Border 2, Marty Supreme, Space Gen: Chandrayaan

Border 2: Spiritual Sequel Saying The Same Story

We are living at a time when the merit of a film has come to be defined by not what it is but what it is not. Perhaps, this will be Border 2 ’s most resounding legacy, Ishita Sengupta reviews.

Dir: Anurag Singh

Cast: Sunny Deol, Varun Dhawan, Diljit Dosanjh, Ahan Shetty

Playing in: Theatres

IN THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS, the roster of Hindi cinema has been clogged with certain kinds of narratives and mostly with one kind of event: war. There has been a proliferation of war films as their rhetoric — identifying the nemesis as an “enemy”, using dialogues filled with allegories of battles — leaks into the grammar of regular dramas. It was about time that JP Dutta’s Border (1997), the original war-cry of a film centred firmly around Indian soldiers, would be reprised, and Border 2 is that.

There, however, are some differences. Border 2 is directed by Anurag Singh (he also made Kesari in 2019). Both are based on the 1971 India-Pakistan war, but if the first focused on the Battle of Longewala, where a small group of Indian soldiers had defeated a mammoth Pakistani army, then the spiritual sequel is broader in scale. Singh’s film tackles the security threats India suffered in land, air and war. More crucially, Border 2 has been released in an India significantly different from the country it was three decades ago.

WATCH | JP Dutta's 1997 blockbuster Border is currently streaming on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription.

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Space Gen: Chandrayaan — Alert! A Crash Landing

The approach of TVF's Space Gen: Chandrayaan is limiting, and the execution is woefully plain, making the show resemble a tritely-written school skit performed as a last-minute decision.

Dir: Anant Singh

Cast: Nakuul Mehta, Shriya Saran

Streaming on: JioHotstar

A STORY LIKE THIS can be told only once. In 2023, India launched Chandrayaan-3, a lunar exploration carried out by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). A stupendous feat such as this could be measured in more tactile terms: the success made India the first country to soft-land on the Moon's south pole and the fourth nation to accomplish a lunar soft landing. A dramatised recreation of this was waiting to happen, and TVF’s new series, Space Gen: Chandrayaan, is the result of that.

Although timely, the five-episode show is a bafflingly underproduced outing that does a gross disservice to the accomplishment it chooses to showcase. Its approach is limiting, and the execution is woefully plain, making Space Gen: Chandrayaan resemble a tritely written school skit performed as a last-minute decision. Everything in the series, from writing to the performances, is an instance of drawing up a list of possibilities and zeroing in on the worst possible option. It might seem impossible, but Space Gen: Chandrayaan is nothing but an example of taking an almost foolproof premise and ruining it to bits.

— I.S.

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Marty Supreme & The Fascism Of Desire

The message of the film is not to Be Like Marty, it’s to watch Marty mutate into a sociocultural cautionary tale in pursuit of a cinematic fairytale, writes Rahul Desai.

Dir: Josh Safdie

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion

Playing in: Theatres

THE “Supreme” in Marty Supreme has dual connotations. The obvious one is that here’s an underdog hero who will stop at nothing to achieve sporting supremacy. Marty Mauser will be an anti-hero, a hustler, a fraud, a narcissist and whoever it takes to summon his destiny of being world champion. Usually, such protagonists have to overcome the system with talent and grit. Here, the talent and grit are almost incidental. It is assumed he has those, so he’d rather game the system in the language of those who run it. As a Jewish shoe salesman in 1950s New York in a post-Holocaust world, he is accustomed to selling his identity more than proving it. America and table tennis are merely his mediums to be seen; he is neither patriotic nor a purist. If he’s an allegory for the entitlement of US capitalism and the illusion of the American Dream — where he upends multiple lives and puts everyone at risk to get what he wants — so be it.

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The problem is the ‘selling’ becomes his personality so fully that Marty himself becomes the one customer who struggles to buy it. It would’ve been easy for the film to make him a mediocre player with delusions of grandeur, but the clincher is that Marty is genuinely good at ping-pong — he can’t afford not to be. He has the skill, the drive, the showmanship, because he sees the game as an advertisement to promote himself, not the other way around; it’s not popular enough as a sport yet, so he is desperate to sensationalise it to glorify the one thing he excels at. When he loses in the British Open final to a new Japanese opponent early on, he’s so shaken that he spends the rest of the film hustling to showcase that greatness again — to himself, before anyone else — and bring to life all the fictions he swore by. It’s a nasty self-fulfilment arc, where the ‘training montages’ revolve around him conning people for money to participate in the next tournament; his life descends into a messy crime caper to earn the shot at a rousing sports biopic. (Not dissimilar to Anora, the sex worker whose life spirals into a caper to retrieve the Cinderella-coded romance she was promised). He’s not tricking others into believing in him; he’s tricking others into helping him retain his self-belief. Some of them already do — like Rachel, the married childhood friend he’s having an affair with — but Marty’s vanity is supreme. The message is not to Be Like Marty, it’s to watch Marty mutate into a sociocultural cautionary tale in pursuit of a cinematic fairytale.

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