Dahaad, IB71, Love Again: This Week's Top Reviews

Portrait Of An India Divided By Religion, United By Prejudice

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows. Today: Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar's Dahaad.

Dir: Reema Kagti, Ruchika Oberoi

Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Gulshan Devaiah, Vijay Varma

Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video India

DAHAAD, the sensational new Zoya Akhtar-Reema Kagti collaborative series, opens with genius thematic trickery. In Mandawa, Rajasthan, a Hindu girl has eloped with a Muslim boy. The inter-faith relationship attracts the attention of a right wing local political party who swiftly turns the incident into an issue. A group of people holding flags flock outside the police station and condemn it as an instance of Love Jihad, an Islamaphobic idea which falsely propounds that Muslim men lure Hindu women for forcible conversions. The girl’s father is a wealthy man, who threatens the officials with dire consequences if they cannot find his daughter. The boy’s father is petrified.

Amidst the commotion stands another man whose sister ran away two months ago and never contacted him since. He has been in the precinct of the police station before but his repeated follow ups on the missing complaint evokes no furore. His sister is an adult, he is told. But then, so is the girl who has fled. The only difference is the religion of the men they chose to disappear with. Looking at the disparity of interest, something in the man shifts. He joins the crowd and raises his hand in protest.

This sequence, which arrives fairly early, is a knockout moment. Even as a standalone scene, it is a terrific testimony to the India we have come to inhabit where the interest of the public is tied to religion and that itself has been revamped as public interest. It also serves as an unsettling reminder of the country’s current social climate, which is increasingly warranting descent into bigotry as the only way to be heard.

The first episode of Dahaad is preoccupied with depicting the menacing consequences of letting religion take precedence over reason, culminating in a chilling scene where a Muslim man is tied to the railway tracks by political party thugs under the false assumption of his affair with a Hindu woman.

MORE REVIEWS

'Love Again' Turns Love & Grief Into Flimsy Hashtags

Love Again — a remake of a movie that was an adaptation of a book — is another brick in a dissonant wall. It’s frightfully bland and superficial, which takes some doing for a story that opens with a death and explores loss through the lens of technology. The premise has P.S. I Love You-level potential. Love Again stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Mira Ray, an Indian-American illustrator who loses her fiance, struggles to cope, sends a series of messages to his old number, and falls for the man that this number has been reassigned to. There’s more. This man, Rob (Sam Heughan), is a music critic working on a Celine Dion profile. He’s a purist, so he looks down on ‘popular’ legacies like hers. The Canadian singer stars as herself, so that Rob can discover that all her corny lyrics over the years are not so corny after all. She becomes a love guru of sorts, guiding him through the empty canals of complex love.

— RAHUL DESAI

Read more
Playing in: Theatres

'IB71' Hijacks History To Hold Us Hostage

IB71, which marks flexible-man Vidyut Jamwal’s first excursion in production, is said to be based on a highly classified mission by India’s intelligence officers in 1970 wherein they negated an impending attack by Pakistan. Apparently the operation was not spoken for as long as five decades and if you look it up, this is the most you can unearth. The year is 1970; tension between the two fragments of Pakistan is at its peak, as it is between the two neighbouring countries. Dev (Jammwal) is an Intelligence Bureau officer who gets intel that Pakistan is planning an attack on an unprepared India in 10 days. He plots a counter-move, telling his superior (essayed by who else but Anupam Kher) that if India can prove Pakistan has committed an act of terror then they can block their air routes and impede the planned attack. The film unfolds with the pointed purpose of portraying what allegedly took place.

— I.S.

Playing in: Theatres

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

The one newsletter you need to decide what to watch on any given day. Our editors pick a show, movie, or theme for you from everything that’s streaming on OTT.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think is worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an hour on this.