Half the year’s over, but we couldn’t find five great Hindi movies to recommend

As we sat at our weekly edit meeting to discuss our biannual best-of lists, we were shocked to discover that we couldn’t think of even five great Hindi movies that would warrant a full-throated recommendation. As expected, there was no shortage of excellent regional-language cinema — the Malayalam gem Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam remains the best Indian film of the year so far, followed by the Maithili-language Dhuin, directed by Achal Mishra — but Bollywood has long been regarded as the country’s foremost film industry. Whatever happened?

As enjoyable as Pathaan was (on several levels), calling it one of the year’s best movies would be rather odd. It is, after all, a star vehicle that panders to populist sentiment, and comparing it against the actual great films of the year should immediately put things into perspective. Pathaan is immensely enjoyable, yes, but  it’s too early to tell if it will have any sort of cinematic legacy at all. The less said about 2023’s other star-driven mainstream releases — Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar, Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan, Shehzada — the better. To paraphrase the late Logan Roy, these are not serious films.

A still from Ajitpat Singh’s Fire in the Mountains.

But what of the ones that are projected as serious cinema? Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains debuted on SonyLIV to muted response, two years after premiering at Sundance. Relatively speaking, it’s among the finer films of the year — evocatively shot, layered in its themes, but never quite as good as it should’ve been. I had a similar reaction to Nandita Das’ Zwigato, which turned out to be funnier than expected, despite its grave subject matter. Kapil Sharma was good, though. Many would also argue that Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai and Gulmohar — both movies that misused the talents of Manoj Bajpayee — are worth mentioning in this conversation. But are they, really? Gulmohar is so stiffly acted, so robotically written — just because it has the sheen of superior cinema doesn’t mean that it is actually any better than the hordes of overwrought family dramas that we are normally subjected to. Nor is Bandaa, a movie with a major perspective problem that nobody is willing to address, any better than the other ZEE5 movies that Bajpayee has contractually committed himself to.

Streaming has been unusually lean as well, and a part of the problem is the evolving strategies that platforms are implementing to tackle stagnating growth. Gone are the days when Netflix would acquire and release gems such as The Disciple and Meel Patthar. This year, the streamer has released original movies ranging from the moderately watchable Kathal — star Sanya Malhotra has done much better work in the past — to the downright horrendous Mission Majnu, which is exactly the kind of movie Sidharth Malhotra does these days. Prime Video, on the other hand, would rather hedge its bets on something like Tiku Weds Sheru, an almost unbearable movie starring a man who only a couple of years ago headlined Serious Men and Raat Akeli Hai, among the two best Hindi films of 2020. He did star in Afwaah, which seemed, briefly, like a solid drama for adults. But it turned out to be another one of those movies that pretend to be important but don’t really have the insight or artistry to back it up.

Bhumi Pednekar and Rajkummar Rao in a still from Bheed.

When all is said and done, two Hindi films released in the first half of this year will have earned a combined total of over Rs 700 crore at the box office. Both those films — Adipurush and The Kerala Story — scored endorsements from the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and leveraged popular sentiment across North India into big box office numbers. Both films also proved that, when it comes to a certain brand of populist cinema, reviews do not matter. Which means that any sort of criticism directed at their propagandist tone is seen, instead, as an attack on religious freedom. With formal dissent explicitly discouraged by those in power — mass protests across the country have been quelled in recent years — it is up to filmmakers to express their fury via their work.

The aforementioned Afwaah was a part of a quadrilogy of spiritually connected movies helmed by a cabal of directors that I like to refer to as The Resistance — Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra, Anubhav Sinha and Hansal Mehta. Of these, Sinha’s Bheed stands out. It’s the only movie of this lot that wears its heart on its sleeve and isn’t ‘manufactured’ like most other Bollywood films these days. There was also a lot to like about Kashyap’s singularly scrappy Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat (so long as the movie was focused on its characters and not on shoehorning in verbalised statements about contemporary India, which had already been communicated rather successfully by the storytelling). But for a variety of reasons — successful clampdown by the majoritarian right, a farcical theatrical release, and next to no publicity even for their streaming debuts — each of these movies remains vastly under-seen. While it’s clear that the audience for films like this has decreased, there’s also a sense — and this is more terrifying — that even the quality of our so-called ‘parallel cinema’ has declined.

It’s worth championing these movies, because long after society has been reduced to ash and then resurrected, they’ll remember artists who were on the right side of history.

But while compiling best-of lists, either now or towards the end of the year, one shouldn’t feel pressured to include passable movies, just because. Situations like this, rare as they are, should be seen as a wake-up call — not to create more shared universes or ride on the coattails of the hatred that is spreading in our society, but to do better. And you’d hope that we emerge from this, as a culture, by December.