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For the Bollywood movie watcher, the first quarter of 2014 was extraordinarily remarkable. Not that the industry produced much that could be regarded as qualitatively exceptional but it certainly delivered interestingly diverse stories inspired by the real world and its concerns. This is election season, so it is hardly surprising that several recent Hindi releases — notably Gulaab Gang and Youngistaan — were about politicians battling for survival. Within this narrative range, netas came in varied shapes and hues. In Gulaab Gang, the leader of a gang of vigilantes (Madhuri Dixit) waged all-out war on a cunning female politician (Juhi Chawla) determined not to loosen her grip over her hapless subjects. In Youngistaan, a just-back-from-the-West youngster (Jackky Bhagnani) is catapulted to the prime ministerial hot seat only to inevitably discover that it is no bed of roses. In Bhootnath Returns, politics takes on an all-new dimension as a friendly ghost (Amitabh Bachchan) joins the electoral fray against a manipulative candidate played by Boman Irani. Talking of spirits from the nether world, Gang of Ghosts had a whole complement of them fighting to save their abode in the city of Mumbai from the grasp of a greedy land shark. Bollywood’s engagement with the topical and the real is by no means a nascent phenomenon but in the past few weeks, it has been not been limited only to films that consciously seek to break the commercial mould. Even a film like Bewakoofiyaan, a romantic comedy starring Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor, deals with the challenges that a young couple faces as the global economic downturn hits home and the male protagonist loses his well-paying job. O Teri, a laboured satire about the politics-media nexus, draws its raw material from the Commonwealth Games scam and focuses on two blundering television journalists (Pulkit Samrat and Bilal Amrohi) that stumble upon the misdeeds of the powerful. The film is a blend of Jai Ho and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron but lacks the star power of the former and the organic humour of the latter. Corruption, recession, political skullduggery, electoral manipulation, bureaucratic apathy — they are all fair game for Hindi movies that are out to entertain the masses with potshots at all that is wrong with this nation. Of course, only a handful of these releases have broken through the mediocrity barrier but even those that haven’t, deserve a few brownie points for effort. At least four films released during the last quarter — Dedh Ishqiya, Highway, Queen and Ankhon Dekhi — earned much more than mere condescending praise, and understandably so. And all of these were firmly rooted in the actual world even when they resorted to stylistic flights of fancy. Actor-director Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi, about an old Delhi family coming to grips with the whims of its temperamental patriarch (played with great aplomb by gifted character actor Sanjay Mishra). It is a funny, moving and insightful film that crafts a loving and deceptively simple portrait of purani Dilli, naturalistically highlighting its many moods, sights and sounds. There are elements in the plot of Ankhon Dekhi that border on the fantastical. The protagonist dreams of flying like a bird and, on an impulse one fine day, decides that he will henceforth trust nothing (and nobody) other than his own eyes to draw conclusions about the world around him. But the filmtone is steadfastly realistic. Pretty much the same is true of both Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya and Imtiaz Ali’s Highway. Their prime intention of these two films is to provide entertainment but neither lets the conventional norms of commercial Hindi cinema dilute its essence. Both films revolve around characters that the audience can instantly relate to despite the fact that these men and women are not exactly ordinary beings and might not be all that regularly visible in everyone’s immediate environs. And that is the most noteworthy aspect of films such as these: they demonstrate that a growing tribe of Mumbai filmmakers and screenwriters are finding ways of balancing the rules of gripping drama and the demands of logical characterisation. Queen, Kangana Ranaut’s career-defining film, gives the coming-of-age drama a completely new spin. No matter how difficult it might be to accept that an about-to-be-married girl left in the lurch by the bridegroom would take off on a solo honeymoon to European cities that she has never been to before, the encounters and experiences of the heroine remain squarely within the parameters of the believable. Girish Malik’s Jal isn’t strictly a Bollywood film. It addresses grave issues like the water crisis in the Rann of Kutch and the threat posed to pink flamingos by a rapidly worsening ecology but it does not shy away from plunging into a world characterised by a surfeit of colours, emotions and action. Too much reality, it seems, is no longer anathema to Mumbai filmmakers as long as it is coated with crowd-pleasing varnish.
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