Counting on surprises

Saibal Chatterjee

In the past year, many Bollywood biggies bit the dust. But fans of Mumbai movie industry will not stop riding on potential blockbusters. So lined up for the remaining 10 months of the year are several big banner multi-starrers that will vie for big bucks at the boxoffice. Among the most anticipated of these projects is the Karan Johar-produced period drama Kalank. Releasing in mid-April, the film stars Madhuri Dixit, Sonakshi Sinha, Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Sanjay Dutt. 

Also coming up in 2019 are Ashutosh Gowariker’s historical epic Panipat, the Salman Khan-starrer Bharat (co-starring Katrina Kaif and Tabu), Ayan Mukerji’s superhero fantasy Brahmastra (Amitabh Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Dimple Kapadia, Akkineni Nagarjuna) and Anurag Singh’s Kesari, a period saga about the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi starring Akshay Kumar and Parineeti Chopra. 

But this year, too, enthused by the sleeper hits of 2018 (Andhadhun, Stree, Badhaai Ho), the industry will be counting on off-mainstream surprises. A healthy bunch of unconventional films are on Bollywood’s release roster. Zoya Akhtar’s musical drama Gully Boy, starring Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhatt and Kalki Koechlin, opened on February 14. Set in a socio-cultural milieu that is rarely depicted in mainstream movies, the film is inspired by the lives of two real-life Mumbai rappers, Divine and Naezy.

Gully Boy, studded with an array of hip hop numbers, received a thunderous response from Bollywood fans during its world premiere at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. Will this character-driven crowd-pleaser set the tone for the rest of the year? There is reason to believe that it will.

Dibakar Banerjee’s Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, produced by Yash Raj Films, has Arjun Kapoor playing a Haryanvi cop opposite Parineeti Chopra’s corporate exec. Their disparate worlds collide in comedic ways when the unlikely pair is thrown together into a series of escapades. Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya is a crime drama set in the ravines of Chambal. The cast of the film has Sushant Singh Rajput, Bhumi Pednekar and Manoj Bajpayee.

And Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, a quirky action thriller that bagged a prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, is slated for release in the third week of March. The film’s plot centres on a young man who is impervious to pain owing to a congenital medical condition. He uses his ‘weakness’ to fight muggers and other miscreants on the streets of Mumbai. 

The Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s Photograph, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra, revolves around a Mumbai street photographer who, to assuage the feelings of his visiting grandmother who wants him to get married, requests a stranger to pretend to be his fiancée. The film, which had its world premiere in Sundance and then played in Berlin, is scheduled for release in March. 

Sujoy’s Ghosh’s Badla, a thriller starring Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu, has also generated a fair amount of buzz ahead of its release. Two Hindi-language films by Bengali directors Goutam Ghose and Suman Ghosh might be flying under the radar at the moment but would be worth keeping an eye on. Raahgir, starring Adil Hussain, Tillotama Shome and Neeraj Kabi, is Goutam Ghose’s fourth Hindi film after Patang (1993), Gudia (1997) and Yatra (2006). 

Another indie film to watch out for in the multiplexes is the Manoj Bajpayee-starrer Bhonsle, directed by Devashish Makhija. The film is about a terminally ill cop who takes up cudgels on behalf of a non-Marathi woman who moves in next door in his chawl. 

Suman Ghosh, a Florida-based professor of economics who has made several Bengali feature films besides the Amartya Sen documentary The Argumentative Indian, is filming Aadhaar, a social satire featuring Vineet Kumar Singh as a Jharkhand man who was the first recipient of an Aadhaar card. 

Unusual Bollywood romantic comedies to watch out for: cinematographer Laxman Utekar’s first Hindi-language directorial venture Luka Chuppi, a tale set in Meerut starring Kartik Aaryan and Kriti Sanon with probable shades of Bareilly Ki Barfi, and Arjun Patiala, about a tall girl (Sanon again) in love with a short man (Diljit Dosanjh) and facing complications due to the height difference.

Away from the Indian movie-making set-up, British writer-director Gurinder Chadha brings to the screen this year writer and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. The drama, Blinded by the Light, set in 1980s England, follows a Luton-based Pakistani lad caught between his personal aspirations and his conservative upbringing. When the boy (played by Viveik Kalra) discovers Bruce Springsteen’s rousing working class numbers, his world changes forever.

Feted British-Indian documentary director Sandhya Suri, whose TIFF award-winning short fiction film, The Field, is making waves globally and deserves to be widely seen in the country where it is based, is currently working on her first narrative feature, Santosh. The film is about a widow in northern India who gets a police job on compassionate grounds after her cop-husband’s death and finds herself in the middle of an investigation into a violent sex crime. 

On the subject of Indians in global showbiz, Priyanka Chopra will be seen next on the Netflix rom-com Isn’t It Romantic, in which she plays a yoga ambassador. The Indian film that we will be watching out for is The Sky is Pink, a biographical drama directed by Shonali Bose based on the story of the life of young motivational speaker Aisha Chaudhary, who was born with an immune deficiency disorder, and her parents. Besides Priyanka, the cast includes Farhan Akhtar and Zaira Wasim.