After the almost execrable excesses of his last few outings – I could barely keep myself from flinching at their over-the-top tonality – I was bracing for more of the same in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi. After all, the territory is ripe for his brand of extravagant cinema: the tale of a sex worker who survives extreme brutalisation to lobby with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
I absolutely love it when a film is self-aware. When it knows its strengths and weaknesses and references these in the narrative itself. It makes my job that much easier. Take Bestseller, for example. I have little to add to what the characters have to say at three different points in the film. ‘What the nonsense is this?’ says one. ‘What the f %# is going on?’ says the same character a little.
It’s now an instantly recognisable subgenre in Hindi cinema. A ‘hatke’ subject that deals with social ‘taboos’ and dollops of humour to make the issue palatable. A largely north Indian middle-class setting, often small-town, with extended families. A top-notch ensemble featuring a permutation-combination of the same character actors, headlined by those torchbearers of this school of films.
For over a fortnight, no one would have escaped the carpet-bombing, from underlining its status as the first Indian film to have an intimacy director to more or less selling this is as ‘the Bollywood film to beat all Bollywood films dealing with infidelity’ (which is so much crap). So relentless was the campaign, I was more or less convinced that all the marketing exercise was nothing but an.
In its review of Six Suspects, the New York Times described it as ‘a fizzy romp… a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in… delivering a rambling critique of Indian culture, taking shots at everything from racism to reality TV’. Tigmanshu Dhulia’s sprawling (there’s no other word to describe this overwritten, densely plotted nine-episode series.