– Bulbbul (Netflix, 1 hour 34 minutes, Tripti Dimri, Rahul Bose)
What’s with Anushka Sharma and the supernatural 🙂 ? After producing and acting in Pari, Sharma returns with Bulbbul, a historical tale featuring a chudail (witch).
Bulbbul is about an hour and a half of well-done, nicely layered drama about Bulbbul, a girl married off as a child-bride into the wealthy home of a zamindar. Her much older husband (Rahul Bose, whom I last remember from Dil Dhadakne Do) loves her but wants the now young, lovely, lissome Bulbul (Tripti Dimri) to focus solely on him. Poor Bulbbul!
– Axone (Netflix, 1 hour 36 minutes, Sayani Gupta, Vinay Pathak)
Upasana (Sayani Gupta, of Article 15 fame) and Chambi want to throw a party for their friend Minam’s wedding, complete with the cooking of the traditional Axone pork stew. The problem is that the stew has an unpleasant smell and will definitely cause problems with the landlady of their New Delhi apartment (played by the marvelous Dolly Ahluwalia).
While Axone has some comedic elements and is touted as a comedy in the teaser below, its strength is in the thoughtful portrayal of life for folks from the north-eastern states. There is the subtle and the overt racism they face, the casually dropped “hindi-chini bhai-bhai”, the constant othering “tum jaise log” and the overt violence. Axone ends on a happy note, ultimately focussing on the unity amid the diversity and the innate goodness of people.
– Choked (Netflix, 1 hour 54 minutes, Saiyami Kher, Amruta Subhash)
Saiyami Kher and Amruta Subhash (of Gully Boy fame) star in Anurag Kashyap’s tense thriller about a young working woman who finds an unexpected income source.
Kher, who debuted in the unfortunate Mirzya opposite Harshvardhan Kapoor, is transformed here as the relatively non-glamorous Sarita Pillai, a middle-class married bank employee with an unemployed husband Sushant (Roshan Matthew). Always strapped for cash and hounded by her husband’s creditors, Sarita takes the money when it appears (literally) before her. After all, who will find out?
Choked has an unpredictable storyline, some very nice acting, but still manages to appear desultory – and that for a Kashyap film. From Kashyap, I’d expected more oomph, drums thrumming, a tight build-up to the explosive climax, but Kashyap underdoes it. So the film is an interesting watch, if a little insipid.
