Ziddi Zameer

Vikramaditya Motwane’s  Lootera  could have been alternatively titled  Opposites Attract , because while Hindi films often tell stories of two dissimilar people falling in love, seldom have a couple been as different from each other as Varun (Ranveer Singh) and Pakhi (Sonakshi Sinha). Pakhi, as Varun acidly reminds her in a post-interval scene, has had a privileged life; the daughter of a zamindar in rural Bengal, she has been brought up in luxury and comfort, sheltered from the unpleasant realities of the world (it’s ironical that Varun should tell her this, though, because ultimately, it’s he who exposes Pakhi to those unpleasant realities). Varun, on the other hand, is an orphan who must fend for himself. Pakhi has known parental love. Her father (Barun Chanda) considers her to be the vessel for his life-force, like those magical birds in folk tales who contain within them the life-force of the mighty kings. The closest that Varun has to a father, however, is Vajpai...

There’s a lot to admire about Shoojit Sircar’s  Madras Café , the most impressive of which might well be the way he handles his leading man and lady. When we first see John Abraham, he is buried beneath a straggly beard, unkempt hair and rumpled clothing, all of which are obviously meant to cue us to his emotional distress. Sadly, the actor, with his rather limited range of histrionics, looks more clueless than distressed, less a scarred soul-searcher and more a caveman who has time-travelled to the future and is still trying to make sense of his surroundings. Things don’t improve much in the subsequent scenes: he walks out of his house, buys a bottle of alcohol (in a nice touch, the man selling him the liquor brings out the bottle even before Abraham says anything: this informs us of the character’s alcoholism much better than any dialogue could have), drinks from it, and stumbles into a church, where he begins confessing to a priest. The rest of the film is his confession shown...

Shuddh Desi Romance. In many ways, Maneesh Sharma’s  Shuddh Desi Romance  is the sort of love story I had been waiting for Bollywood to provide for a long time. To elucidate, what I had wanted, all these years, was a romantic saga that goes against the monolithic trend of depicting marriage as the final destination for any couple, for no matter what the temperament and ambitions of the couple in question might be, and what misgivings they harbour about wedlock, our films do not permit them any conclusion but that which ratifies their love with  saat phere  and  ek chutki sindoor . But apparently, I was asking for too much, because no Bollywood romance, not even the “modern” ones—from  Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge  to  Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani —have bothered to buck that trend. The hero in each of these films starts out by mouthing uber-smart lines about marriage and monogamy being overrated and the need to follow your heart as opposed to the so...

The lives of the titular characters of  Paan Singh Tomar  and  Shahid  are almost twisted mirror images of each other. Paan Singh, as we see in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film, starts out as a law-abiding citizen—a soldier in the Indian army, no less, and a successful athlete to boot—who, owing to a tragic set of circumstances, ends up an outlaw wanted across three states. Shahid Azmi, terrified and angered by the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992, opts for the life of a militant in order to avenge his slain fellow community members, but renounces that path and returns to law—literally. He becomes a lawyer. We could therefore say that Paan Singh’s is a story of disillusionment with the System and the renouncement of it once and for all, while Azmi’s is that of regaining faith in the System and coming back within its fold. Yet, there's an insistent implication that Azmi remained, in his own way, as unyielding a rebel as Paan Singh. Like the militants he once aspired to join...

One of the many reasons why I love film noirs is the insight they provide into brooding, wounded male psyches. The noir heroes are usually worlds removed from the charismatic, flamboyant leading men who generally adorn the silver screen: in their gruff demeanour, heavy smoking or drinking, and the tendency to sit in the dark and mull over morbid things, they represent the exact antithesis to the kind of entertainment we expect from the movies. And yet, there is something endlessly fascinating about these men, about the scars that lie, barely concealed, beneath their tough guy-exterior. These men are haunted by demons from their past—generally, it’s a childhood trauma, or a skeleton in the closet, or the loss of loved ones and their failure to do something to prevent the tragedy that torments them—and in order to hold on to sanity and keep functioning, they dive headlong into their work, keeping the senses occupied with the rigours of the job, so that they don’t have to face themselve...