Indian Cinema
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AUTOHEAD (Dir. Rohit Mittal, 2016, India)
Rohit Mittal’s macabre slice of docufiction plunges the depths of Mumbai’s underclass. The concept of Autohead involves a documentary crew observing a rickshaw driver, Narayan (Deepak Sampat), who gradually reveals a murderous defect in his unpleasantly compelling disposition. Mittal’s docufiction recalls most readily Belvaux and Bonzel’s magnificently twisted Man Bites Dog (1992). Analogously, the crew Continue reading
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THE BATTLE FOR BANARAS (Dir. Kamal Swaroop, 2015, India) – The Crowd
There is a spectacular political trice at the end of Swaroop’s participatory documentary. At night, on the banks of the river Ganges, which is teeming with euphoric revellers and a swathe of India’s police, Modi emerges victorious, returning to Banaras, where he had stood for election as a BJP candidate. As he makes his way Continue reading
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PARINDA (Dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989, India)
At times watching Parinda is like seeing the handiwork of a geographer dissecting the topography of an urban landscape, flattening and amplifying the fissures of a Bombay milieu that had typically never been printed on celluloid in quite the way director Vidhu Vinod Chopra and his cinematographer Binod Pradhan had in mind when they were Continue reading
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FAN (Dir. Maneesh Sharma, 2016, India) – Star Studies
Fan is facilely about the political and psychological chasm between stardom and fandom. On paper, this seems like a very tasty proposition indeed; especially considering SRK has not made a good film in quite a while. The doppelgänger, a ubiquitous motif, suited to the fragmented, interruptive form of popular Hindi cinema, is familiar to the Continue reading
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BAJIRAO MASTANI (Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India, 2015)
Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films have tended to confound me for their emotional and psychological emptiness, often masked by a fondness for the engrossing worlds he imagines through the art of production design. Bhansali is an unashamed mainstream, populist filmmaker who with his interests in narratives of unrequited love and fatalistic romance recalls the films Continue reading
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