the new millennium bared its fangs and a revolutionary digital communication technology, horror comedy perked up. But it took India a whole decade for Stree (2018) to arrive on our screens. The southern film industry suddenly showed us a sluggish Bollywood hooked to Hollywood, whose actors and directors needed Hindi-Urdu film scripts and dialogues served to them in Roman as they walked a new path to the public’s hearts and wallets.

Always more grounded with a sharp ear for dialects, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada films easily combined mythical spooky characters with irreverent comedy that came out of metros and armed itself with with rural goddesses, spooks, shamans and rural kulaks in ancient ancestral havelis. The genre thrives on pan-Indian patriarchal khandans whose young are educated abroad and visit home carrying with them unthinkable life choices.

Of the two major hits in Hindi, Stree is based on Kannada folklore and Bhool Bhulaiyaa (two seasons with a third in the making) is a remake of the Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu.

The narratives of all these people with fierce-looking patriarchs barking out orders are nevertheless led by the young, who have wandered into what to them by now is an alien culture. The havelis, their inherited spooks as well as scared and mysterious inhabitants provide the backdrop to high horror, while comedy derives from the frantic bumbling attempts of the loud young visitors at injecting their own thinking while also trying to make themselves understood to their families frozen in time.

Keeping the ghosts propitiated with booze and blood provides a nice side income to local black magicians, priests and their sidekicks, who lead the comic subplot.

Some common pan-India patterns emerge in all. One is the simultaneous rise of mobile connectivity in the most regressive rural areas, where many affluent families have sent their young abroad for higher learning. Well, they return only to find an India being pushed towards a ritualistic feudal past and a Hindu dharma to which their families subscribe.

Women are educated now and wear modern clothes, but rural or urban, most families will organise month-long wedding festivities like movable feasts carrying the young and the baraatis from Europe to metro cities. The final stopover is in their native village, rich in both horror and comic clashes between the living and the dead.

Also read | ‘Stree 2’: A Mediocre Film of Ideas, Desperately Trying to Become a Spectacle

Public opinion is the final arbiter for all filmmakers keen to rake in enough on the first opening to cover costs and more. With porn flowing freely into smartphones at the press of a button, the truth is, all the officially young have turned away from old world romances between ghosts and mortals (from Madhumati to Nagin) that thrived on tree-hugging in forests and dream sequences.

Even the music and the dances presented by crowds dressed in faux rural ethnic costumes (like Gujarat’s much-publicised Garba today pushes the envelope some more with the irreverent braiding of bhangra pop and desi rap and ye olde Bengali romantic ditties like ‘Aami je Tumaar’).

Isolated from frustrated and sour family elders and greedy priestly classes thriving on rituals, the celebrations of temple festivals, exorcism and ghost-busting, all that the havelis now offer are tourist packages or solitude and women left behind nursing many anxieties. They and their souls provide the opportunity to populate films with ugly form-changing ghosts, demure sexy bahus and sex-crazed young teens.

As India – and indeed the world – descend more and more into existential terror and despair, the confused young, brought up in a dehumanised world of Facebook, Insta and smartphone images and podcasts, enjoy sequences like an educated female ghost flying in the air, reading messages scrawled on walls in red such as “O stree kal aana” (in Stree) and turning back, while the uneducated male ghost disregards the words to steal ‘modernised’ women. The male ghost drags ‘modern’ women to his lair and punishes them, no not by raping, but dressing them as tonsured female monks in white.

These films are a vaudeville version of Mira Nair’s film Water, and the dishevelled and mad ghost woman dancing alone in a haunted part of the haveli in candle-lit halls can be read as a spoof of all those grand operatic Sanjay Leela Bhansali films.

The real immutable subject of horror coms are backgrounds. They are like the invisible cities of which Italo Calvino wrote, designed to counter boredom and drift. How could you otherwise survive so much chaos and extermination worldwide?

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

In Gladiator II, Director Ridley Scott Goes Through the Motions, Retreading Old Ground

While the first one held attention with its striking performances, this one plays it safe.

What happens when you take one of the most irreverent filmmakers of our times, and force him to be sombre, sincere and melodramatic? The result is a film like Gladiator II. It’s not to say that the sequel doesn’t have the campy goodness of the original, especially in the turns by Denzel Washington playing Macrinus (a gladiator-turned-influential figure in Rome), Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger playing Emperor twins Geta and Caracalla (a more sadistic version of Romulus and Remus), but there’s something amiss.

Gladiator (2000), starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen among others, fell into place around Crowe’s astounding central performance as Maximus Decimus Meridius — equal parts moving, thrilling, actor and star. Paul Mescal’s performance never quite lends gravitas to the sequel, and it might not have much to do with the actor himself, or even the written word. Something never quite clicks into place about Lucius (Mescal) and why he’s a protagonist worth rooting for.

Director Ridley Scott established Maximus as a haunted father/husband with a chilling shot (by John Mathieson, who returns to his duties in the sequel too) when he’s hugging the feet of his wife’s burnt corpse hanging from the roof of his home. Even in melodrama, the 2000 film knew economy and restraint, something the sequel never comes close to imbibing. The excesses of Gladiator II only seem to convey its big budget and emphasise on its scale, but they never quite communicate any feelings. It’s a shame really, because on paper, Scott still seems to have a lot of fondness for that world.

Gladiator II begins two decades after the events of the first film. Rome hasn’t become the democracy as envisioned by Marcus Aurelius, something Maximus gave his life for, after killing Commodus (Phoenix). If anything, the Romans have become even more imperialist, conquering all the way till the Northern parts of Africa under the able leadership of their General Accacius (a world-weary Pedro Pascal). After giving the viewers a refresher on the most iconic images from the first film, the film begins in Numidia, a North African kingdom, and the last frontier for the Roman empire to gain complete domination of the region. The Numidian forces are commanded by a pale-looking boy(Mescal), the runaway prince of the Roman empire, known by the locals as Hannos.

Also read: ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’, a Film That Forces us to Revise Our Notions of the Real and Truthful

An an epic battle sequence quickly disintegrates after Hannos sees his wife killed on Accacius’s orders. Hannos is grievously injured, and taken prisoner by the Roman army. Stewing in his vengeance for Accacius’s head, Hannos goes on to become a renowned gladiator in the Colosseum – the prime entertainment arena in Rome – for the amusement of the psychotic twin emperors, and the people. As Commodus sums up the plot of the first film, “The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story!” Scott retreads the same arc as the last time, without any surprises, which is frankly shocking for a filmmaker like him.

But it becomes apparent pretty early on that Scott’s heart isn’t fully into the sequel. Especially, when I saw CGI baboons fighting Hanno in a trial by combat. The film does its best to convince us that they’re real, and probably even Hollywood with its thousands of overworked VFX artists couldn’t make it look more realistic than this, but once I picked on its artificial beasts, the stakes for the fight dissipated almost immediately. Similarly with some more CGI sharks and a rhinoceros; I don’t doubt Scott did his best to make the creatures seem as realistic as possible, but I was largely unmoved by any of the battle set-pieces. The action in Gladiator II is its most visceral during hand-to-hand combat sequences.

Mescal fully commits to the physicality of his character, fighting with nothing to lose. But the impact of most action set-pieces are muted, compared to the visceral sequences in the original film (put together with fewer resources). It’s not Scott’s fault that the Indian censors cut a beheading scene (oh, the irony!), resulting in a jump-cut in the middle of a thrilling battle sequence.

It also doesn’t help that the sequel is full of adequate-but-largely unmemorable performances. Mescal goes in the opposite direction of Crowe’s brooding Maximus, and is shown to like to talk to an Indian doctor, Ravi (Alexander Karim) tasked with mending the Gladiators in the arena. Ravi, hailing from Varanasi we’re told, almost becomes Hanno’s therapist. You can see Scott and writers Peter Craig and David Scarpa, trying to repeat the magnificence of Djimon Honsou from the first film, whose character, Juba, lends so much heft to the scenes with Maximus.

Washington, playing a slave-turned-gladiator-turned-free man-turned-politician Macrinus, is a treat to watch as he chews the scenery with his New York accent, not bothering to do an affectation for period specificity. It’s a thrilling, scene-stealing performance that is let down by a rushed, nondescript send off. Pascal shows promise as the dutiful, conscientious general, who realises the cost of war he’s inflicting on behalf of his reckless, apathetic emperors. But even his Accacius doesn’t get the real estate that he deserves to flourish.

Gladiator II is the kind of busy film, where a lot appears to be happening. But once you step back, you see how the narrative is resting on proven territory, rather than trying something new. This is the kind of sequel that is green-lit because of spreadsheets, with business consultants approximating how many seats it will fill within the first weekend, even in a worst-case scenario. This might be a safe, respectable sequel for a groundbreaking action film. But I’m almost certain that Scott — who would mock his creation rather than adore it — will not think about this film after the opening weekend.

Dibakar Bannerjee’s Unreleased Film Tees Explores the Stories of Three Generations of Kashmiris

After commissioning the film, Netflix has not yet put it on its platform and has no plans of doing so.

In Tees, Dibakar Banerjee explores the way personal histories sometimes completely conflict with official narratives of the past and present. The film looks at three generations of a Kashmiri Muslim family’s lives to tell a story of loss, grief, political turmoil and freedom. In the 90’s, Ayesha (Manisha Koirala) struggles to deal with growing communal unrest in Srinagar, finding refuge in her memories of a shared cultural identity with the Pandits of her city.

Three decades later, her daughter Zia Draboo (a mesmerising Huma Qureshi) and her partner Meera (Ruchi Pujara) run pillar to post trying to buy a flat in Mumbai, with housing societies rejecting them both for their sexuality as well as Zia’s Muslim name. “All this is happening because I am Zia with a ‘Z’ and not a ‘J’,” she cries at one point.

More than two decades later, in 2042, Zia and Meera’s son Anhad Draboo (Shashank Arora) has his manuscript ‘Tees’ rejected by the Literature and Arts Commission of a dystopian state, owing to the sensitive nature of its content.

In an ironic turn of events, Dibakar Banerjee’s film has met the same fate as Anhad’s book. Commissioned by Netflix, the film has been in limbo since its completion in 2022, when the streaming platform shelved its release. Netflix has since said that it has no plans to release the film. In an interview with Deadline, Banerjee said, “Netflix has never given me any other reason except they don’t know if this is the right time to release the film. Given what happened with Tandav, the only conclusion to reach is that Netflix is reluctant to release the film out of fear of being similarly targeted. But the film I have made is very different to the web series in question.” Tandav, a show on Amazon Prime, faced criticism and protests from Hindutva supporters who objected to the show’s references to Lord Shiva, with criminal cases being filed against Prime Video executives, cast, and crew.

Premiering at the Dharamshala International Film Festival last weekend, Tees is now in the hands of potential buyers and discerning festival audiences. While the film depicts a future dystopia, it seems the censorship and bureaucratic authoritarianism that impact Anhad’s book have affected the film’s future too, in the here and now. The all-powerful, surveillance state in Tees doesn’t seem to be too far off given the predicament the film finds itself in.

Through its 142-minute run-time, writers Banerjee and Gaurav Solanki deal with a plethora of complicated issues like homophobia, Islamophobia, displacement, generational trauma and the eventual banality of tech-based surveillance. At no point however, does the script belabour the matter, coursing through the lives of its characters with empathy, complexity and humour. Even as Ayesha and her Pandit friend Usha seem to be caught in the turmoil of communalism, their relationship becoming strained, Banerjee never leaves the messy grey area for the safe harbours of a black and white fallout over identity.

Food becomes an important marker of a multifaceted identity, particularly to Ayesha. “Let’s put your (Hindu) recipes and ours (Muslim) together and create a cookbook so that others can see what Kashmiri food is all about,” she tells her friend Usha. Food here may divide, but it also brings the two friends together. Usha and her husband’s final escape from Srinagar is arranged by Ayesha, even as she cleverly uses the unrest to steal Usha’s recipes from her home. Ayesha takes from Usha that which she will most remember her friend by, their physical separation also turning into an existential one. Koirala plays the chaotic and confident Ayesha with a beautiful restrained and quiet quality. Several long shots of her face as she talks to her Pandit friend on the phone reflect perfectly her inability to face the present without the glint of nostalgia.

In 2042, Anhad’s world is restricted and constantly surveilled. The state intervenes in every aspect of his life, even sounding out warnings if he raises his voice. Cinematographer Rajan Palit does well to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, keeping his shots tight and lighting neon and sparse. What is particularly interesting about this timeline is Banerjee’s ability to show not tell. The technological tools and gadgets are used matter of factly, the audience getting used to their functions slowly on their own. There is no real explanation about what kind of society the dystopian state has organised but you realise it is fundamentally graded and unequal based on how different characters are treated and the privileges they are afforded. Anhad’s Aadhar card level is too low for him to be able to access several areas of a metro station, for example.

This access is also determined by how pliant you are to state sponsored propaganda. Anhad’s book deals with the anti-Muslim riots of 2030 in Mumbai (therefore the name Tees), an event that is neither spoken nor written about as per the dictates of the government. Naturally his manuscript is rejected. He tries to publish a cookbook based on his grandmother’s Kashmiri recipes but that too is rejected (because of the use of the word ‘Kashmir’) in a ploy to get him to write a pro-government version of Tees. Shashank Arora is excellent as a prostitute-cum-writer battling with the mighty arm of state censorship, his angst and seething anger visible, even under the veil of humour. His scenes with the family housekeeper, played by Naseeruddin Shah are particularly hilarious, the latter having completely disappeared into his role as Gasha.

Perhaps the best thing about Tees is in the way it treats its audience as intelligent and perceptive. There is so much that is kept out of the frame, leaving it to the audience to imagine and put together. We see Zia and Meera’s contentious relationship, but we are never shown how they break up. We know they have a child, Anhad, but we don’t know how he ends up with Zia’s grandmother and not Meera. We see Zia have a mental breakdown, where she flirts with the idea of suicide, but we are never actually witness to her eventual suicide. Most importantly, the riots of 2030 are alluded to– when Muslims were set on fire and thrown into swimming pools – but never depicted on screen. Everything that comes to pass is foreshadowed and therefore left to the audience to work out.

On the other hand, there could be some discomfort in the way the director, who has no history or relationship with Kashmir, has told its complicated story. At several points, one could ask whether it is ‘appropriate’ for Banerjee to be the one telling this story. At the Q&A after the screening, an audience member did indeed ask him this question to which his reply was, that after an artist has told stories that ‘belong’ to them, it is only natural to explore those that they may not personally be associated with.

In the film, in the end, what connects the three generations to each other and stands in opposition to tyranny is their memories. Ayesha’s memories of living in a peaceful, multicultural past, Zia’s memories of leaving a turbulent Srinagar for Delhi, and Anhad’s memories of the riots of 2030. “My memory is again in the way of your history,” writes Agha Shahid Ali in his poem ‘Farewell’, and that is exactly what the memories of the Draboo family represent — an alternative, uncensored version of the truth.

‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’: A Lifeless Spy Franchise Prevails Over Filmmaker Duo Raj & DK

The Amazon Prime series is arguably the safest and weakest project Raj & DK have taken part in.

The choices in Citadel: Honey Bunny sing less frequently compared to other undertakings of the Raj & DK filmmaker duo. An offshoot of Amazon Prime’s gazillion-dollar spy franchise pitted against the silliness of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, etc., Raj & DK’s latest carries the baggage of an over-embellished universe tensely fitted into a studio-approved runtime. Like its American counterpart helmed by the Russo brothers, even the Indian version spans six episodes with a duration of 40-50 minutes each.

No one stops to smell the flowers in Citadel; every detail is synthesised in a manner for a payoff. Citadel is the kind of shiny, continuously-pruned-by-audience-testing franchise that seems to be at war with the strong authorial voice of its creator-duo: famous for their ironic, whimsical, do-it-yourself aesthetic. Having suffered through the American series, starring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden, I remember thinking even a ‘bad’ Raj & DK show would be an improvement for Citadel.

Honey Bunny has some of Raj & DK’s eccentricities, but I couldn’t help but feel that they were stifled by the larger universe created by Josh Applebaum, Bryan Oh and David Weil. They do an acceptable job of creating two Indian characters, who will tie into the larger world of the show, but having seen Raj & DK being unhinged (in a good way) with their choices in their original shows, no one will blame viewers for feeling slightly let-down by Citadel: Honey Bunny.

Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) is a struggling actress in Mumbai, in the early 90s. Bunny or Rahi Gambhir (Varun Dhawan) is a Bollywood stuntman in the same era. They’re together when the show begins. As acquaintances? Lovers? Strugglers? The show doesn’t dwell on it. We’re told Rahi moonlights as a secret agent with some trusted friends (and fellow orphans) – Chacko (Shivankit Parihar), seeming like always a minute away from breaking into a TVF monologue about friendship, and Ludo (Sohum Majumdar), who I suspected as a possible traitor early on for some reason. They work for Vishwa (Kay Kay Menon, continuing his superb run after Farzi), locked in a battle with a rival organisation headed by Zuni (Simran). Their mission should they choose to accept it – is to steal a ‘disk’ from a middle-man (a reliably lecherous Parmeet Sethi).

Like its predecessor, Citadel: Honey Bunny keeps cutting between two timelines: in 1992 and 2000. There are affectionate odes to the era in the form of Rahi’s bike, which seems to be like the one Shah Rukh Khan rode in Deewana (1992) – the song Koi Na Koi Chahiye also playing in the background. Rahi sports a mullet, a haircut popularised by the likes of Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Dutt around that time. Also, Dhawan makes sense as a filmy nut, whose life revolves around posters of Bollywood heroes. I had no qualms buying him as a stuntman, because I can’t imagine a life for him outside of Bollywood.

A still from ‘Citadel: Hunny Bunny.’

It’s as a spy that Dhawan appears to be a false note. He’s got none of the understatedness, assurance in his body language to be under the radar. If anything, Varun Dhawan acts with a chip on his shoulder through most scenes here. Unlike his job description that requires him to be a cipher through most tense situations, Rahi is an open book through his tiniest grievances. He mutters, grumbles, furrows his eyebrows like he’s a sulking school kid. While Dhawan is a sincere and more-than-capable action hero, it’s his character’s overemphasis in the dramatic scenes that bothered me. On the other hand, Prabhu has the action-star wattage (on full display in Family Man S02) and just the right amount of acting chops. As Honey, Prabhu brings heft to her fights, underlining her action scenes with an urgency and desperation (like Alia Bhatt in Jigra). She’s not fighting simply because she’s good at it, but because she has no other choice.

Raj and DK arguably write the best gags in Hindi cinema, and there’s a splendid one here. Kay Kay Menon’s Vishwa calls people home and feeds them burnt chicken. It’s a clever, sadistic, psychological gag that condenses a lot about how the man runs his outfit. Another winning element of the show is young Kashvi Majmundar as Nadia, Rahi and Honey’s eight-year-old, who is every bit the wisecracking and matured-beyond-her-years kid in a Raj & DK show. One of the signature tricks that the duo pulls off here is keeping us guessing about who the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys are. They pull it off neatly, with the reveal coming at the end of episode four.

However, these are the few, scattered bright spots in a show that (even at over four hours) overstays its welcome. Despite its densely populated narrative featuring rival organisations, paranoid scientists, their clandestine meetings in art galleries, technology that could destroy the world if it falls into the wrong hands, and lots of dialogue featuring jargon like ‘coordinates’, ‘decode’, ‘collateral damage’ etc. In a Raj & DK show – I would imagine they would make fun of the jargon at some point, but here they’re forced to be sincere about it till the very end.

There are narrative holes the size of craters on Mumbai roads – where many top-class spies simply can’t get the job done. Sikandar Kher plays Shaan, one of the most incompetent spies in this world, who somehow continues to hold on to his job after major gaffes. Simran, playing Zuni, the head of a spy network – is shockingly calm as her crew keeps fumbling the ball more than once. The writers’ convenience (Sita Menon, along with Raj & DK) puts the show on cruise control towards the end, as most characters circle an important piece of tech called ‘Armada’ – which will result in one of the most comprehensive surveillance projects in the world. Despite everyone knowing who has it, and armies chasing them down, they manage to evade all of it.

Citadel: Honey Bunny is arguably the safest and weakest project Raj & DK have taken part in. Especially since their failures (Happy Ending, A Gentleman) are as storied as their successes. They try to infuse quirks here, but the rules of engagement ensure the duo are straitjacketed through most of this assignment. However, a superb unbroken take emerges out of nowhere. The camera follows a moving car and then enters through the rear window, as Honey makes her way from the boot to take down her kidnappers using a knife, with a cover of Asha Bhonsle’s Raat Baaki (from Namak Halal, 1982) playing in the background. Amidst many such green screen chase scenes, the show needed more such moments with the makers’ personality shining through, to be truly memorable.

‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’, a Film That Forces us to Revise Our Notions of the Real and Truthful

The Netflix documentary explores the world of a gamer who builds an entire life he cannot have otherwise.

I know the exact moment when Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin swept me off my feet. It’s when Mats Steen, a gamer in his early 20s from Oslo, ‘unlikes’ the Facebook pictures of his fellow gamers.

The gamers’ guild is meeting up in person, and Mats isn’t able to join them. So, at first, he likes the pictures of them laughing, drinking, doing silly things. But then, overcome with envy (and probably helplessness), he ‘unlikes’ those pictures.

It’s the ultimate mark of respect from Ree and his crew to their protagonist, Mats – a young man grappling with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a debilitating disease that has imprisoned him to a wheelchair.

While the documentary does intend on being an ode to Mats, it doesn’t make the mistake (like many films in the genre) of not keeping in mind the line between an ‘inspirational’ life story and hagiography. It’s important to remember the subject’s flaws as a man, to take inspiration from him. Hence, by showcasing his protagonist’s petty and bitter moments, Ree affords Mats his humanity.

The Remarkable life of Ibelin borrows its name from Mats’s alias in World of Warcraft, a multiplayer computer game that he inhabits as a private detective named Ibelin Redmoore. He was introduced to this game by his parents, when they realised he couldn’t be outdoors. Even as Mats’s condition worsened, he never quite stopped gaming, thanks to the special equipment that allowed him to use a computer with his functioning fingers.

What starts off as a hobby slowly morphs into an obsessive, vicarious way of living. Role-playing in the game, Mats invents a virtual life for himself, whose magnitude the family doesn’t understand till after his passing.

In a world where virtual identities are spawning cautionary tales around us, Ree’s documentary takes the premise of a differently abled person connecting with the world through a computer, and emerges with a fairy tale. It’s sweet, it’s curious, it’s emotional; but it always earns our tears.

Watching this in India, it’s hard to shake off the film’s nearly utopian, first-world setting. Almost as if the documentary’s world was a computer-generated simulation unto itself. Where everyone acts in the best faith, there’s almost no deceit (except Mats hiding his condition from his fellow gamers, because he doesn’t want their pity) and how almost everyone acts in the most clear-eyed way, never giving in to the temptation of melodrama and unnecessary tears.

The film begins with the announcement of Mats dying, but it’s what sparks off the family’s discovery of his other life.

It’s magical how Ree and his crew reconstruct Mats’s offline and online worlds with the help of archival footage from another documentary using a voiceover of his blog posts (which are read out by an actor), the family’s home videos, interviews with his family members and some friends from the gamers’ group, and with that also animating Mats’s life in the game with the help of a 42,000-page transcript (which a fellow gamer avails to the family and the filmmaking crew), allowing them to visualise Mats’s virtual life.

The end product is a film that doesn’t just feel like a paean to an extraordinary life, but one that revels in forensically examining mundane details of an ordinary life. What many of his family members didn’t realise is that an ordinary life is the only gift Mats wanted. And even though he didn’t realise it, he had got that, albeit under trying circumstances.

According to his father’s estimates, Mats spent close to 20,000 hours in the game. What at first glance feels like a flippant way of passing time in (what onlookers might term) an uneventful life reveals itself to be an engrossing, rich life filled with many anecdotes.

Mats may have only been able to communicate using his keyboard, but that didn’t stop him from flirting with girls, using his wit to win over people and connect with people through their most challenging circumstances by simply being a listener. One of the most remarkable things about Ree’s film is how it forces us to re-examine our notions of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’.

Ibelin meets Rumour – revealed to be a girl called Lisette living in the Netherlands – his first crush. Mats might not have had a shot at a normal dating life during high school, but in the game he can infuse his personality and wit into his avatar. It turns out this a charming concoction, because Rumour almost immediately takes a liking to him.

There comes a time when Lisette’s parents are worried about her falling grades, because of which they take away her computer (as a result Rumour disappears from the game for days). Mats writes a wisely argued email to her parents, pleading to their rational selves, getting them to reconsider their decision. Lisette calls Mats a ‘real’ friend – which is one way to describe a pen pal.

Mats also helps a mother-son duo overcome their distance. Xenia has trouble reaching out to her son, Mikkel. When she asks Mats for advice, he suggests she make him a part of their guild. As the mother and son start playing together, their connection grows. What starts off with gestures of affection within the game slowly translates to real life.

Is love in the virtual world real then? Mikkel recounts how Mats gave him the confidence to go up to people in the game’s world – something he imbibed into his real life. He confesses it’s only because of Mats that he went from being shut in his room, to tolerating people.

Is this only a trivial computer game then? Does it have no real-life consequence? Is the bond restricted to when we’re in a virtual world, fighting an enemy? Ibelin asks us to recontextualise what we consider real and what may be truthful – even in the depths of a fantasy.

But Mats is no saint, Ree’s film makes sure to remind us. There comes a time when Lisette feels betrayed by him. He’s shown to be a womaniser in the game, a sign of his growing restlessness as Lisette lives it up on her social media feed. He uses the game as an outlet – venting his frustration, being rude to fellow gamers, living as hard as he possibly can.

The guild’s head, Kai, even offers to talk to him in person, which he expectedly rebuffs. The pressure partly comes from keeping his medical condition a secret, which makes his friends increasingly suspicious and concerned. When he comes clean to the guild through a blog post, there’s a stunned, stoic silence. Everyone is too shocked – but they do tell him that nothing will change.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin becomes an elegy for outsiders, misfits, unconventionally-abled people. Not everyone might have the same skill-set, looks or mannerism – but does it make their story less important?

Mats spent a large part of his life confined to a wheelchair and in front of a screen. So, did his life amount to nothing? He lived under trying circumstances – but he had crushes, made new friends, mediated fights, took part in them, tendered apologies, was accepted and respected for who he was – not how he looked.

By the end, we see something Mats might not have been able to. Despite its challenges, Mats did get his wish of a respectful, ordinary life; where he left the world better than he found it.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is streaming on Netflix.

The Enduring Legacy of Madhubala

Madhubala’s beauty and her early death before its decline have made her a timeless icon, inimitable and strictly not for sale.

Hindi films from Bollywood are often deemed lowbrow and vulgar. For decades, young middle-class movie buffs in India have been brought up on this truism. Just as they have been led to believe that there can be no decent romance in languages other than the Queen’s English, or that only the Punjabis get it mostly right in matters of food, mounting of gala weddings and defying families in matters of heart.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

It is therefore time to go against the tide of public opinion. For starters, let us look at the very concept of vulgarity. The term ‘vulgar’ comes from the Biblical fold and it literally means ‘of the people’ – hence the term Vulgate’s Bible. So If Mughal-e-Azam is vulgar, then so be it. Why should we hesitate from asserting that the romantic musical still remains shamefully close to many Indians across generations. Mughal-e-Azam, a timeless musical from the 1950s, a romantic veritable Midsummer Night’s Dream, took K.A. Asif a decade to make and has been on every Indian movie lover’s shortlist since 1960. If it is vulgar, then we want more of it.

At the heart of this romantic musical is the haunting and luscious beauty of Madhubala, a young beauty from an impoverished Muslim family, pushed into films by an avaricious father, with a Hindu name like her colleagues MeenaKumari and Dilip Kumar. A Hindu name, it was felt in the immediate post-Partition years, would smudge her Muslim identity for the majority audiences who were still feeling unsettled about our largely hybrid world of entertainment. As Madhu Bala, literally translated to ‘Honey Girl’, she would become more palatable. In the film Mughal-e-Azam, one must mention the much celebrated role of Akbar, played by Prithvi Raj Kapoor to much approbation. His Akbar today seems more of a cross between a madman and a Khap Panchayat patriarch. Similarly, Saleem, his rebellious son, played by Dilip Kumar, seems in the harsh light of action films today, a bit of a coward despite his good looks. He remains a resonant and remote son of a bossy father whom he defies weakly, mumbling his displeasure. The officially young find such compliance appalling now.

But it is the young, mischievous Madhubala, as the dancer Anarkali, who truly sparkles with her giggly uninhibited sexuality and her bold declaration of love for the prince as she dances.

From the 21st century divas in Bollywood, the audiences demand a ‘hot bod’ and clothes that show it to the fullest. But in Madhubala’s case, her body is largely irrelevant. It is her face that even now can launch a thousand movie battles. Madhubala is Woman, as opposed to other contemporary talents like MeenaKumari, who despite better acting talent will remain a soft woman from Parineeta or Sahib Bibi, waiting on her man to thaw and love her. However today’s stars, wearing high-end dresses by designers like Manish Malhotra or Sabyasachi and branded make-up, attempt and fail to emulate her bewitching smile and those heavy-lidded eyes streaming a fluid sexuality that no mascara can lend, no eyeliner enhance .

Post-Madhubala Bollywood, in trying to create a clone, is only making beauty a commodity that can sell other commodities: high-end clothes, personalised accessories, FMCG goods, laptops, swanky bathrooms and cars.

Madhubala was perhaps not an adroit and polished actress the way Meena Kumari, Nutan or Waheeda Rehman were. She was a presence, whether the scene played in a regal hall of mirrors or a forlorn auto workshop. Only music can showcase such a presence. And some of her best scenes play out through the haunting music that accompanies her arrival. Her best directors were musically sensitive photographers like Asif, who, in some strange way, understood the unavoidable attraction of her half mischievous, half tragic self-containment that rode the wings of songs like ‘Mohey Panghat Pe’..or ‘Ik Ladki Bheegee Bhagee si..’

It is notable that Asif’s reels of an earlier version of an unfinished Mughal-e-Azam, featuring a different cast, were discarded after Madhubala stepped in. Asif did not try to extend the quintessential appeal of Madhubala for his audiences by giving her long wordy dialogues (the kind Akbar or Saleem were to mouth with all the thunderous resonance of popular Parsi theatre style ‘dialogue delivery’). He accepted her wisely for what she was.

Physically, Madhubala remained the way she was till the end, somewhat ‘shapeless’ by today’s standards. A closer look reveals a dangerous lack of vitality around her eyes, brought on by a congenitally defective heart which caused her to die so young. Legend has it that before her illness was discovered and shooting for Mughal-e-Azam began, she and her great love Dilip Kumar came close to getting married. But her father would not let go of his golden goose and forbade matrimony for her.

Madhubala seems to have receded thereafter in some place deep within herself and in Mughal-e-Azam, she seems to be responding to situations created for her by the script writer with a profound weariness and a premonition of an early death. This makes the tragedy of Anarkali even more touchingly real and haunting. Think of the slow ravishment of a peacock feather caressing her face or a bunch of grapes being dangled seductively close to that luscious mouth by Saleem .

She seems to be responding to an inner reality, less to her lover.

Madhubala’s kind of sad interiority soon came under threat by a new breed of actors that went on to rule the screen after the 1970s – the not-so-good looking but intellectually sparkling triad of Jaya, Shabana and Smita Patil and the earthly buoyant Mumtaz and Zeenat Aman. These new actors were trained and well read. They projected everything they had towards their screen lovers and villains, leaving nothing in reserve. Madhubala’s passive acceptance of the inevitable by women was by now a thing of the past.

Her illness, though cruel and lingering, saved Madhubala from being pushed into emulating the others while fighting the ravages of an advancing age. Like Marilyn Munro, Madhubala’s beauty and her early death before its decline have made her a timeless icon, inimitable and strictly not for sale.

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

In ‘Singham Again’, Rohit Shetty Goes for Loud Hindutva Populism for Box Office Bucks

Even the presence of several top stars cannot save the film from being a sloppy effort.

Singham Again might be the most half-hearted, insincere film in Rohit Shetty’s career of two decades. Which is saying a lot, given that Shetty is a shining example of mainstream Hindi cinema’s convenient, shameless and shrewd populism.

Just look at his simplistic understanding of gender roles and patriotism, how he will blow the conch for Hindutva forces and alternate it with some of his insidious Islamophobia (like in Sooryavanshi and Indian Police Force), and his unsubtle endorsement for extra-judicial killings and custodial torture.

Like most of his peers, Shetty will say anything to get a clap out of his audience. It doesn’t matter how daft it sounds.

Like in a scene where a young boy asks his mother, who apparently works as a bureaucrat for the current government: “Did Ram really travel 3,000 km to save Sita?” The response is: “Of course, it’s a fact.”

Even in a Rohit Shetty film, where idiotic dialogue is par for the course, this line sticks out.

This comes shortly after a sequence plays out like a recruitment video for a Kashmir first-responder unit. It concludes with our protagonist (Ajay Devgn) coming face-to-face with a group of Kashmiri youth, right after he has captured a terrorist.

Shetty builds up the tension for a hostile confrontation, but then a young man blurts out, “Stone-pelting is a thing of the past. This is naya Bharat’s naya Kashmir.” Expectedly, a drone shot of the tricolour on Lal Chowk follows after this exchange.

Even by the standards of a desperate, needy Bollywood film, Singham Again proves there’s no low that is too low for a scheming blockbuster willing to trade decency for money and whistles.

Shetty’s latest is an Avengers-like version of his cop universe, assembling all his previous cops – Bajirao Singham (Ajay Devgn), Sangram Bhalerao or ‘Simmba’ (Ranveer Singh) and Veer Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar), along with upstarts Shakti Shetty (Deepika Padukone) and Satya (Tiger Shroff).

Shroff’s character isn’t even afforded the dignity of a surname, presumably because he’s an orphan. He shows up for a brief fight scene, followed up by a backstory that can be encapsulated in the time needed to make instant noodles.

Singh is the only actor with anything to offer, single-mindedly focused on making an impact in this crowded film and bringing it out of Devgn’s comatose presence. He appears to be improvising most of his lines for a role that is as thinly written as the ‘wife’ characters in the cop universe.

Kareena Kapoor Khan, resuming her role as Avni – the better-half from Singham Returns (2014) – undergoes the humiliation of playing a damsel in distress. It’s a wasteful, disgraceful part for someone with Khan’s talents.

But what makes Avni even more embarrassing is how Shetty posits her as a part of the ‘cultural ministry’, whose aim is to turn non-believers into giving credence to theories that the Ramayana is a part of our history and not just a mythological text.

She does this through a series of motion-graphic re-imaginings of the Ram Leela, where she parades urban legends as (pseudo) scientific findings. For a bureaucrat trying to rise up the ranks, it doesn’t seem that far off. But Shetty uses this gimmick as a tool to basically remake the Ramayana within his cop universe. Singham is Ram, Simmba is Hanuman… the villain (Arjun Kapoor) is Raavan. Yawn.

I don’t know how much Shetty is clued into the discourse on X, but he has been criticised in the past for the Islamophobia in his films. In this film, for the longest time, he teases the audience with a villain who is called Danger Lanka, not giving his real name till much later.

Also read | ‘Indian Police Force’: Rohit Shetty’s Diatribe Against Muslims, Tempered With the ‘Good Muslim’ Cliche

The villain, Arjun Kapoor, probably sees this as his moment to craft something as memorable as Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat (2018). But he is never supported by Shetty’s (six) writers – Yunus Sajawal, Abhijeet Khuman, Kshitij Patwardhan, Anusha Nandakumar and Shantanu Srivastava. All Kapoor ever does is flash his pearly whites, while hacking people with a machete.

After resisting for what seems like an eternity, Shetty introduces Kapoor’s character as Zubair Hafeez. Almost on cue, Kapoor starts using words/phrases like ‘inteqaam ki fateh’, ‘maqsad’ and ‘jazbaa’, which feels as natural and organic as the face of a rapidly ageing Bollywood celebrity.

At first, I dismissed the choice of the name of the villain, Zubair, as a mere coincidence. But then I heard him speak a line that riffs on “Ayodhya toh bas jhaaki hai, Kashi ab bhi baaki hai” (Milap Zaveri is credited for ‘additional dialogues’), and I stopped giving the film the benefit of doubt. Shetty knows the kind of bloodlust he’s feeding; consciously destroying the cultural fabric, only to earn some more money.

One of the most unintentionally funny things about Shetty’s film is its innate fear of backlash of the kind Adipurush (an adaptation of the Ramayana) faced last year. Despite being one of the most pliant films for right-wing forces and something that was purposed as a Rs 500-crore star vehicle for Prabhas, Adipurush failed at the box office and was criticised for the liberties it took from all quarters.

Shetty didn’t want there to be any doubt in even the most distracted viewers of his film’s Hindu identity; hence he scores every second scene with a chant as our heroes walk in slow-motion, coupled with a deluge of Hindu iconography, which seems to be catering to the Hindutva types.

The film even explicitly mentions in its disclaimer that its characters are in no way to be seen as revered deities.

Even putting aside its saffron propaganda, Singham Again is arguably one of Shetty’s laziest undertakings. It shows in the unimaginative action sequences, the terrible dialogues and the absolute mockery of its superstar cameos, despite affording each and every star their own ‘entry’ sequence.

Imagine that Padukone, a naturally charismatic movie star, who made an impact in Jawan (2023) with two songs, seems cordoned off in her own film. We hardly see her interacting with the other characters, almost as if she shot her portions separately and was later digitally infused into the film.

Devgn, who has had an overwhelming need to be worshipped as a star in the last 15 years, has finally snuffed out any possibility of being admired as a once-hungry, sincere actor.

If films are a dish, then Singham Again is equivalent to the mush meant to feed babies and the elderly. Watching this film in the nearly packed theatre, I remember thinking whether we were already in an ideological apocalypse.

As much as I was bored by Shetty’s sloppiness as a storyteller, it was nowhere near the rage I felt towards how much of Singham Again had become fair game. I looked around – a guy behind me was running a live commentary of the film for his friend over the phone, this couple next to me couldn’t stop whispering through the film’s runtime, and this group of young boys kept talking amongst themselves as everyone around them, in a zombie-like way, pretended like this was normal behaviour in a theatre.

The viewers seemed determined – or were too distracted – to accommodate any unruly behaviour around them and uncomplainingly ate up anything that the film offered in the name of ‘mindless entertainment’. Maybe such people deserve Singham Again and Rohit Shetty.

How a Film Enquiry Committee Paved the Way for the Film Finance Corporation

The Committee’s recommendation for an FFC was initially found unacceptable but the government yielded to the demand by 1956.

The following is an excerpt from Sudha Tiwari’s The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India published by Routledge.

The Film Enquiry Committee (1949)

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting noted in 1948-49 that an enquiry into the film industry was necessary. The last enquiry was conducted in 1927-28. A fresh enquiry was necessary in view of the growth of the film industry since that time, in order to examine how the organisation of the industry could be improved and on what lines its future development should be directed. A Film Enquiry Committee was formed on September 2, 1949 by the Government of India to “make recommendations regarding its further development as an industry and as a medium of education and entertainment”.

Sudha Tiwari,
The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India,
Published by Routledge (2024).

According to Kumar Shahani, “the intention of calling for that report to be written was absolutely Nehruvian…it fitted into the kind of state that Nehru imagined…should be created for the Indian nation”. The Committee was constituted by a Resolution of the government of India in the MIB dated 29 August 1949. As per the Resolution, the government of India did regard “the importance of the cinema in modern life and the magnitude and complexity of the problems relating to films”, making it essential to conduct a thorough enquiry into the film industry. Of the three important terms of reference given to the Committee, one of them was, “To examine what measures should be adopted to enable films in India to develop into an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture, education and healthy entertainment.” (Emphasis added). The Chairman of the Committee was S.K. Patil (Member, Constituent Assembly), and the rest of the members included M. Satyanarayana (Member, Constituent Assembly), V. Shantaram (Rajkamal Kalamandir Ltd., Bombay), B.N. Sircar (New Theatres Ltd., Calcutta), Dr. R.P. Tripathi (Head of the History Department, Allahabad University), V. Shankar (I.C.S., representing MIB), and S. Gopalan (Secretary of the Committee).

Response to the Film Enquiry Committee Report and its Recommendations

In 1954, when the recommendations were finally discussed in Parliament, Mr. Patil was disappointed again at the callous attitude of the government and at its turning down of the most important recommendation of the Report, i.e. the Film Finance Corporation (FFC). The government had declined the establishment of a film corporation with the usual excuse of the “priorities of expenditure to meet the urgent requirements of the development projects and programmes of the Five Year Plan”. The government had also rejected one of its other central suggestions, the forming of a statutory Film Council of India citing similar reasons. Mr. Patil opposed the government’s proposal to establish a National Film Board which was to direct and supervise the work of the proposed Film Production Bureau and the Film Institute. He said that such an arrangement would be an “enlarged edition of the present Central Board of Film Censors”.

The FFC in the Making

One sees two united voices emerging from filmmakers and producers: that there is a need to change the way Indian cinema looks, and that financing and changing the production ethics is the key to bring radical changes in the Indian film industry. Many from within and outside the film industry saw the state playing a crucial role in bringing these two changes. Though the state was present in all these debates and discussions, in providing a platform to the film community to come together and discuss the issues troubling the industry, it was still hesitant to take up its responsibilities towards the film industry. The recommendations of the Film Enquiry Committee were yet to be taken up seriously by the government.

The press reported in May 1954 that the government had rejected the FFC plan. Dr. B.V. Keskar, the then Minister of Information and Broadcasting, presented a statement to the Parliament on the action taken by the government on the recommendations of the Film Enquiry Committee. The government had decided instead to set up a National Film Board with a view to “developing the film as a medium of national culture, education and healthy entertainment”.

The Board was to direct and supervise the work of two new bodies, the Film Production Bureau and the Film Institute. The Film Production Bureau would give advice on scripts, offer guidance to producers on various aspects of production such as story, scenario, artistic talent, and cost estimates. It would provide a library and research service. The functions of the Bureau would be purely advisory. The Ministry told the Parliament that in the present state of the industry, the setting up of a representative statutory Film Council of India, as recommended by the Enquiry Committee, would not be advisable. It was feared that such a Council, at this stage – when there are diverse elements in the industry in different stages of development and with the attendant difficulty of reconciling several interests – would find it difficult to wield authority and take the responsibility of shaping the affairs of the industry. The Government would, however, be prepared to encourage any move on the part of the film industry itself to form a Film Council based on voluntary co-operation.

The Committee’s recommendation for an FFC was found “unacceptable both in view of more urgent commitments under the Five-Year Plan and the business risks involved in the proposal.” It only offered ‘suitable machinery by legislation’ if producers were inclined to find necessary funds for a corporation by contributions or otherwise. The government had, however, decided in principle to provide suitable grants for specific purposes such as the production of educational and children’s films. In October 1954, State Awards for Films were inaugurated “to encourage production of films of a high aesthetic and technical standard and educative and cultural value”. Films like Shyamchi Aai (1953) and Do Bigha Zamin were presented with the President’s Gold Medal and Certificate of Merit respectively. These decisions received a mixed response. The FFI urged the government to help stabilise the film industry by creating a film finance corporation as early as possible on mutually acceptable terms and conditions.

By September 1956, the government yielded to the demand for a finance corporation. News came that the government had decided to constitute a National Film Board and a Film Finance Corporation to help the development of the motion picture industry. First rejected, it was later realised that the film industry with its “tremendous educative and entertainment values, should be given State aid for proper development.” The proposed Board was to have, as its constituent units, the present censorship organisation, a production bureau, and a film institute. The FFC would initially have a capital of Rs one crore. The Bill to this effect was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 10 December 1956. The National Film Board was being set up “to promote the development of film as a medium of culture, education and healthy entertainment.” The FFC was to render financial assistance to film producers by way of loans. The Annual Report also informed that the form and details of organisation and the general principles governing the method of financing were being worked out.

However, there was again a long silence on the formation of the Corporation and the Board. While replying to a debate on the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill in Lok Sabha in December 1958, Dr. Keskar stated that the government was taking steps to establish an FFC “on a modest scale”. He also said that the preliminary work in this direction was already over, and the question would have been taken up much earlier but for the financial difficulties of the government. He also advised the gathering of producers, exhibitors, distributors, and film artistes to organise itself on sound business lines to overcome its financial and other difficulties. He invited the industry’s co-operation in achieving the ideal of a “wealthy and prosperous country”. He also stressed that the film industry was essentially a “social industry”. It provided entertainment and also served as a medium of instruction to the masses. It had, therefore, an important part to play in the evolution of society. It should not divorce itself from the society from which it drew its sustenance. Ministers still used phrases like “duty to society”, “people’s and the country’s welfare in their minds”, and films having a “beneficial influence” in their speeches and statements while talking about the film industry. Mr. Keskar was told that the Indian film industry was still facing the problem of lack of finance, and the high rates of interest which the producers had inevitably to pay the financiers were aggravating the problems. A suggestion was placed with the Minister that the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) could help the industry, with its large funds, by advancing loans.

The Film Finance Corporation Limited finally came into existence in March 1960. It started functioning in May 1960 in its Bombay office, with the appointment of a nine-member board of directors with Mr. N.D. Mehrotra, a retired Income-tax Commissioner, as Chairman. The main objectives of the Corporation were: to promote and assist the film industry by providing, affording, or procuring finance, and/or other facilities for the production of films of good standard and quality with a view to raising the standard of films produced. The FFC started with an authorised capital of Rs one crore to be subscribed entirely by the government of India.

Sudha Tiwari teaches History at the School of Liberal Studies and Media, UPES, Dehradun.

‘Anora’ Is a Winsome Reimagination of ‘Pretty Woman’ With Some Twists

Indie director Sean Baker’s latest has a firm grip on the audience’s emotions.

A lot of the splendour in Sean Baker’s Anora lies in its treatment – where we might be shown one thing, but deliberately made to feel something else. For example, the film opens with a discomfiting panning shot featuring barely-clothed exotic dancers performing with neon lights around them. However, Baker scores this scene with a loud, winsome techno song taking what is a distressing visual of young women forced to work a job that fetishises them, and drains the self-pity out of it. It is what it is; these women aren’t victims, and Baker seems to be insisting we mustn’t see them with a patronising gaze, demoting them from a person to a social cause. They probably do need saving, but they have no delusions about expecting it from a drunk, seemingly kind spectator. They’ve probably heard too many 3 a. m. promises, which have been forgotten by 6 a.m. These hardened individuals hide their disappointments behind their profane, tough exterior. Ani (Mikey Madison) is no different.

In a sublime opening stretch, Baker (with indie films like Tangerine and Florida Project behind him) establishes Ani’s work day at her high-end Manhattan strip club. Her simple objective is to make the mostly male patrons spend as much money as they can, even if it includes detours to a nearby ATM. It starts off with some cute, flirty conversation to ease the patron in, and then somewhere along the way comes a suggestion for a private show. The action moves indoors, only for the spending and the bad decisions to quadruple. Baker is able to find a rhythm in Ani’s routine: in the way she dances, teases her clients, does what she’s expected to, and goes home when the night is over.

Her life’s course is disrupted when young ‘high-roller’ Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn) – son of a billionaire oligarch from Russia – walks through the doors. Ani is the only dancer who speaks Russian, so she’s given the task of tending to him. When the conversation starts off with his broken English and her cautious, filled-with-pauses Russian, the audience members have little to no clue that they’re watching the meet-cute of a ‘love story’. Ivan asks Ani to share her phone number with him, and before you know it, we’re watching Pretty Woman all over again.

Baker knows this and takes our expectations to dizzying heights, giving us the perfect fairytale. Ivan’s debauchery continues in Vegas with Ani by his side, where the visual language of the film (by cinematographer Drew Daniels and the editor, Baker himself) races at a million miles per hour. In what seems like a frivolous suggestion at first, Ivan proposes to Ani. The audience I was with, brushed it off even before Ani did. But Eydelshteyn employs his sincere, dead-serious eyes. Could this be Ani’s way out? Is this real love, or is it just fantasy? Like Ani, we too have a bad feeling. And yet, we’re seduced by the less pragmatic, more attractive questions — what if this is real? What if this romance actually pans out? What if it’s Ani’s way out of dingy, suffocating strip clubs to a lifetime of well-lit, dignified rooms? What if?

A still from ‘Anora’.

One of the most enrapturing things about Anora, is how Baker balances the aftermath of the Vegas wedding, straddling genres of a Coenesque screwball comedy, a road movie, a social satire, and a feel-good film. As the news of Ivan and Ani’s wedding gets out on social media, his parents send his Godfather and local guardian, Toros (Karren Karagulian) to ‘fix’ matters. It’s Toros’s job to get the marriage annulled within the next 24 hours, before his parents (already airborne from Russia) touch down in America. Toros sends his two henchmen – Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to check on the extent of the damage, which results in one of the most singularly unclassifiable sequences in a recent film. Ivan manages to evade both the men, while Ani uses her physicality and her raised-in-New York smart mouth to hurt the duo.

In Anora, which it’s later revealed is Ani’s legal full-name, Baker keeps the jokes coming thick and fast, even when it mimics a stressful Safdie brothers movie – after Ivan goes missing. The men have to find him before his parents land and raise hell, while Ani needs to find him to secure her fast-depleting shot at the good life. In one of my favourite jokes, a hapless Toros going around with Ivan’s picture inside a diner is shooed away by a group of young men. Toros’s miserable pleas quickly turn to a diatribe about how he dislikes the current generation, their innate discourteousness, and their sense of entitlement; Toros sounds eerily similar to a middle-aged Indian man at a social gathering.

A still from ‘Anora’.

As Ani, Mikey Madison, is such an electric presence in every scene that it’s hard to look away from her. She conveys her character’s steeliness, vulnerabilities, desperation with economy. Eydelshteyn manages to make a careless young man seem silly, charming and even likeable. Ivan views himself as more rebellious than he is, but his cruel recklessness is also believable. He will tease a girl’s dreams, only to snuff it out for it to end up as a ‘funny’ anecdote for him in a few years’ time. As Toros and Garnick – Karagulian and Tovmasyan are mostly required to play two bumbling punchline characters, but the actors sell the hell out of their silliness. The surprise package in the film is Borisov as Igor – the silent bald stoic Russian, who can be as dangerous as he looks. But Baker bestows him with moments of grace, as a way of saying that even the most stereotypically-dressed people are capable of acting in the most surprising ways.

Baker brings this rollercoaster of a film to a slow, gradually-decelerating halt. The last scene unveils the heartbreak this film has been hiding under its bright, flashy, humorous armour. It’s an exhibition of a filmmaker in such tremendous control that he played the entire theatre like a live orchestra for over two hours, drawing out the laughs, the winces, the gasps – only to conclude the film in utter silence. He might have batted for outcasts in his earlier films as well, but Sean Baker has never shone brighter than now.

*Anora won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes film festival; it had its South Asia premiere as the closing film of the MAMI Mumbai film festival 2024.