The Best Films of 2023: Shah Rukh’s Jawan and Pathaan, OMG 2 and 12th Fail feature in Shubhra Gupta’s list

Finally, it is about freshness and creativity. The zing thing that gets us into the theatres, surrendering to the dark, waiting for the screen to light up with story-and-character. In most of the films that made the cut, there were several enjoyable moments, but as soon as they were over, we went back to going tch-tch, this could have been so much better.

As we hover on the cusp of 2024, I’m left wondering if studio-backed, star-led Bollywood has lost its ability to create pure, untrammelled cinema. Are we now going to only get corporate calculations of ‘what works’ which will leave us with constructed well-produced ‘content’ with zero feelings?

I leave you, meanwhile, with the films which gave me something to smile about.

OMG 2

An adolescent boy is shamed for doing something nature has equipped him for at his age and stage. His school throws him out, his family is made fun of, and his father, who should have known better, hangs his own head, too.

Akshay Kumar and Pankaj Tripathi in a still from OMG 2.

Amit Rai’s OMG 2 doesn’t mince words. It smartly uses religion (sanatan dharm, no less) to broach, and breach, a taboo subject. Its humour is underlined; it has a superfluous song or two. But what it does is something no Hindi film has done, not just this year, but in all these years: it normalises young people’s sexual urges, to explore their own bodies and those of others, and offers up sex education up an urgent topic of conversation. Masturbation. Gasp. Hasth maithun. Double gasp.

Pankaj Tripathi is earnest and effective as the father, and Akshay Kumar plays second fiddle: the former is a devout Shiva ka das, the latter is Shiva incarnate, with his faithful Nandi plodding along. I’ve always maintained that when Akshay is not taking himself seriously, he can be fun. And props to his designer: a harlequin jacket sporting all the primary colours is uber cool.

Pathaan

SRK had rizz before rizz was a word. There he is, face bloodied, hair hanging down wildly, as his torturer lands yet another blow. The camera swoops low, the background music goes crazy, and we know that this is the moment. Pathaan breaks free. And the star who plays the character does too. About time.

Shah Rukh Khan in a still from Pathaan.

Pathaan works because SRK’s raffish charm offensive makes it work, along with the eye-catching trio of Deepika-John-Dimple. It is a film which takes on the persona of its kinetic lead character– jumping off cliffs, swooning on beaches swarming with beauties in stringy bikinis, chivvying a bad guy who once used to be a good guy, and exchanging world-weary banter with another superstar who just happens along, just to, you know, hang.

Taking a day off to get a hair-cut? Even Bond doesn’t play it as cool.

Jawan

Jawan isn’t as much a film as it is a declaration of intent. SRK’s second blockbuster of the year, after Pathaan, sets him up as our person. He understands what it is to be powerless, and he is the saviour who will set everything right.

Atlee and Shah Rukh Khan on sets of Jawan

Atlee’s hero is the classic Everyman who stands like a shield against oppressors of all hues: greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, venal cops. These enemies have always been around in mainstream cinema in all languages: we recognise them even before they open their mouths.

SRK plays the double-role of father-and-son, another masala trope we would know in our sleep. Jawan is the old-school hero made new, and SRK takes the character and runs with it. And he, clap, clap, gets a posse of women to help him reach his target. Not all of it works, but what does, is right up there.

12th Fail

Vidhu Vinod Chopra got his mojo back with 12th Fail, a heart-warmer of a film about an underdog who battles, with admirable grit and courage, the odds stacked against him, in order to crack the all-important UPSC examination.

Vikrant Massey in a still from 12th Fail.

Manoj Kumar Sharma’s father, a low-level officer, wears his honesty like a badge, but never has any spare cash. He has made it clear that if his son wants to make something of himself, the latter will have to do it all by himself. Manoj, played with absolute conviction by Vikrant Massey (watch him take away several Best Actor awards in 2024) doesn’t let anything deter him, not even his several rounds of failures in the ‘prelims’ and the ‘mains’, winning his fair lady on the way. There are a few contrivances that the plot throws up, but on the whole, this is a film which makes you want to celebrate the never-say-die human spirit. Yes, this is a tunnel, and look, there’s light at the end of it.

Rocky and Rani Ki Prem Kahani

By rights, Rocky and Rani shouldn’t have been here : I just couldn’t like it enough because of its overwritten dialogues, and ideas which look as if they’ve been left-over from his earlier hits. What’s with this obsession with ‘mithai ki dukaans’ from Chandni Chowk? Wasn’t all juice leached out of it in K3G? So last decade ya.

Actors Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh in a still from Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani.

Karan Johar has never used so much tell in his colourful romances: he does well enough with show. But there’s your Rocky-Ranveer, top-to-toe in emerald Gucci, and Rani-Alia as a TV reporter with a jaw-dropping wardrobe — just look at those sari blouses — not heating it up as much they could have. Whatever happened to smoulder? There’s Jaya Bachchan who doesn’t get a break from being a sourpuss, though her gorgeous scarlet lip-colourful is a show-stopper in its own right. And there’s Shabana Azmi and Dharamendra in a late-stage love story, which makes you smile, but also wince.

But one song in the film has Ranveer Singh and Tota Roy Chowdhury swirling and twirling on a stage, their blood-red lehengas making a statement as dextrous as their dance moves, against the world of heavy-handed men. It’s because of that one song, and what it represents, that the film leaps into this bunch.

What a sequence. In one fell swoop, it imparts a genteel kick up generations of patriarchal backsides, and slides neatly into the sweet spot gender fluid persons hide in, hoping no one will out them, and makes it beautifully seen.

Do we love patriarchy being smashed? But obvio.

Apart from these, I have some honourable mentions.

Three Of Us.

Right on top is Avinash Arun’s Three Of Us. It isn’t a big-budget, big-star film. It comes from the director who made Killa, one of the loveliest coming-of-age films in Indian cinema. That this one, starring Shefali Shah, Jaideep Ahlawat and Swanand Kirkire, made it to the multiplexes, feels like a miracle. The film is a winner, spinning a heartbreaking story of love, loss and remembrance.

Arun’s intimate knowledge of his stunning Konkan terrain douses the film with beauty, as these characters walk down dusty paths of the tiny town, dotted with houses that have old wells in the backyard, and waterbodies that hold terrible secrets.

Three Of Us is also an unlikely romance, the kind that doesn’t involve grand gestures and loud songs and dance. There’s music enough in the way scenes unfold fluidly, and tell us that when memories die, what is left is compassion.

A still from Three Of Us.

Goldfish

A thorny relationship between a mother and daughter is the vehicle through another story of memory-and-forgetfulness is told in Pushan Kripalani’s Goldfish. What this-two hander starring Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin also does is to question age-old assumptions about maternal love, and comes up with some uncomfortable answers. All women do not yearn to be mothers; and nurturing is not an automatic quality. At the end of the day compassion is enough.

Zwigato

Stories of little people are disappearing from the big screen. Nandita Das’s Zwigato has Kapil Sharma in an unexpectedly fine turn as a courier guy, called ‘delivery partners’ by their heartless employers who make them work around the clock with little pay and no extras. The most-excellent Shahana Goswami gives Sharma fine company: Das really should direct more.

Bheed, Afwaah

Both Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed and Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah needed wider play in theatres. The films can be seen as companion pieces. The former, starring Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, Ashutosh Rana, Dia Mirza and Pankaj Kapur in central roles, focusses on the lakhs of migrants who were forced to flee the cities to go back to their villages when the world’s most stringent lockdown kicked into place. The characters may have been fictional, but the film is a reminder of the stark reality of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all we could see around us was death and despair.

Bhumi Pednekar in a still from Afwaah.

Afwaah brings Mishra back into the Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi zone, in the way it melds satire and realism: we live in not just two India’s, as an Emmy-winning comic has famously declared; we live in multiple Indias. What do you do when you accidentally land up in a place where modernity and civility is just skin-deep? How do you save yourself from murderous trolls? Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays the confused ‘desi’ who’s a stranger in his own land, ably aided by Bhumi Pednekar, Sharib Hashmi, Sumeet Vyas and T J Bhanu. It is an unsettling glimpse of New India: will you stay or run away?

Thank You For Coming

If ‘masturbation’ was a word that the Hindi movies spoke out loud in 2023, ‘orgasm’ wasn’t far behind. It’s not as if the Big O hasn’t made an appearance in Bollywood up until now. But in Thank You For Coming, directed by Karan Boolani and produced by Rhea Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor, it is out loud and proud. Female desire is still not a ‘topic’ that’s tackled in Hindi movies as much as it should be: this female first romp, starring Bhumi Pednekar (who’s really had a busy year, doing all kinds of different roles) and a bunch of her besties, does exactly that. Let’s talk about sex, baby.

Dhak Dhak

Overall, Dhak Dhak comes off patchy, but what it does was to give a bunch of women centre-stage, via an unusual mode of transport. Taking off to the high mountains on a motorbike is such a guy thing, right? Ratna Pathak Shah, Dia Mirza, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanjana Sanghi are an unlikely bunch — a feisty grandma, a put-upon wife, a You Tuber-cum-biker, and a bride-to-be — who go vrooming off, helping each other out of bad patches, and getting to the highest point of their lives. Women doing their own thing? More, more.

A still from Ratna Pathak Shah, Dia Mirza, Fatima Sana Shaikh, and Sanjana Sanghi-starrer Dhak Dhak.

Will Dunki, Rajkumar Hirani’s outing with SRK, the star who’s been on top in 2023, be able to sneak into this list? We’ll let you know.