Between two screens: Reminiscing the year that went by through the projection lens

As an avid consumer of cinema, 2022 found me flying off at a tangent. Bollywood offered slim pickings and the ultra-masculine world of the pan Indian films couldn’t resonate with me either. I could barely sit through the top Hindi grosser of the year, Brahmastra: Part One-Shiva, and, contrary to popular opinion, found the visual effects of Bhediya notches above the opulent spectacle of the former. As opposed to almost the entire world, I happened to find a liking for the veterans Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor in the “blink and you’d miss” films like Goodbye and Sharmaji Namkeen respectively. I continued to relish Malayalam movies—Ariyippu, Bhoothkaalam, Pada, 19(1)(a), Dear Friend—a gift of COVID and stay-at-home streaming that just keeps giving. Kunchacko Boban and Sai Pallavi became the new champions (however late) for an outsider, stationed miles away from Alappuzha and Coimbatore. And my picks of the year are strictly in the indie, documentary and shorts space—Jaggi, Dhuin,  All That Breathes, Tortoise Under the Earth, Under The Waters...

But then there are interesting patterns that have emerged when I look back at the year with some purposeful reflection. My way of seeing seemed to have a rubric of its own.

Ladies Special

I started the year with a movie that was a carry forward from last year, The Power of The Dog. With a woman cinematographer, Ari Wegner, as her ally, filmmaker Jane Campioncast a fresh, delicate but devastating look at the “male” genre of the Western and the theme of the pathology of maleness. It set the tone for the themes and trends that struck me in both mainstream and alternate space in 2022. The vision may have been flawed and some might have even failed in what they intended to do, but the films directed by women turned out to bethe most fascinating.

Rima Das’s Tora’s Husband, that premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), about a man trying to keep his business afloat during COVID, disregarding his family for the community, might feel meandering but brims over with Rima’s characteristic compassion and an eye for minute details of day-to-day life.

Nandita Das’s Zwigato, also premiered at TIFF, gives a human face to the gig economy of home delivery of goods that kept life moving during the pandemic.

Anvita Dutt explored a complicated mother-daughter relationship in Qala (Netflix), where one person’s ambition gets pitched against the craving for validation of the other.

Anubhuti Kashyap zoomed in on an unusual issue in Doctor G—how gender can determine even your academic and professional aspirations and choices and what happens when you are forced to break away from the convention.

Jasmeet K. Reen’s Darlings (Netflix) was a darkly funny and at times chillingly real look at domestic violence.

Wonder Women

In a terrible year for Bollywood’s male superstars, be it Akshay Kumar, Aamir Khan or Ranveer Singh, the women kept shining on.

Aalia Bhatt starred in the biggest hit, Brahmastra. Despite her petite self, she made for a towering presence in and as Gangubai Kathiawadi, the other big money churner of the year. And she was a hoot alongwith Shefali Shah, the daughter-mother team that Darlings rested on.

Besides Darlings, Shefali Shah was riveting as the strict gynae in Doctor G and the principled cop Vartika Chaturvedi in the second season of Delhi Crime. Human (Disney+Hotstar) and Jalsa (Amazon Prime) were the other popular turns. Now wait to be wowed by her poignant performance next year in Three of Us.

If anyone should get credit for the success of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, it’s not the director Anees Bazmee or the youth favourite Kartik Aryan, but Tabu who lent the film its delicious moments with her giddy turn as Anjulika/Manjulika. And then she registered her presence in another of the few big hits of 2022, Drishyam 2. She now looks set to bring the house down in Kuttey.

Geetanjali Kulkarni brought alive the inner restlessness of a teacher working in the COVID war room with consummate ease in Amazon original web series Unpaused: Ek Naya Safar. And I have little more to add to what has already been written about her continuing brilliance as Shanti Mishra in Sony Liv’s Gullak 3, who keeps questioning family hierarchies and male supremacy with her nagging and saves a girl from a disastrous marriage.

Amruta Subhash as a woman fighting for the custody of her kids from her divorced husband while starting a pickles business and Anjana Sukhani as the other woman and stepmother to her kids perform in admirable tandem in Zee 5’s Saas Bahu Aur Achaar Pvt Ltd.

Tillotama Shome was the big surprise in the new season of Delhi Crime, never putting a foot wrong with her unexpected negative turn. Bhumi Pednekar’s easy-going queer play in Badhaai Do was just as riveting.

From Badhaai Do to Doctor G Sheeba Chaddha was loveable with the different hues she brought to her on-screen mother, so much so that the loud caricature of a role heaped on her in Maja Ma was best forgotten.

Moral Kombat

Four compelling women centric films I saw this year—the acclaimed Bangladeshi film Rehana that was in Cannes last year, Malayalam film Ariyippu, a forthcoming Malayalam one called Daayam and the Tamil film Gargi were all about massive upheavals in a woman’s life that force her to question her world but don’t shake her moral core. At a time when moral fibre seems to be disappearing in human beings, these women show a tremendous sense of fairplay, opting to be on the side of right than wrong, however tough that choice might be. Azmeri Haque Badhon (Rehana, who will soon be seen in a Vishal Bhardwaj film), Divyaprabha (Ariyippu), Sai Pallavi (Gargi) are luminous in shining a light on the urgent battles.

A Few Good Men

However well-intentioned and earnest may have been Ranveer Singh’s performance, Jayeshbhai Jordaar got too righteously boring in tackling an issue as significant female foeticide. In fact, it was the films with strong roles for women, that also seemed to push the envelope of male representation persuasively.

Rajkummar Rao’s Shardul in Badhaai Do doesn’t just bring queerdom deeper within the family fold but also subverts the masculine ideals of the world of cops, without getting heavy-handed about it. Ayushmann Khurrana’s Dr Uday Gupta in Doctor G is an entitled guy who finds his advantages questioned and privileges and swag creased out by the company of women he is forced to keep as a budding gynaecologist.

From Vijay Varma as the dangerous and abusive Hamza to Roshan Mathew as the loyal friend Zulfi or Rajesh Sharma as the quiet handler Kasim Kasai, Darlings had more interesting shades of men than all the year’s macho films put together.

In Saas Bahu Aur Achaar Pvt Ltd, Anup Soni brought alive the knotted mind and tangled reality of a man caught between two women—an ex and a present wife—and children from the previous marriage he is trying hard to strike a good equation with.

A throwaway scene in Gullak had the sons of the Mishra family, Anu (Vaibhav Raj Gupta) and Aman (Harsh Mayar) making tea for unannounced guests. It’s these little details of the dynamics of Mishra family of Bhopal that showed that despite the conventional setup that it is, with nagging Shanti as the housewife and husband Santosh (Jameel Khan) as the bread-earner, there were little ways that conventional role-playing was poked at while striving towards equality.

One of the most outstanding efforts in the male zone was Anmol Sidhu’s debut Punjabi feature Jaggi that despite its rough edges and a protracted, over-explained finale, overturned the notion of virility and explored the psyche of a vulnerable man in the uber male Punjab. It rode on a standout performance from Ramnish Chaudhary in the titular role.

The Great Disruptor

He may not have created a storm of the Sairat kinds but had his signature on two of the most significant Hindi films of 2022. Nagraj Manjule underscored the fact that death is a great equalizer in a world divided by caste, class, religion, and gender in the short Vaikunth segment of Unpaused: Ek Naya Safar that is set in a crematorium during the second wave of COVID.

Jhund was a pulsating though cluttered celebration of the takeover of the subaltern and the dispossessed. The sub-plot in it, featuring a tribal girl’s attempts to procure identity documents for government records, is one of the most telling pieces of social commentary in recent Indian cinema.

Real Life

After A Night of Knowing Nothing, Invisible Demons and Writing With Fire last year, Indian documentaries continued to sport a winning edge in 2022. Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes located the issues of development, progress, urbanisation, climate change and pollution in a deeply poetic and profoundly humane way in the lives of brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad and their assistant Salik Rehman whose passion in life is to rescue and tend injured kites. Fingers are tightly crossed for it to finally bag the Oscar for India.

Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched that premiered at TIFF and won the Canada Goose Amplify Voices award might be about the ex NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar but speaks of larger issues concerning journalism in the times of misinformation that have a universal resonance the world over.

Cinema Verite

Shishir Jha’s Tortoise Under The Earth, poised between the real and the reel, is about a tribal couple in Jharkhand mourning the death of their daughter due to uranium poisoning while also facing the demon of displacement forced by the so-called development. The organic narration draws from the culture, myths and rhythms of the tribal life and lets the tribals tell their story their own way than imposing a specific mode on them.

Achal Mishra’s Dhuin is a little minimalist gem, a slice of life of a struggling actor in Darbhanga, his dreams of establishing himself in Mumbai but the stresses and strains of being hard up that forcibly ground his ambitions. The stoic last act makes for the kind of unexpressed, lingering melancholia that rarely gets seen in Indian cinema.

Short Takes

Short films had a lot going for them: the outlandish, playful yet empathetic take on exodus of migrant workers in Vaishali Naik’s 7 Star Dinosaur Entertainment, form and content, myths and folklore coming together hauntingly in Yudhajit Basu’s Kalsubai, an absurdist exploration of loss, grief and loneliness with a plant lover at its centre in Amrita Bagchi’s Succulent, a deep dive into the world of cow vigilantes in Varun Chopra’s Holy Cowboys, the loss of home, both real and metaphorical in Kaushik Oza’s The Miniaturist of Junagarh, a family vacation becoming an uneasy playground for desire, transgression and sexual awakening in Ambiecka Pandit’s Under the Waters and an audacious and iconoclastic exploration of the idea motherhood in Megha Ramaswamy’s Lallana’s Song or the unique look at the poster culture of Mumbai in Rishi Chandna’s Party Poster.

Love Thy Neighbour

Riz Ahmed the British actor and musician of Pakistani descent won an Oscar for live-action short film, The Long Goodbye, that he had co-written and starred in, Arooj Aftab’s “Mohabbat” grabbed the Grammy for best global music performance, the series Ms Marvel feminized the Marvel world by turning the superhero into a South Asiangirl emerging from the ashes of the Partition, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and is now shortlisted for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, Bilal Lashari’s The Legend of Maula Jatt hasn’t yet stopped minting money and Ali Sethi’s “Pasoori” became the most streamed song globally. In a nutshell: Pakistani pop culture hit the peak.

The foreign affair

Steven Spielberg’s deeply personal ode to movies, The Fabelmans and Jafar Panahi’s exploration of the politics of cinema in the face of suppression in No Bears. Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic look at male friendship in The Banshees of Inisherin, and Michelle Yeoh’s impeccably mad turn in the multiverse (while still working on her taxes) in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. The trenchant takedown of the privileged in Ruben Ostland’s Triangle of Sadness or the body politics of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Foreign films, as usual, have been about the embarrassment of riches. The two closest to my heart this year have been Lukas Dhont’s Close and MaryanTouzani’s The Blue Caftan, both delicate explorations of gender, identity, sexuality and more. The Blue Caftan is about defying all that limits an individual and a call for personal liberation. Close is a study of loss—of people and relationships—and grief, guilt, reconciliation, and atonement that brings one back a full circle to life.