March 2022 will be remembered as the year when the OTT platform gave us one of Ryan Reynolds’ worst film. The Adam Project was as silly as Reynold’s last film Red Notice and the one before that Free Guy, all released on Netflix and all competing with Green Lantern for being Ryan Reynolds’ career-worst. On the plus side , this month Ajay Devgan and Madhuri Dixit made their impressive digital debut .We also discovered bright new writing-directing talent in Rahul Nair.Read on for the best on OTT in March.
1. Jalsa(Amazon Prime Video): What are the chances of you knocking down a child in a random hit-and-miss incident and the victim turning out to be your own househelp’s child ? I would say 1 out a zillion. Having gotten over this Gulshan Nanda brand of coincidence, Jalsa is a knock-out drama with Shefali Shah and Vidya Balan, particularly the former delivering performances of a lifetime. Director Suresh Triveni also get an admirable performance out of newcomer Vidhatri Bandi. Easily one of the best made-for-OTT feature films to date.
2. Rudra: The Edge Of Darkness(Disney+Hotstar): Applause for Applause Entertainment for bringing to us this praiseworthy adaptation of Luther where Idris Elba had played a cop in a dark edgy thriller. Ajay Devgan stepped into Idris’ shoes with impressive results. Rudra was a fetchingly mounted séance in sinisterism . Every actor seemed to get the point. The narrative trotted along at a pacy speed with elements of psychopathic conduct creeping in gradually as the plot came to a boil. Devgan held the narrative together, succeeding in making Rudra’s failures as a husband and an investigative cop look convincingly gutsy.
3. The Fame Game(Netflix): If Ajay Devgan navigated Rudra through its complicated course it was Madhuri Dixit, giving the Fame Game its hospitable allure. She was every bit the sparkling star Anamika Anand whose public face was unpeeled by her unsavoury family’s sordid deeds. Madhuri was brilliantly serene and graceful, so much so that it was easy to overlook another sterling performance , by Rajshri Deshpande as a doughty cop on the kidnapper’s prowl. Just why the cop’s physical orientation was pushed into the plot remains a mystery to be solved in Season 2 ,perhaps?Manav Kaul got to play out two of the most favourite fantasies of all actors.He got to play a heart-throb superstar adored by all women from Madhuri Dixit to Muskaan Jaferi(the latter very effective in a tough role).He also got to beat up a journalist at press conference for asking an impudent personal question. The Fame Game had its flaws. But Sri Rao is a writer to watch out for.
4. Eternally confused & Eager For Love(Netflix): And the award for the best voice performance since Aamir Khan gave voice to the dog in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dadhakne Do, goes to Jim Sarbh. He plays the protagonist Ray’s alter-ego. Sarbh voices all of Ray’s naughtiest vices and unplumbed virtues Sarabh proves a third dimension to this delectably young and vibrant series written and directed by Rahul Nair. Hard to believe this is Rahul’s first. No virginal awkwardness in this virgin’s coming(ahem) of age story.
5. Salute(SonyLiv): The Write Brothers Bobby & Sanjay are the real heroes of this clenched tale of the teacher and the taut. Interestingly two brothers in the police force, ideologically far removed from one another ,are at the crux of a film that prods at the audiences’ collective conscience while creating an edge-of-the-seat thriller about guilt and redemption.I have been closely watching Bobby-Sanjay’s climb to the top of the ladder in Malayalam cinema. From Ente Veedu Appuvinteyum (2003) to Traffic to Notebook to How Old Are You and One, these two brothers have succeeded in infusing the already-robust destiny of Malayalam cinema with an added luster.Is Salute the best screenplay that Bobby and Sanjay have written to date? The answer would have been a resounding yes, were it not for a relatively lame endgame which left me feeling a wee cheated thought not betrayed.The narrative has too much going for itself to suffer from a post-climactic depression. I would say Salute survives the end-blow most gracefully, thank you.The pacing is consciously languorous , as though the pressures to come on the drama of ideological warfare need ample breathing space to grow. Grow, the narrative does with astute velocity.A sense of gathering foreboding is constructed in the way young cop Aravind(Dulquer Salman) revisits an old procedural miscarriage in his police station, needling his brother senior cop Ajith Karunkaran(Manoj K Jayan) and risking a jeopardized career.But as Aravind tells his live-in girlfriend(Diana Penty, trying hard to make some space for herself), he would rather suffer the consequences of his past transgression than go on as though nothing happened , while an innocent man rots in jail. It is a fabulously nuanced character with a glorious moral graph. I am afraid Dulquer Salman for all his stardom is not up to it.No doubt he has a likeable screen presence. But there is more needed to make Aravind a living trobbing character. The man suffers immense pressures for his ideological stance. But what we see is a placid policeman barely registering the surface of his anxieties.As Aravind is pressurized from both family and colleagues to drop the efforts to bring belated justice to the wrongly accused, the narrative swerves away from its meditative thoughtful study of crime innocence and reparation .It now converts itself to a cops-and-robbers chase film with the culprit , a selfappointed godman and s*x healer, proving himself as slippery as a compelling closure for cat-and-mouse game that promised an end with a resounding bang but woefully whittles into a weak whimper.While the last-half hour is compromised, the narrative remains partly breathless but pertly pacy all through.Sreekar Prasad’s editing is firstrate with the plot moving in tandem with the stressful tension that the protagonist creates when he prefers to be a pebble in the stagnant pond.Salute has a lot to say about mending broken promises. It is a coiling seething angry film about injustice and corruption set to a normalized tone which doesn’t pick on any character for poor discharge of duty.
6. Gamanam(Telugu, Amazon Prime Video):What happens when the full fury of Nature hits a metropolitan city catching its unprepared citizens in a crisis that they have no idea how to deal with? In Gamanam writer-director Sujana Rao threads three stories involving several lives into a pastiche of pain endurance and final redemption as torrential rains hits Hyderabad swamping the city in a splashy storm before the eerie calm.Gamanam could actually have been a far better film than it finally ends up being. It has the seeds of a redemptive masterpiece planted at its core, but it remains content being just a mildly moving survival –and supremely soggy saga edified and titivated by at least one truly charming performance by Sriya Saran.Haven’t you, like me, wondered why this lovely actress has not been given her due recognition? In this faintly ambrosial anthology Sriya plays Kamala a deaf abandoned wife struggling to keep her baby and herself afloat—both literally and metaphorically—as the torrential deluge strikes the city . Sriya’s Kamala’s fight against Nature’s fury reminded me of Shabana Azmi in Goutam Ghose’s Paar and Aparna Sen’s Sati. It is a physically and emotionally exhausting part, and Sriya is more than up to it.Elsewhere there are two street urchins(how I hate calling them that,but I find myself unable to articulate a better term for children who grow up on the streets) trying to sell Ganesha idols in the torrential rain. It’s a heartbreaking image and one that could be assumed to be potentially manipulative. Cinematographer Gnana Shekar V S captures the bleak bathos of a city under siege with a painter’s penetrating but pre-arranged vision. Regrettably, the script gets progressively mawkish and melodramatic. By the time we come to Nithya Menen’s angelic rendition of Vaishnav jann at a kiddies’ school function the plot’s gone South in more ways than one.The quest for a dramatic climax kills much of the impact of the earlier parts of the narration.In a clumsily staged climactic crisis there is a young cricketer saving little children in a schoolbus . This crisis is so artificially manufactured it feels like a sorry compromise to a well-intended idea.The romance between the aspiring cricketer Ali(Siva Kandukari) and Zara(Priyanka Jawalkar) is powered by Ilaiayaraja’s robust love songs, presumably the highlights of the show. I am not too sure that the over-punctuation provided by the songs and background music work in the context of the film’s neo-realistic aspiration.Caught between the urge to be authentic and to reach out to a mass audience Gamanam falls short of the glory which would have rightfully been its if only it didn’t strive to straddle the two worlds at the same time.
7. Bloody Brothers(Zee5): This crime thriller was quirky and fun . But the characters are constantly surprising themselves, as much us. This is what powers the plot.It’s simple, really. Two brothers who haven’t met for a long time, meet at a wedding attended by the who’s-hoot , get drunk.While driving back one of them knocks down an old man. The feeling of remorse and redress that follows carries the characters and the story forward .While the original BBC series relied on wry humour, director Shaad Ali and his writers(Siddharth Hirwe, Riya Poojary, Anuj Rajoria and Navnit Singh Raju) gather the goofy impulse into the circle of suspense so that nothing appears as serious or unsolvable as it seems.Jaideep Ahlawat and Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub are two of the most celebrated products of the streaming revolution. Playing the Grover brothers, neither is able to induce any extra vigour to the proceedings. Yeah, they are both adequate –that’s the least we expect from them—but nothing more than that.
8. Sharmaji Namkeen(Amazon Prime): Rishi Kapoor comes alive one more time for this endearing culinary concoction about a retired man cooking his way out of boredom. That Paresh Rawal supplements Rishi Kapoor’s unfinished performance is a quirk of fate that miraculously doesn’t bring down the film’s charming aura. A befitting farewell to one of Indian cinema’s greats. RIP, Mr Kapoor.
9.Undekhi 2(SonyLIV): Fast-paced and breathless Season 2 may seem to some like just a repeat performance of Season 1. That , Undekhi 2 is. And yet the core issue of a police inspector Ghosh(Dibyendu Bhattacharya) trying to save a tribal girl from a filthy rich family has a kind of contextual resonance that doesn’t get worn in repetition.And the way Muskaan participates in shootouts with her violent husband gives a completely unexpected twist to the till-death-do-us-part theory of marital togetherness.The women are , in fact, exceptionally aggressive in Undekhi. There is one on the run, a dancer who has tremendous survival instincts in the jungles. Then there is Teji(Aanchal Singh) married to the the most peaceful heir of the violent Atwal family , Teji is rapidly learning the ropes of the illicit business. And then there is Saloni(Ayn Zoya) a television journalist not averse to blackmailing and extortion.For a series about toxic masculinity the women in Undekhi have a lot to do, and not much of it is legal or legit. Writer Sumeet Bishnoi plunges us into this dangerous sleazy world with no hope for any redemptive thrusts. Nobody changes, there are no character reformations in Undekhi at least not in Season 2.Perhaps the characters will begin to shed their plumes in Season 3.
