If it hadn’t been for Pushpa’s second coming, this year would have been a wash-out for mainstream Indian cinema.
The sequel to the surprise pan-India success of the 2021 ‘Pushpa: The Rise’, starts and goes on baggier and laggier than the original, being rescued by a terrific third act. The origin story told us why one of Pushpa’s shoulders was permanently higher than the other, and how his hand-under-chin gesture became the trademark for a sandalwood smuggler whose prowess at getting the precious logs out from under the nose of his nemesis would have made Veerappan envious.
Industry watchers who predicted that ‘Pushpa 2‘ (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu) will make the fastest Rs 1000 crore at the box office are crowing. It is a good moment to pause and assess how the trajectory of the Sukumar-Allu Arjun-Fahad Faasil-Rashmika Mandanna film has impacted the industry, and will shape it going forward: unveiling a ‘South’ film trailer in Patna to an uproarious welcome, releasing in close to 5000 screens all over the country, pushing out every other film out from the multiplexes, and showing no signs of slowing, ‘Pushpa: The Wildfire’ is the template every other mainstream industry will be compelled to emulate. Because, bro, that’s how the box office rolled.
Where it didn’t, was in Bollywood.
2023 revived the Hindi film industry’s flagging fortunes. Shah Rukh Khan came and re-conquered with his trio — ‘Pathan’, ‘Jawan’, ‘Dunki’. Sunny Deol ditched the hand pump but stayed firm on pulverising the baddies across the border in ‘Gadar 2’. Ranbir Kapoor roared in ‘Animal’, giving real-life critters a good name. And Ranveer and Alia made their Rocky-and-Rani the nation’s sweethearts in Karan Johar’s mid-life romance ‘Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani’.
The big starry tentpoles started crashing from the start of 2024. Hrithik Roshan’s ‘Fighter’ began the slide, followed by Akshay Kumar’s ‘Bade Miyan Chote Miyan’, Ajay Devgn’s ‘Maidaan’, Kartik Aryan’s ‘Chandu Champion’: they may have made up some of the slack with other revenue streams (streaming platform pay-outs etc), but there’s no doubt that these films did not get the numbers they were anticipating.
Both ‘Singham Again’ and ‘Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3’ raised the box office temperature a little, even if both were stuffed with tired tropes. And the year will end with Varun Dhawan’s hard-swing-into-the-South, ‘Baby John’, whose fortunes can only be told by a soothsayer.
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The surprise box office win-of-the-year mantle remains with ‘Munjya’, and the horror-comedy genre is sitting comfortably at the top, with the super successful Rajkummar Rao-Shraddha Kapoor starrer ‘Stree 2’, a mid-film which sneaked into the sweet spot left vacant by the non-performing biggies, and refused to leave. It was literally the only genre which had people streaming into the theatres: Dinesh Vijan of Maddock Films, which produced both, owns 2024.
The films which also did well, or let’s say, well-enough, box-office-wise, caught our eyes only intermittently in the mouthful of a robot-romance ‘Teri Bahon Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya’; the fight against the demon-and-the-human in ‘Shaitaan’; the multi-lingual monkey-god adventure, ‘Hanu-Man’; the David-Goliath face-off in ‘Maharaja’; the saggy sci-fi saga ‘Kalki 2898 AD’, toplined by Prabhas, Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Kamal Haasan, just about managed to get into this list.
But the films which left me happy, and fulfilled, were miles away from the empty star-stuffed extravaganzas that were made strictly for number crunching, with few creative bones in sight.
Here they are, in the order of their release.
India’s Oscar hopeful Laapataa Ladies is a delightful story of two brides who get swapped, lose their ‘spouses’, and find their way, most importantly, to themselves. Kiran Rao’s sophomore feature did the wise thing by not taking ex-husband Aamir Khan in the film: as a producer, he’s doing the right thing and shepherding the film on the path to the Oscars, with the experience he gained when ‘Lagaan’ was in the running. The choice of fresh faces made this feminist parable set in fictional rural India very contemporary: the messaging is unapologetically strong, but timely, and we cheer as the Nitanshi Goel, Pratibha Ranta and Chhaya Kadam, along with Sparsh Srivastava, find their calling.
Three women seem to be the magic number of 2024: in ‘Crew’, we have Tabu-Kareena Kapoor Khan-Kriti Sanon playing airhostesses-with-the-mostest, holding scared passengers’ hands in the air, and having each other’s backs, is all part of their job, which involves a heist, trials, tribulations, and, yes, a lot of fun. Which comes from the bonding between the leading ladies, with Tabu and Kareena owning their age and the fact that desire has nothing to do with it, and with Diljeet Doshanjh stopping by in a sporting cameo: want quickie, will get.
Expectedly, Dosanjh reserves all his main character energy for ‘Chamkila’, Imtiaz Ali’s bio-pic of the madly-popular, madly-controversial Punjabi singer Amar Singh Chamkila, whose assassination may have ended his life, but not our abiding interest in it. With Parineeti Chopra as his personal and professional partner, Dosanjh lives the role of the singer who has to struggle with his Dalit identity and abject poverty to gain entrance into the hallowed portals of the kind of desi entertainers who pack out halls in the NRI-heavy pockets of the US and Canada. I cannot remember the real Chamkila’s face any more; it’s become transposed by Dosanjh’s.
It feels as if I’ve been writing steadily about Payal Kapadia’s debut feature All We Imagine As Light since I saw it at its Cannes premiere in May, observing her marvellously observational style which makes you forget the artifice involved in filmmaking — camera angles and placement, making sure that the light is right, characters and their situations — in the way she and her cinematographer Ranabir Das capture the lives of three (there, that number again) female friends-and-family-and-collaborators, with the kind of unfettered intimacy we rarely see in Indian cinema. The performances — from Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridu Haroon and others — are as grounded as the story-telling, the former brilliantly embodying the spirit of the quintessentially efficient Malayali nurse as well as a very specific one which is her own, a woman trying to find a perch in a late-night Mumbai local train which leads her home, both physically and metaphorically. It may have missed the chance to be India’s Oscar hopeful, but in the way it is winning hearts and minds around the globe (with two historic noms at the GG), it’s clear that Kapadia has just begun as she means to go on.
Sundance winner ‘Girls Will Be Girls’, from first-time filmmaker Shuchi Talati, is another female-forward film, in which a young woman comes of age, while teaching her mother a thing or two about desire. Kani Kustruti (in another terrific performance) plays the protective mother to Preeti Panigrahi’s spirited teenager, a student at a boarding school in a North Indian hill station, who is learning her way around her own erogenous spots helped by age-appropriate curiosity, and a much more experienced classmate (Kesav Binoy Kiron). In her warm, empathetic drama about women and their wants, done with zero prurience, Talati proves that she is a filmmaker to watch out for.
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