Bollywood in 2014: The Films and Performances I Loved

All my favorite Hindi movies of 2014 have a number of things in common. Each features a clutch of memorable performances. Each is anchored by strong female protagonists whose concerns are never just limited to romantic entanglements. None of them is set in a generically pretty universe of brightly lit mansions and apartments and fashion-magazine-ready international locations. Instead, every one of these films immerses us in specific, idiosyncratic worlds one rarely gets to visit in Bollywood cinema.

Dedh Ishqiya, for instance, richly imagines and realizes both the particulars of small-town North Indian life and the elegant decline of the world of the Nawabs. And the language in the film, the sinfully gorgeous Urdu poetry as well as the slangy hilarity of the banter between Khalu and Babban (Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi, playing off each other with virtuoso joyfulness), feels like a reproach to the Hindi films that sound like their lines were written in English and then run through Google Translate. 

Dedh Ishqiya also gives us not one but two great female characters (engaged in a queer love story, no less). Madhuri Dixit's Begum Para is, in essence, a major movie star played by a major movie star. Para-jaan's life is a great, cunning performance, and Dixit, acting with her hands, her eyebrows, even her sunglasses, imbues the part with her own legendary charisma (which has, with time, gained an impossibly sexy imperiousness) and a few hints of seams-showing desperation. Huma Qureshi, as her companion Muniya, proves once again that she is the most ferociously attractive young female actor working in Bollywood right now. The naturalism of her performance only heightens the take-no-prisoners nature of her appeal. Their chemistry made me want a Begum-Muniya spinoff.

Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is, in my opinion, the best Hindi film of 2014. I loved the film's potent, Kafka-esque blend of surrealism, paranoia, and wicked humor; its resolute, unafraid exploration of thorny histories (both personal and political); the strange, tender love story between mother (the masterful Tabu, in my favorite performance of the year) and son (Shahid Kapoor, who finally establishes himself as a heavyweight among Bollywood's leading men). Haider is a magnificent lyric tragedy.

Ankhon Dekhi, a thoughtful little film about a middle-aged man who decides that he will only believe the things he sees with his own eyes, has much on its mind, some of it fairly heavy. But it feels neither ponderous nor self-important. The filmmaking is surefooted and light of touch, marrying existential concerns with a clever sense of humor and an unerring eye for the wealth of detail that make up the banal, glorious clutter of everyday existence.  Rajat Kapoor gets the film's resolutely unhip middle-class milieu warmly, wonderfully right. The leads, Sanjay Mishra and Seema Pahwa, are astonishing.  Mishra is all gentle bewilderment and even gentler enlightenment. I thought of my own mother more than once while watching Pahwa. Their performances are so honest, they feel like life itself.

Queen is the year's sweetest fantasy of self-actualization. A feel-good film in the best possible sense, Queen gives us a protagonist truly worth rooting for. Rani is so many of the girls you and I have known in South Asia and probably in the rest of the world. These girls dress modestly and do as they are told and never get to truly decide what their lives ought to be like. My mother was one of these girls. I have cousins and friends who are these girls. Their lives often feel like tragedies of unacknowledged desire and potential. But in Queen, one of these girls takes flight (after asking her father for permission, natch), and it's thrilling to watch her.  

Kangana Ranaut's work in the film is an achievement because she doesn't play Rani as a specific type or a neatly curated set of characteristics. In a way, she doesn't play her at all. This is a performance that doesn't feel like a performance, because it seems entirely unaware of any possible audience and completely free of actorly self-consciousness. Ranaut saves the film from sliding into manipulation or predictability.

Bobby Jasoos is the other pleasingly feminist entertainer I loved this year, although it found far fewer takers than Queen. Too bad, because this is a darling little film. You know the sort of horrid Bollywood movie that's often described by its directors as a "family film"? It's generally crammed with sexist and homophobic jokes, dance numbers that use female bodies as props, and rarely anything that resembles a real-life family. Bobby Jasoos is nothing like that, and it is exactly the sort of thing I'd describe as a family film, since one could have a great, unembarrassed time watching it with one's dad and mum and siblings and grandparents. It's good-hearted and entertaining and never gets too dark, but it is filled with people whose personalities and aspirations have something to do with the people you or I would know. The film is about a woman living in a Hyderabadi Muslim family who wants to become a detective in spite of her father's disapproval. There's a mystery to be solved, although it's fairly facile. The film is not a standout entry in the detective-movie genre. But the familial dynamics are compelling and authentic, and, while the film's tone is merry, its central premise - the struggle women in largely conservative cultures encounter in reconciling the pursuit of their own desires to the mandates of a patriarchal social structure – is serious stuff.  

Vidya Balan, who has never been bad in a movie, doesn't act like a heroine. She isn't winning or saintly. The charm isn't on at full blast. Bobby is just a regular person who wants what she wants and works tirelessly to get it. Balan here is that rare creature - an actor in a conventional mainstream film whose performance has a fully-formed, worn-in, regular-person quality to it.

Imtiaz Ali's Highway, like Queen and Bobby Jasoos, also sets its female lead on a path toward emancipation, but his film, in which a young girl forms a bond with the criminal who kidnaps her, is uninterested in the sort of happy ending that gives audiences the warm-fuzzies. I had significant issues with Highway. Ali tends to add at least a couple of entirely unnecessary notes of sentimentality to his otherwise carefully considered films. Here, he is not content to leave the relationship between Veera, the eventually willing captive, and Mahabir Bhati, her tormented captor, nebulous and undefined. He has to literalize it, which is especially troubling given how problematic their equation is in many ways. Ali also seems, in his sympathy for the kidnapper (a terrific, often terrifying Randeep Hooda), to go a few steps too far in trying to cast him in a retrospective halo. The ill-conceived coda, in which Veera pictures the two of them as children hanging out together, made me groan out loud in the theater.

Still, this is a charged, beautiful film. Shot on a variety of real, stunning Indian locations, it has an offhanded but unforgettable gorgeousness that made me glad that I was watching it on a giant screen. Its score is unusual and great. (Patakha Guddi is a firecracker of a song.) And Alia Bhatt as Veera is heartbreakingly good. There is a casual, candid quality to her acting that I find irresistible. 

Alia Bhatt might be 2014's MVP, also shining in two hit rom-coms, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and 2 States, neither of which I was crazy about (though Varun Dhawan's crack comic timing in the former was a happy revelation). I did, however, enjoy Hasee Toh Phasee, which had a troublingly dim understanding of mental illness but got both its romance and comedy beats just right. I especially liked that you could sense the connection between the two leads right from the beginning, and the girl didn't have to become "normal" or be prettified before the guy fell for her. (And this from Dharma Productions, the house that Rahul and Anjali built!) Parineeti Chopra somehow crafts a cohesive, touching performance out of what seems to have been written as a bag of tics, and she has all sorts of heat with Sidharth Malhotra, who undercuts his dreamboat looks with a dopey, wounded sensitivity. Speaking of dreamboats, I also enjoyed Fawad Khan, whose old-Hollywood gravitas I suspect I will need regular doses of, in the silly but pleasant Khoobsurat. Deepika Padukone's enormous eyes and megawatt screen-presence enlivened the otherwise pedestrian Happy New Year and the pretty but insubstantial Finding Fanny, the highlight of which was a big, sexy, hysterically funny performance from the criminally underused Dimple Kapadia.

Bollywood in 2015 looks enormously exciting. The list of major, interesting-sounding films, made by directors with sterling records, is long. (Just off the top of my head: Badlapur, NH10,  Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, Piku, Bombay Velvet, Shamitabh, Wazir, Dil Dhadakne Do, Shaandaar, Fan, Bajirao Mastani . . .)  2014 was more modest (of course, it ends with big, loud, sneakily radical PK, which is, as I write this, earning about a zillion Rupees) There were a few heartwarming surprises, some stunning artistic comebacks, some dire failures that gave a few among us a mean little jolt of schadenfreude (*cough*Humshakals*cough*). A number of female-led films did excellently, and probably were more profitable in terms of their return on investment than many of the expensive, shoddily made movies built around middle-aged male superstars. (Unfortunately, each time one of the former does well, it will be seen as something of a fluke, and no matter how many Action Jacksons do badly, we'll get four more of those next year.) But overall, it was a totally not-horrible year for Bollywood-watchers. And really, can anything in 2015 really top the cheesy, ear-wormy, insane genius of this?

A Bunch of Thoughts on "Happy New Year"

1) This film is long. SO long. There's a moment, right before Farah Khan's name shows up in the opening credits, when Shah Rukh Khan's voiceover informs us that "Lambi kahaani hai" ("It's a long story.") An hour in, the movie was barely done introducing its principal cast, and I realized that SRK's line might, in fact, have been a threat. 

The problem is, they easily could have trimmed about a third of the film without losing out on anything substantive. The protagonist, Charlie, is planning a heist to avenge his father. It's not a super-unusual or particularly interesting heist (it's got the usual lasers and passwords and vaults), except for the fact that he and his ragtag team have to participate in a dance competition in order to pull it off. But the audience has Charlie's plan explained to it at (excruciating) length again and again and again. Also, Farah Khan stages some fun gags and comic moments, but too many others just don't land. Nandu (Abhishek Bachchan) vomits at will, Jags (Sonu Sood) goes into rages when he thinks people are insulting his mother, Boman Irani's character gets stress fits. None of this is particularly funny, and all of it happens too often and for too long.

2) You know what they could have spent more of the film's exhausting run time on? Deepika Padukone. She may not be the great dancer she's playing (she is stunning but stiff in Lovely, winningly fluid in Manwa Laage and the final dance number), but she has a delightful facility with the tonal shifts that often characterize masala movies. She can go from broad comedy to heartfelt, outsized emotion with no sign of strain. In Bollywood comedies, female actors rarely get to be funny, but Padukone steals every scene she's in. She's become the sort of actor-star that has you rooting for her no matter how under-written her part is. I missed her when she wasn't on screen. I wanted more of her.

3) I didn't want more of SRK's Charlie. however. One reason I enjoyed the much-maligned Jab Tak Hai Jaan so much is that Khan got to be charming in that easy, humorous, movie-star way that he possesses but hasn't shown us too often in recent years. I wish that's the sort of easy, unclenched attitude he'd gone for here, because that's the only way this sort of larger-than-life, filmi badass character works. (Watch Hrithik's sexy turn in Dhoom 2 and then Aamir's constipated one in Dhoom 3, and you'll know what I mean.)

My favorite SRK moments in this one were in the Satakli song where he got to be happy and smiley and just hang with the rest of the gang. SRK can play Big Man in Charge well, but only when the character is inherently the kind of guy you do want in charge (Kabir Khan in Chak De!), not just someone who gets to be the boss-dude because he's played by a superstar.  

Charlie is such a douche, though. He ropes in people who have nothing to do with his vendetta into his plan, knowing full well that if something goes wrong, they could go to jail as well. (We learn soon enough that his master plan, the one that has his gang constantly falling at his feet for, is flawed.) He constantly puts down Nandu and Mohini because the former is from a less privileged background and thus not classy enough, and the latter is a "bar-dancer" and therefore pretty much a sex worker. (Nothing wrong with being a sex worker. Unless, of course, you're chilling with Charlie. Because he'll be mean to you about it. Ugh.) Charlie also gets his nemesis's son thrown into jail even though that dude did nothing wrong. (I mean, his hair was . . . not good, but that is not a punishable offense.)

4) I have to, as always, give SRK credit for being a generous producer. The money shows on screen. The films toplined by most of the over-40 male superstar brigade usually look pretty low-rent these days, with tackily filmed songs and ugly sets. You just know that most of these films' giant budgets have gone straight into the pockets of their middle-aged leading men. But Khan actually wants to, at the very least, put on a good-looking show. He doesn't callously assume that the adoring fans will show up no matter how shoddily assembled the product is just because he's starring in it. Farah Khan, of course, is a deft hand with the only-at-the-movies spectacle; here, she serves it up in enormous, candy-colored heapings. You definitely want to see the aerial shots of Dubai all lit up on a big, big screen. Take food and a pillow, though, if you go. Seriously, I felt like I was in there for years.

5) The song sequences are pretty fun, but I really wish the staging and choreography had been more inventive. Remember the Farah Khan who shot Main Hoon Na's Chale Jaise Hawaein in one long, uninterrupted take? Remember her gloriously manic technicolor qawwali from the same film? I miss that Farah.

6) Speaking of Main Hoon Na, is it possible that Farah's never made a film since that hit her debut's sublime meta-masala high because she worked with a writer who could actually write on that one? Her subsequent films have had good gags here and there, but haven't worked as a coherent whole. Main Hoon Na, too, featured the over-the-top patriotism and the revenge plot that Happy New Year relies on, but those tropes worked because the characters felt like people, not accessories in extended comedy bits, and the world of the film felt fully realized, as loony as it was. (Hit Abbas Tyrewala up again, Farah! Or maybe Anurag Kashyap, since he's obviously willing to do crazy stuff for you! Anurag, good on you for being so game in your cameo, but that cross-dressing gag was not cool.) 

Related: Who would've thought that Rohit Shetty would make a better masala comedy with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead than Farah Khan? I'm just as shocked as anybody else.

7) I used to think self-referential Bollywood in-jokes were so funny and clever back in the early 2000s, but with this film, I think I'm completely over them, especially in SRK's movies. Keep those arms firmly pinned to your side, SRK. Never repurpose DDLJ quotes again, SRK.

8) Sonu Sood is the modern-day Vinod Khanna, right? Impossibly handsome, totally underrated, and with that unmissable quality of solid, heroic decency. Let's make Sonu Sood a star! (I actually kinda wanted Sonu and Deepika's characters to get together. He was so nice to her!) Also, while we're on the subject of handsome, underrated dudes, more Jackie Shroff, please. This film gives him a bit more to do than Dhoom 3, and his character here, a straight-up villain, is way more likable than the daft fool he played in that dull film. Dude knows how to chew up some primo scenery. Anyone who wants "I support the Shroffaissance" buttons and T-shirts, get in touch with me.

9) Abhishek is basically playing Uday Chopra's character from the Dhoom series here. He does it as well as Uday. (This is a compliment. Uday was, no lie, the best thing about Dhoom 3. By this point, you might have guessed that I did not much care for Dhoom 3.)

10)  I wasn't the only one rooting for the team of cute children to win the Indian rounds of the World Dance Championship, right? Those little girls looked so crestfallen when they lost!

On "Haider"

Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is an achievement of lyrical, humanistic storytelling. Dense with history, but never pedantic, the film asks why people - creatures of flesh and blood, of love and desire, of songs and laughter - are the first to stop being of significance, to become invisible, to disappear in times of sociopolitical conflict. It is a pointed, sorrowful question, and Haider is a pointed, sorrowful movie.

Bhardwaj's retellings of Shakespeare's tragedies have always felt flavorful and specific, because he always finds a milieu for these centuries-old stories that gives them a jolt of immediacy and topical charge. You may not know the ins and outs, the various versions of the Kashmir story, or be intimately acquainted with this particular moment (the mid-nineties) in its history. But Haider's world will seem at least a little familiar to you, because various iterations of this setting – places of fear and grief and resentment, of soldiers in the streets and of diminished families in homes – are so often in the news that we are probably horrified when we pause to consider how used we've grown to the sights and sounds of people suffering. 

Haider's Kashmir is remarkable not just because of its powerful depiction of that sort of suffering, though. (At one point, a doctor diagnoses Haider with PTSD, but it isn't just him, the film suggests. The entire state is shellshocked. The trauma runs so deep that men have forgotten how to enter their own houses without being frisked.) It is also deeply moving in its evocation of a way of life that we haven't seen often enough on cinema screens. Bhardwaj goes in search for the color and richness in that way of life. He puts a ear to its heart for the music and the poetry in its voices. Fathers and sons sing together. Children learn and play. The dizzying patterns of flowers woven into the carpets and the shawls and painted onto the stoneware shimmer even as life after life goes barren. Haider casually situates its characters amid the flames of Kashmir's gulmohar trees and the elegant inevitability of its snowdrifts, not because these are picturesque, but because these characters belong to this beauty, and this beauty belongs to them. Haider reminds the viewer that the lives that we reduce to numbers (these many dead, these many wounded) are not abstractions. Bhardwaj doesn't dramatize this assertion with cinematic patness or with a heavy, accusing hand. He lets the intimate, warm, lived detail accumulate in each scene until this place feels real and bloody with life - life lived, savored, lost, wasted, truncated. Just as the Faiz Ahmed Faiz verses that close the film, Haider grieves the dead and the living left behind.

The question of grief is of great interest to Bhardwaj here. Haider doesn't know how to even begin grieving. How to process his beloved father's disappearance, his beloved mother's apparent betrayal? He acts out, he comes undone, he haunts the ruins of his childhood home. (Ghosts are a preoccupation in the film. The absence of disappeared family members haunts the lives of their loved ones, holding them in limbo. The specter of old joys and old loves hangs heavy. Men with mutable identities resurface from certain death and disappear into the snow. The Kashmir of Haider is, among other things, a cemetery, and nothing in it is completely dead.) Haider is furious and confused and unhinged and broken, sometimes all at once, and he stumbles painfully in his darkness. Shahid Kapoor, whose melancholy prettiness, sweet voice, and slightly manic way with comedy (and there is a good deal of twisted, Kafka-esque comedy here) suit him to Bhardwaj's cinematic vision, drives that pain home with emphatic grace. His scenes with Tabu (who plays his mother, Ghazala) are devastatingly romantic, the two performers responding to each other's faces and bodies and voices with clarity that feels instinctual. 

While Haider mourns as if that mourning is all that is real to him, Ghazala is aching to be done with mourning. She wants to free herself from the unhappiness of an unsatisfactory marriage, of a missing husband, of a long-absent son. Tabu, as this complex, fascinating character, does the kind of magisterial work that stays with you for a long time. Here is an actor whose unnervingly beautiful face I can watch for hours as it changes shade and register. She brought so much (sex, sadness, intelligence, charisma) to every line, every glance, every silence that I began wishing that the movie were entirely from Ghazala's perspective. Both mother and son are sympathetic. (Very few characters are painted entirely black in Haider; even Kay Kay Menon's unctuous, plotting uncle is lovelorn and wracked with guilt.) The plight of these two allows the film to wonder about the dilemma faced by a wounded people. Ought they to move forward? Can they move forward? Or must they engage again and again with their grief? Haider doesn't come to straightforward conclusions, but it nods toward both remembrance and compassion. The story ends, as everyone knows, in death. But Haider is not merely dirge; it is also serenade.

On "Gone Girl"

The protagonists in Gone Girl are lovely to look at, but they do ugly things to each other and to the people around them. Their first encounter is charming; the kiss it culminates in is one of the prettiest things I've seen at the movies this year. Powdered sugar swirls in the air, dusting Rosamund Pike's movie star face (a face that like her performance is much more uncompromisingly chilly than one might have expected for Amazing Amy, but perhaps much more interesting for that unexpected touch of ice), and Trent Reznor's gleaming, potent score is full of twilit magic. The proposal of marriage is also charming; Ben Affleck's Nick gallantly saves Amy from embarrassing media questions with cute compliments and a ring. But the marriage itself is neither charming nor charmed for long. It becomes an unhappy, unfortunate thing when the marital set these two perform on changes to a space that is less prettily designed, harder to "block." There's this moment (maybe made up) when Amy asks Nick why he's forcing her to be that wife – the nag, the harridan. That's not the role she wants to play. She'd rather be the cool wife, the good wife, and he is to be the good husband. But it isn't easy to be good or cool when there is no more money and no more big city glamor. It is easier to lie and to cheat and to hate each other. Nick doesn't make Amy feel light like he used to; he drains her of her patience and her resources. Amy doesn't make Nick better or smarter anymore; she makes him feel cornered and diminished. The relationship goes from symbiotic to vampiric. People stalk and beat and kill in Gone Girl; gore is splattered in sick, abstract-expressionist tableaux. But what makes this movie scary is the notion that love warps so easily into something monstrous and keening for blood. We claim to know, really know our life partners, our spouses, but can we really know another person? Can we know what will make the switch flick and the light go out in the beautiful, beloved heads of the people we hold closest to ourselves. Fincher suggests that the most frightening monsters might not be under the bed but in it, right next to us.

Gone Girl sets its mystery, with the sort of mounting pressure that makes you feel like you're arrested in the final moments of an unpleasant dream, struggling to wake up but also curious to see how it all turns out, against an inquiry into the workings of a marriage. That relationship, much like the town that Amy goes missing in, is portrayed here as a thing of sunny surfaces and a cankered underbelly. New Carthage is photogenic suburbia peopled with sunny Midwesterners in some scenes, and seedy ruins full of broke, broken shadow-folk in others. In marriage too, there are the stories one tells – of annual wedding anniversary treasure hunts, for instance, or of little signals to signify trust or love that only one's significant other can recognize, and then then there are the resentments that charge these benign-seeming totems of the relationship and turn presents into weapons and shared vulnerabilities into exploitable weaknesses. Gone Girl is interested in the falsehoods intrinsic to romantic relationships that couples hide out of sight underneath the signifiers of a fairy-tale romance. The film asks us to consider that the marriage narrative is one that inevitably loses steam as time goes on, has its powdered-sugar enchantment rubbed off it by the banal realities of strained finances, say, or unmet expectations. Perhaps the way to avoid the commonplace ending – the prolonged low-key misery of long-term unhappiness or the charmless grotesquerie of divorce – is to borrow tropes from outside the genre, so to speak, of the love story. Both Amy and Nick are writers, after all. While Nick, often the less sharp mind in the relationship, writes in clichés outside the margins of his marriage, Amy much more inventively borrows from the whodunit, (She even does homework for her plan with books on murder.) Just as she plotted games in which her husband looked for clues that led him to a present, she plots a jape in which he might end up in jail for her murder. Fun!

Fincher plays at length with the idea of marriage as a fundamentally performative construct, a story to be written and read and acted out, a spectator sport. The neighbors, the friends, the parents, even the media in a certain kind of relationship are watching open-mouthed and hungry for the next twist as they would a film, a television show, or a play – and then passing judgment as they would on said film, television show, or play. Gone Girl's twisted sense of humor comes from its investigation of real life as reality-TV-esque spectacle. The entire nation is perversely gripped by the Nick and Amy's strange situation. They want more. In a deliciously ironic scene, Nick sees that his once-failing bar is the town hot-spot, now that its owner might be a murderer. A woman, styled like someone out of the Real Housewives franchise and volunteering at Amy's search headquarters, wants to take a smiling selfie with Nick and later sends it to a smarmy, outraged newsperson. Tanner Bolt (played with glorious, amused understatement by Tyler Perry) tells Nick: "You two are the most fucked up people I know, and I specialize in fucked up people." He is laughing; he is entertained by their spectacle. And he is not alone. Everyone wants to watch, hear about, and be part of Nick and Amy's freak show.

But the outsiders are not the only spectators here. Nick and Amy watch each other, and watch themselves watch each other. At first, they act out better, cooler versions of themselves to reel the other in, and then, when Nick loses interest, Amy decides it’s time to amp the drama up. And it works. Because Nick is paying attention not only to Amy’s machinations, but to his own responses. He preens after getting a TV interview right, for instance. He’s made an impression. He’s got through to her. Even after she comes back, and he finds himself stuck in the mousetrap of his marriage, he is at least a little into it. Because there are ways out of that mousetrap, if he really wanted to make a run for it. The audience knows it, his endlessly supportive sister Margo (Carrie Coon, a dry, authentic standout in a terrific supporting cast) knows it, and he knows it. But Nick, with his folders full of ideas for novels he's never written, is now living in an interesting story, is finally an interesting character. Amy, too, returns to him, risking exposure, because she finally feels seen. For Amy, to be seen as she is - devious, destructive, exacting, uncompromising - is to be loved. If Nick knows her, he loves her, must love her, will love her.

While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these engaging ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these gripping ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, I think its critique of marriage could have been more nuanced if the narratorial scales had been more balanced. Both Nick and Amy are fucked up people who do fucked up things. Nut since the narrative is mainly focalized through Nick for the first half of the film, and he is being hounded and grilled (though we don’t know yet for certain if he deserves to be or not), we react with cautious sympathy to him, handsome and likable, albeit, as we learn, pretty flawed. Amy, on the other hand, emerges initially from her journal entries. She is perfect and love at first in these entries, and then perfect and scared. But we are meant to think that she might already be dead when we hear from her via the journal. So her voice is not as real to us, her troubles not as immediate and pressing as Nick's. (Though her diary indicates that he was physically violent with her, that he was a profligate spender, that he didn't want her to get pregnant, his bafflement at these charges reads as pretty genuine to us.) By the time we learn that she isn't dead, and we finally get her "true" perspective, she is revealed to be a diabolical villainess, hell-bent on destroying her husband's life for a crime he didn't commit. And she's destroyed a former paramour's life. And she'll go on to kill another lover. While her husband's misdeeds – the cheating, the neglectfulness – are crappy, they are also human. Amy does evil things because she wants revenge. We never truly get to see the character as a fully realized person as opposed to a figment of her own diabolical imagination or an almost-mythic beast of vengeance. She tells us that the initial years of her marriage truly were good, that Nick really did make her feel happy. We also get to see a brief glimpse of her as someone with emotions other than rage when she finds out that her husband is now enamored with a younger woman, even though she has given up her money, her life in New York, and a good deal of her emotional energy for him. Rosamund Pike brings a world of shading to that wordless, almost throwaway moment. But it is not enough. If the story is about a philandering doofus and the psychopath who brought him to heel, its reflections on the psychosis of marriage itself become less provocative. The film, then, functions as a very solid example of modern noir, but maybe not much more. And it becomes a more troubling piece of art, too, since Amy's legitimate complaints and concerns about men who don't try hard enough and expect too much, about women who have to keep trying with diminishing returns, become moot, since they're coming out of the mouth of the person who cried rape and murder. I worried that the film could be trivializing the issues of violence against women, that a certain kind of person, who unfortunately abounds in society, would take away from this film the moral that women do make this shit up all the time, or that they're crazies who asked for it.

But I think Fincher is actually interested in more than a crackling genre exercise or a blasé indictment of “psycho bitches.” Its interrogation of how people in relationships connect to and alienate each other, put on a show for and reveal themselves to each other feels neither incidental or accidental (and it helps that Affleck and Pike play their characters as more than just a hapless schmo and an ice-demon, respectively). The failure, then, is one of (too-faithful) adaptation, to borrow a phrase from this sharp piece. Sure, the idea of this force of implacable evil as a villain makes for compelling storytelling, but we see (in her scenes at the motel, at Desi’s house) that Amy has glimmers of more than that. What if Fincher and Flynn had gone mining for more of those glimmers instead of giving in to the temptation of creating a Big Bad? What if they’d disposed of that previous boyfriend and given Nick a different hook to claw his way into Amy’s psyche with? I wonder, but as it stands, Gone Girl still feels like something more than soapy, scary fun. I find myself wrestling with its pleasures and problems days after I watched it, and I suspect that while it doesn’t marry (ha!) its more interesting concerns entirely successfully with its pursuit of more pulpy pleasures, it still manages to poke around in some dark, troubling places in that attempt.

On "Gunday"

Gunday is not a great film. From time to time, it pretends as if it has something to say about Very Important Matters - the tragedies of war and divided nations, for instance, or the inefficacy of a system that alternately ignore and oppress the underprivileged, or immigrant identity and the stigma that accompanies it. It doesn’t really have much to say about these Very Important Matters, however. The narrative isn’t much interested in exploring its titular protagonists beyond their attractively bronzed surfaces. Bikram (Ranveer Singh) and Bala (Arjun Kapoor) are lifelong friends; they’ve turned to crime because the straight and narrow didn’t work for them; their quest for power owes itself to insecurities stemming from their identity as refugees from across the border; they’re insanely in love with the same woman. All of this is great material for an absorbing, memorable masala entertainer, the sort Gunday repeatedly pays homage to. Take Deewar, for instance, in which we find a protagonist whose trajectory is similar to the ones in Gunday. But Vijay’s descent into darkness carries much more weight, because his angst and his disillusionment are fully realized in the narrative, and the relationship with his estranged mother gives his arc great emotional urgency. Gunday pays lip service to the ideals of friendship and love, but none of these big emotions are anchored in anything beyond stray lines. The characters talk with great somberness about the injustice, about why they are the way they are, but we’d rather have seen them live through the circumstances that form them, motivate them, and wreck them. 

The most involving section of the film, in fact, is the prologue, in which we watch the young Bikram and Bala (played by two excellent child actors) survive truly harrowing situations. We watch them protect each other, and we believe in their love for each other. We feel for these plucky, mistreated kids. If the film were about these children, we'd be rooting for them throughout. But the film is about grown-up Bikram and Bala, and we don't really see grown-up Bikram and Bala suffer. I didn't know why I ought to be on their side even as they killed cops doing their jobs and threatened to set the city on fire. Montages of our heroes chilling with nuns and laughing with the poor didn't convince me. I needed a couple heavy-duty, expertly written scenes that would win me over to their crime-happy corner. Even more fatally for a film about an epic friendship, we don’t get any particularly moving moment that conveys fully the depth of these men's feelings toward each other. Both are very demonstrative, and have a good time together, and the two leads project a convincingly warm sort of bonhomie. I admit I bought that these guys were great pals, but the actors' chemistry sold me on their friendship, not the writing, which reaches for the kind of high drama that it doesn’t quite earn.

Despite all of the not insignificant problems I've listed above, Gunday is quite often during its considerable running time (a large chunk of which, I suppose, is taken up by slow-mo running) an enormously entertaining affair. It looks fantastic, for one. The film's aesthetic is one of unwavering, joyously gaudy exuberance. The on-location scenes have a vividness and tang to them. The song-and-dance numbers are colorful and energetic, though the Punjabi influence in much of the music is confounding. The period detailing isn't over-fussy, but you get the sense, in scenes set in the boys' office or living quarters, for instance, that some care has gone into creating a world that feels, if not painstakingly authentic, then at least something like the one we know from the films of the Seventies and Eighties. The film is never entirely, depressingly generic-looking, unlike a number of the recent (and much more expensive) superstar-driven actioners that I can think of. Even the big action set pieces (atop a train, amid the crowds at a Durga Puja, in a coalmine) are staged with the kind of flair that is entirely missing in so many of those bigger films, where wire-fu action beats are slapped together with some tired comedy. (There is some ridiculous action choreography here as well, but, overall, all the kicks and punches fly about with a good deal of zip.) The director, Ali Abbas Zafar, may not be skilled enough to ballast his second feature with the emotional heft that made the films he's inspired by so memorable. But he does seem to have a handle on the unashamedly pulpy pleasures of those entertainers.

Gunday is helped by the fact that the angry young men whose story it tells are played by, well, young men. When twenty-somethings play these slightly juvenile characters, with their brash thoughtlessness and their cocksure swagger and their love-at-first-sight nonsense, the proceedings are a sight more amusing, and less embarrassing, than when middle-aged actors play the same sort of part, squeezed into the same sort of clothes, making eyes and passes at the same women, and beating up the same passel of goons, but with much less energy and ease. Ranveer and Arjun are both great fun to watch when they are together, even they both have been directed, sometimes to comic effect, to growl and grimace through dialogue that doesn't quite merit that level of intensity. Arjun, I suspect, isn't a particularly good actor yet. He delivers many of his lines in a half-done way that makes you wonder if he's really thinking about what he's saying. But he acquits himself nicely when he gets to work those sleepy eyes and that charmingly manic grin. Ranveer is better. We already know he can pull off the goofy bits, but he brings to his character (character sketch, really, since neither role is written with much nuance or shading) both a quiet sense of decency and a degree of coiled tension. I was reminded, from time to time, by his performance (and his painted-on pants) of a young Vinod Khanna. 

Gunday also benefits from a tremendous antagonist in the form of Irrfan, who, in his cameo as a cop hot on the boys' trail, expectedly steals every scene he's in with his silky menace and his delicious way of making his lines both hilarious and potent with threat. He's clearly having a whale of a time, as is Priyanka Chopra, spectacular here in a series of gorgeous Dhakai sarees. Her performance here as the sort of woman who reduces men to roshmalai is evidence that the actor is immensely watchable when she drops the simpering, insubstantial ingenue act she unfortunately favors all too often, and aims for a more grown-up brand of sex appeal.

Gunday is by no means an essential entry into the modern masala canon, but it isn't a lazy cash-grab either. It's light on its feet and stylish and never ugly. Zafar cribs, with the proper degree of both respect and good humor, from sources he understands and has genuine affection for, instead of cynically and clumsily appropriating tropes and devices from South Indian films. Do I wish it did more with its resources and went further with its themes, that it delivered more completely on all of its narrative promise? I do. Did I still want to whistle admiringly a couple of times? Yep.