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?