Ivan Nagar curates a personal must-watch list.

Time and time again, people have asked me for Bollywood recommendations. This is not a simple task – a lot of great Bollywood films are so contextual that chunks are lost in cultural translation. This listicle will take that into account, and I will go over some films that provide a good entry point into Bollywood for non-Hindi speakers. This is in no way a ranking of the movies, but just a list of film recommendations, as varied as possible with regards to genres, topics and how old the films are.

1. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011)

In many ways, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is the perfect first Bollywood film to watch for any non-Hindi speaker as it offers a unique balance of Indian and European sensibilities unseen in many mainstream productions. Following three friends on a road trip across Spain, it is a simple road movie on the surface with a beautiful philosophical core that deepens one’s understanding with every re-watch. The film is accompanied with excellent music by Shankar Ehsaan Loy and lyrics & poems by Javed Akhtar, staple features of not just Bollywood, but Indian culture going back thousands of years.

2. Awara (1951)

Raj Kapoor is one of the greatest Indian filmmakers of all time, leaving behind arguably the biggest and most popular legacy. Awara is Kapoor’s magnum opus. A film that fantastically pays homage to Kapoor’s biggest influences – Orson Welles and the German expressionist movement (involving works such as from F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang) – the cinematography and production design are a sight to behold, involving perhaps the most exceptional (and earliest) dream song sequences in Bollywood history. Awara‘s beloved soundtrack by legendary composers Shankar and Jaikishen with lyrics by the greatest poet of Indian cinema Shailendra, is still sung by millions of Indians, and is Indian cinema’s biggest and most successful export during the Soviet era. Even today after half a century, I often run into Eastern Europeans who knew the songs by heart and are big fans of Kapoor. Auteurs like Raj Kapoor are immortalised by their iconic cinema, and there is not a better example of it than Awara.

3. Do Bigha Zameen (1953)

London. Late 1940’s. Two relatively unknown filmmakers from India watched Vittorio De Sica’s humanistic masterpiece The Bicycle Thieves and are influenced to bring neo-realism to Indian cinema. One of them was Satyajit Ray, who went on to make his internationally renowned Pather Panchali, while the other was the equally talented but unfortunately overlooked Bimal Roy. Though both Pather Panchali and Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen are highly influenced by The Bicycle Thieves, they differ with regards to directors’ choice in cast. Roy chose to go for a known cast because of commercial reasons, while Ray stayed true to the neo-realistic roots and worked with non-professional actors. This is not to say the performances in Do Bigha Zameen aren’t realistic or grounded in humanity – in fact Balraj Sahni’s lead performance cannot be praised enough and would undoubtedly be counted amongst the few greatest Indian performances of all time. Do Bigha Zameen is a powerful human tragedy, immensely moving and has several heart-shatteringly beautiful scenes. It went on to become the first Indian film to get nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and for good reason, as rarely does one come across Hindi cinema as beautiful and timeless as this.

4. Udaan (2010)

A brilliant display of where small budgeted indie filmmaking is headed in India, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan is a debut any filmmaker would be proud of. A film that boldly announced the arrival of one of present day’s most original and consistently good Indian directors, Udaan is a coming of age film set in modern small town India and is a depiction that is refreshingly honest and sometimes brutally so. The film features brilliant music by one of the most exciting composers working in Bollywood today, Amit Trivedi, and equally brilliant lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya.

5. Dangal (2016)

From low-budget indies, we jump straight to the highest-grossing Indian film in history, and behold the most commercially successful Indian actor of all time, Aamir Khan. Western audiences might know him from his 2001 Oscar nominated epic Lagaan, but Khan’s fame in East Asia has grown rapidly over the years, so much so that his films earn up to 10 times more in countries like China than they do in India. Dangal is a film with a social message that also packs a hefty dose of mainstream Bollywood entertainment, and Khan’s performance in particular is unbelievable, managing to astonish Indian audiences (and now Chinese audiences as well) every year with his chameleonic abilities as an actor.

6. Pyaasa (1957)

Raj Kapoor wasn’t the only Indian auteur to be influenced by Orson Welles. Another disciple of Welles was Guru Dutt, a director who possessed the ability to paint beautiful visual poetry on the canvas of cinema. Whether it’s blocking, framing or lighting, they all pay homage to Welles’ Citizen Kane. Pyaasa is Dutt’s most renowned masterpiece and one that has aged incredibly well, with it’s sociopolitical themes ringing as true today as they did back in the late 1950s, when India was in it’s constitutional adolescence. The soundtrack of Pyaasa is perhaps the greatest ever composed in Bollywood, pairing the legendary composer S.D. Burman with renowned poet and lyricist Sahir. Sahir’s piercingly observant lyrics managed to garner praise from then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was ironically criticised in them. Over the years, polls in several publications such as TIME Magazine and Sight and Sound have counted it amongst the best films of all time, so even though Guru Dutt may not have enjoyed much commercial success post-Pyaasa, his influence on Indian cinema will live on forever.

7. Kabhi Kabhie (1976)

No Bollywood listicle would be complete without a romantic film and no one in the history of Indian cinema mastered romance on screen like Yash Chopra. If one were to list the 10 most popular romantic Hindi films of all time, at least half would be credited to Yash Chopra – it comes as a surprise to learn he also managed to direct iconic non-romantic films like Deewar and Trishul in his career. Kabhi Kabhie came out at the peak of Chopra’s career, a time where he directed an amazing film almost every year and was operating at the top of his game. The music, direction and dialogues in particular are highlights of not just Kabhi Kabhie but Yash Chopra’s filmography. The film’s romantic core finds strength in the immortal songs penned by Sahir and a charming cast led by the talented Rakhee and the demigod of Hindi cinema, Amitabh Bachchan.

Since this is the only film on the list featuring Bachchan, I believe it’s fair to mention his iconic status in Indian pop culture. This is a man who has been leading films for over 50 years and remains one of 2-3 most popular Indians alive. For the last 32 years, fans of Bachchan swarmed his residence every Sunday just to see him come out and wave hello to them – such is the stardom of Amitabh Bachchan.

8. Lagaan (2001)

Lagaan probably has the most international exposure on this list, as it was famously the first Indian film in almost 50 years to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and garnered universal critical acclaim along with tremendous commercial success. Lagaan is a full blown Bollywood epic, one that Roger Ebert deemed ‘enormously entertaining’. I am in complete agreement with the claim: it manages to take all the usual ingredients of a mainstream Bollywood film and refines them to a degree of near perfection. A story set in colonial India about farmers being exploited by the British and how they settle matters by facing off on the cricket pitch, it almost sounds like an Indian fantasy. But Lagaan takes it’s unbelievable premise and grounds it with terrific performances (especially by Aamir Khan, who already has 2 films on this list), phenomenal music and a heartfelt story of the harsh colonial era in India.

9. Masaan (2015)

Masaan in many ways is the face of modern avant-garde Hindi cinema, and after premiering at Cannes in 2015 it went on to garner praise from all over. Unfortunately, as is the case with many great films, Masaan underperformed commercially. The script by first time screenwriter Varun Grover is superb and only second to the remarkable performances from the whole cast (in particular Vicky Kaushal). A story about individuals trying to escape the decay of small town urban India, it takes on heavyweight subjects such as the caste system, class divide, misogyny in society, and weaves them into one intertwining cathartic tale.

10. Sujata (1959)

Masaan wasn’t the first beautiful film taking on the caste system in India – Bimal Roy did it back in 1959 with Sujata. A tale of a lower caste orphan girl (Nutan) who is raised by an upper caste family and always made to feel the burden she bears by birth, Sujata is a tender but powerful takedown of the evils of the cast divide in India. It puts a mirror in front of the Indian audience and forces them to take note of their hypocritical and oppressive ways. Just like it’s predecessor on the list, Sujata too premiered at the Cannes Film Festival back in 1960, and even though it tackles subjects specific to India, I believe its emotional appeal remains universally accessible. Sujata‘s soundtrack by again, S.D. Burman, gave India one of the most popular lullabies of all time with its beautiful lyrics penned by Majrooh Sultanpuri.

11. Queen (2014)

Queen is the quintessential modern Indian feminist film, one that dismantles patriarchy in a way that is inoffensive enough for Indian audiences. Writer-director Vikas Bahl, like many influential Indian directors before him, understood that the best way to address the harshest of problems in society is through the humour that makes people look within once they stop laughing. Bahl was aided in his venture by Kangana Ranaut’s terrific lead performance, who along with actresses like Vidya Balan has brought a new wave of female-centric cinema to the mainstream of Bollywood. Queen doesn’t give us a ready-made strong female character. On the contrary, Ranaut convincingly depicts a plausible character arc of the titular working-class girl from Delhi, who finds herself in an unfortunate and unlikely situation but refuses to let life keep her down and embarks on a journey that is as much fun for the viewers as it is for her.

12. Salaam Bombay (1988)

The mention of Queen has provided us with an unintentional segue for this next entry, Salaam Bombay, which was the explosive debut of renegade filmmaker Mira Nair who has since become one of India’s biggest female directors. One could argue that Salaam Bombay isn’t a conventional ‘Bollywood’ film, in that it is not a part of the mainstream by any stretch of the imagination, but if so, could we say the same about the cinema of Guru Dutt and Hrishikesh Mukherjee? And if not, then what is it that separates the two? Mira Nair presents a stark realistic picture of the slums of Mumbai, a no holds-barred story about the grim realities of the city that the world usually associates with the glamour of the Hindi film industry.

13. Taare Zameen Par (2007)

With 2007’s Taare Zaamen Par, Aamir Khan proved that his talents not only lie in front of the camera but behind it as well. Khan has been notorious throughout his career for being extremely intrusive with the directors of his films, and all that backseat driving experience proved useful in his directorial debut, an unusually sure-footed and flawless first film for any director. Aamir Khan is a famously socially conscious artist, whether it’s hosting a TV show focused on social problems in India or constantly being involved with films that have strong sociopolitical statements to make. Taare Zameen Par is no exception. The film centres around a dyslexic child whose learning difficulty goes undiagnosed and is constantly labelled as ‘lazy’ and insincere, especially problematic in a country like India where parents often put a lot of pressure on their children to perform well academically. The film was immensely successful upon release, proving that Aamir had once again struck a chord within Indian audiences.

14. Mughal-e-Azam (1960)

In 2004, legendary film director Yash Chopra (of previously mentioned Kabhi Kabhie) made a film after 7 years. The hype for Chopra’s Veer-Zara was immense, bringing together top movie stars and a post-humous film score by exemplary music composer Madan Mohan. The same Friday as Veer-Zara, Mughal-e-Azam (English trans. The Great Mughals) was re-released in a fully restored colour version. What was amazing is that a film that was 44 years old at the time managed to give a tentpole release as stiff a competition at the box office as it did.

The production of Mughal-e-Azam is the stuff of legends, beginning in the 1940s with principal photography taking place only in the early 50s after a long period of pre-production disrupted by the India-Pakistan partition riots. The film’s financier also ended up relocating to Pakistan, which left Asif without any backer. When he finally managed to get the funds together, his old cast which consisted of heavy weights like actress Nargis had moved on to other projects, and Asif had to re-cast all the main players. Dilip Kumar was cast for the lead role, an actor widely considered the greatest to have ever graced Indian screens alongside stars like Madhubala and Prithviraj Kapoor. The film was shot in 3 languages so the filmmakers would shoot everything thrice, and on top of this as many as 14 cameras were used for some sequences, all of this contributing to sky high production costs. Principal photography took so long that during that time colour technology had arrived in India, and unable to restart the film from scratch but still wanting to shoot in colour, Asif shot a famous dance and song sequence in colour with the rest of the film in black and white. When Mughal-e-Azam finally hit cinemas in 1960, it had been 16 years in the making.

But the people were finally able to see Asif’s magnum opus, a story of an Indian prince rebelling against the Emperor Akbar for the courtesan he fell in love with. The film became so popular that most people to this day believe that the courtesan suffered the same fate in real life as she did in the film (Spoiler: She gets entombed alive). Mughal-e-Azam is not only the greatest epic ever to be made in India, but it is also a film with an unbelievably troubled production which is as fascinating as the film itself. Asif seemed to have been cursed with grand projects that went through unbelievable turbulence before completion – he went on to make only one more film and suffered an untimely death before it’s completion. At least we will always have Mughal-e-Azam to remember him by.

15. Dil Chahta Hai (2001)

Last but definitely not the least, we have Farhan Akhtar’s seminal Dil Chahta Hai. Arguably the strongest directorial debut in Hindi cinema, Dil Chahta Hai revolutionised Indian filmmaking in numerous ways, whether it was the gust of urban freshness it brought with it, or introducing basic concepts like a call sheet which was surprisingly not a thing in Bollywood until then. It is a coming of age story of 3 friends, Akash, Sid and Sameer, and includes all the main elements one expects from a Bollywood film, but in a way that appealed to urban elitists who looked down on Hindi movies in favour of Hollywood. For many people, Dil Chahta Hai was the first time they felt that a Bollywood movie could be relatable, cool and at the same time true to its mainstream roots.

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This list was denser than I initially expected, but I sincerely hope it will make you seek out some good Hindi movies and discover a cinema that I believe is misrepresented or in many cases, caricatured, in the minds of Western audiences.

Ivan Nagar reviews Steven Soderbergh’s experimental new venture.

It is 2018 and I am sitting in a cinema, waiting to watch a film shot on an iPhone. For someone who has not watched Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015), arguably the first notable film to be shot on an iPhone, this is a very exciting viewing experience.

The film quickly establishes Sawyer (Claire Foy) as a no-nonsense character with a low tolerance for bullshit, which helps the audience process and understand what she goes through and her consequent reactions, while the overall delirium and paranoia of Sawyer and her situation is beautifully and brilliantly captured by Thomas Newman’s amazing soundtrack. Foy’s performance is good for the most part, but her accent dwindles in a few scenes, and it was strange to see an actress famous for playing the queen play a midwestern American working girl trapped in a psychiatric institution. Matt Damon also continues his streak of outlandish surprise cameos in what is easily the funniest scene in the film (albeit without any tough competition).

Frankly, for the first 10 minutes, the iPhone factor acted as an obstruction between the narrative and I. I was too preoccupied with noticing the aesthetic implications of the film being shot on a phone, and its inadequacies stood out more. The biggest perhaps is it’s poor dynamic range, which resulted in blown-out highlights – for example, every window in the film during day scenes were bright white with no detail. This is also obvious with later sequences in the film where Soderbergh depicts a forest at night – the lack of an iPhone’s ability to shoot in low light resulted in Peter Andrews (Soderbergh’s pseudonym as cinematographer) turning the colour temperature colder, tinting the images on screen with an overall blue hue (although this could just be an artistic choice). In addition, the iPhone’s lens is fixed, translating to limited focal lengths. This gives the film the illusion of being shot entirely with wide lenses, everything distorted and sometimes fish-eyed. Personally, this was not a problem, and Soderbergh’s freedom to get unconventional coverage of scenes was interesting to watch at the very least. Another plus side was that the iPhone also allowed Soderbergh to put the camera in places and tight spots where a full sized film camera wouldn’t go. Case in point is a scene where the camera is inside the trunk of a car with Sawyer.

Apart from the obvious and generic psychological thriller themes in the film, Unsane half-heartedly tries to provide some sort of cynical commentary on how the medical industry has a darker, overly capitalist side that exploits patients to fill beds and scam them out of their insurance money. How much truth there is here is unsure, but it’s unsettling nevertheless. Nathan (Jay Pharoah) informs Sawyer of this scam and in turn explains to the audience why exactly she’s been frustratingly kept in the hospital against her will, also tells her to keep her head down so that her ‘observation period’ is not increased, or worse, get punished with solitary confinement. He repeats this to Sawyer multiple times, however only provokes her reactionary side, and she lashes out every time someone says anything slightly aggravating to her. It becomes frustrating – you’d think that considering the situation, she might control herself and play smart to get out sooner, but she doesn’t and it feels a bit convenient device to drive to the plot forward.

Up until the last act, the film remained a psychological thriller and did not prepare me for a sharp tonal change. Unsane suddenly becomes a slasher horror, and we are given a brutal, gory climax sequence. The very last scene, however, was executed as if it was out of a student film. Soderbergh deserves credit for how he subverts audience expectations and how he plays on psychological thriller tropes such as the ‘it’s all in the head of the protagonist’. Unfortunately, my praise would stop there, as although there are no glaring issues with it, there is also absolutely nothing special, and most of the things it attempts have been done by much better films in much better ways.

7/10

Unsane is out now in UK cinemas. Check out the trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the BFI’s 61st London Film Festival (4-15 October), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Ivan Nagar reviews Elvira Lind’s LFF Documentary Competition submission.

Bobbi Jene opens in Tel Aviv, where the celebrity contemporary dancer Bobbi Jene Smith is preparing for an upcoming performance. She moved to the city at the age of twenty-one, when Ohad Naharin offered her a place in the famous Israeli dance group Batsheva, dropping out of the Juilliard School of Performing Arts in the process. At the time Bobbi Jene was a naïve girl who had never left her country and, as she later states, jumped on this opportunity without even “thinking of the rent”. Her path wasn’t without difficulties, and Bobbi must make tough decisions and face dilemmas which director Elvira Lind captures masterfully. The camera loiters at a close distance and observes the intimate aspects of both Bobbi’s private and her professional life, sometimes drawing so close to the people around her it feels almost intrusive.

For the most part, Lind succeeds in distilling the mood of Bobbi Jene’s life. We are introduced to her boyfriend, Or, and the realities of cross-cultural romance are sketched out through the little nuances of their relationship. Lind also captures the feelings of disconnect Bobbi faces when she returns to America, to reunite with her family and try to integrate with a dance community that has “no idea that she is back”. Other sequences may prove inaccessible for some. In one instance Bobbi orgasms in a studio space by vigorously rubbing against a sandbag while a man watches from a distance on a chair. We later learn this is the basis of her solo performance in Jerusalem – the moment the film is building up to. The film also boasts a significant amount of candid nudity, which inarguably reinforces the dialogue Bobbi is trying to have about nudity itself and the blanket of self-consciousness around it. Once the viewer gets over such superficially uncomfortable moments as Bobbi shopping for a sandbag with her mother, we can see exactly what she is trying to communicate through her performance and the ways she is sharing a deeply personal experience with not just the live audience in the film but also us as viewers. As Bobbi hilariously remarks to her mother, “sometimes you need to find pleasure in what weighs you down.” One conversation she has with her mother, walking down a New York street, underlines the fundamental philosophical differences between the two and how Bobbi’s growth and evolution as a person in a different culture for nearly ten years has created a divide between the way they see things.

The first peek we get of the performance in Jerusalem is through a carefully and appropriately-chosen wide shot while Bobbi performs for a museum before they approve it. In an interview with a journalist Bobbi goes into detail about how the piece, initially conceived as a five-minute performance, has morphed into an hour-long sequence. The final performance in Jerusalem is described by Bobbi’s former mentor as an experience that would have changed his life had he seen it when he was younger. Coming from a virgin point of view in regards to contemporary dance, I am not sure how much energy from that electric performance is lost in its transition from real to reel – a lot of the dance work in the film was a completely new visual experience for me, and one that invoked many different emotions. The performances ignite a deeply emotional reaction, hard to grasp and even hard to describe, and it’s not clear if they’re intended to make the viewer feel anything specific at all.

Through Bobbi Jene, the filmmaker offers a glimpse into the world of the eponymous dancer: the realities of both her private and professional lives, the turbulence she faces in both by moving back to her country of origin, and the changes this transition causes – sometimes tangible, sometimes subliminal yet thunderous rushes of emotion. Director Elvira Lind has crafted a viewing experience that, much like the contemporary art it depicts, is as powerful as it is abstract.

Bobbi Jene will receive its UK premiere on the 6th of October, at London Film Festival. Watch the trailer below:

Ivan Nagar reviews Alex Kurtzman’s reboot of the iconic Universal monster franchise.

The Mummy marks the beginning of Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’. (Or was it ‘Dracula Untold?’ Don’t bother – it’s a rhetorical question). The Dark Universe is an effort to reboot the monster classics the studio made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and The Mummy is planned as the first of many. The film begins with a haunting prologue that gives us a backstory for Sofia Boutella’s titular character, but the dark gloomy tone of the film is almost instantly twisted when Tom Cruise is introduced. (At no point in this review will I refer to Cruise’s character by name because he is essentially playing himself in this movie.) What follows is a numbingly loud action set piece in an Iraqi village during which we are also graced with Jake Johnson’s bland comic relief.

Although I firmly believe that Annabelle Wallis’ beauty is unparalleled, there is no denying what an absolutely talentless actress she is. From her first scene, she manages to lower the bar of acting in this film to the depths of hell (to be fair to her, it is a very low bar to begin with). At this point, I would like to commend Alex Kurtzman – for whom The Mummy is a directorial debut – who leaves no stone unturned to make sure the audience is put through as much torture as possible: voilà, bad CGI. Also, what kind of moron shoots at tiny spiders with an assault rifle?! Only the best kind. Jake Johnson, ladies and gentlemen.

A lot of the establishing shots are gorgeously photographed and extremely haunting, but alas, the film constantly wrestles with conflicting tones, and unwanted comic relief keeps pulling us back from the kind of grim and dark world this film should’ve been entirely set in. There are countless problems with this film, though some of them should be excused for their unintentional hilarity. Case in point: the mummy (Sofia Boutella) makes out with her helpless victims and turns them into zombies suffering from polio. My favourite scene in the film takes place when Annabelle Wallis’ character (who is puzzlingly convinced of Tom Cruise’s benevolence) sits down next to him to thank him for saving her life by letting her have the only parachute on a crashing plane, only to be told that he thought there was another one. Normally this scene would be your generic bit of comic relief, but Kurtzman approaches it in the strangest way, with awkward silence and an unintentional sense of deadpan comedy. It’s the completely opposite of film’s overall tone, and that is exactly what makes the scene laugh-out-loud funny.

At some point in this mess of a film, Tom Cruise joins the four-eyes club (if you’ve even seen the trailer you’ll know what I’m talking about). It’s important to make it clear how excruciatingly miscast Tom Cruise is in this movie. It’s almost as if someone randomly put a National Treasure character in a dark monster movie: you can see the confusion on his face as he runs around, expecting to be in a trademark TC action film.

Towards the end of the film, when the mummy is wrecking havoc across London, the trapped workers in an archaeology site are given this gem of advice to protect them from the mummy: “lock your doors!”. That solid recommendation is of little use, as dead crusaders buried in the site come to life and start attacking the workers. You might ask why the crusaders are fighting for the mummy? What possible allegiance could medieval European knights owe to an Egyptian princess? Yes, good questions. When the London Underground is scarier than zombie crusaders in your film, you’re doing something wrong.

In the end, The Mummy is the weirdest love triangle Tom Cruise has ever been involved in. Throughout the film it feels as if the director had no control over/was completely indifferent to the tone of the film, the screenplay feels completely tired despite the mildly talented screenwriters who worked on it (David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman, from a story by Jon Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet) and although the cinematography is surprisingly good at the start, it gets progressively worse. It is no surprise that this film has bombed at the box office, vanishing under the juggernaut of Wonder Woman (our review); with Alien: Covenant, Baywatch and the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie all similarly performing below expectations, this summer has already been something of a reminder to studios that fatigued nostalgia-based franchises are of little interest to audiences.

I would like to end this review with a quote from the titular mummy. “There are worse fates than death.” Yes, like having to watch this film.

4/10

The Mummy is out in UK cinemas now. See the final trailer below: