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RRR, or Rise, was one of the major entertainment stories of the year. Revolt. Roar. The captivating Tollywood epic from S.S. Rajamouli has conquered a western barrier that had previously thought insurmountable for Indian movies, becoming a critical and financial success. The Telugu-language period musical, a defining theatrical experience with its daring dance routine and raunchy animal mauling scenes, has also achieved worldwide success online since its unexpected streaming debut in May via its Hindi dub on Netflix (and, to a lesser degree, its original version on the Indian streaming service Zee5). It may have opened the door to a deeper investigation of the largest film industry in the world for many viewers outside of South Asia who had never seen an Indian film before.
The almost 2,000 productions every year in India are dispersed throughout a number of regional and linguistic subindustries. The Hindi-speaking Up until recently, Bollywood had unrivaled financial dominance, but thanks in part to Rajamouli's own Baahubali duology's simultaneous Telugu and Tamil premieres, industries in the nation's south have surpassed it (also available on Netflix). While RRR exemplifies the violent bombast, banger tunes, emotional honesty, and even unpleasant jingoism that some of the Indian mainstream is known for, this year has seen the release of a wide range of excellent Indian films. Despite using a different mode to convey their splendor and action, some play in the same sandbox as RRR. Others considerably diverge in terms of style and politics, serving virtually as counterbalances to the Western conception of Indian movies as vibrant, spectacle-driven musical melodramas.
Even RRR wasn't developed with western audiences in mind, thus none of these films were specifically intended to change that perspective. Nevertheless, because of the curiosity sparked by these films, you may find a number of Indian films on your preferred streaming service if you take a brief look. Five of the year's top films are currently available for streaming on a variety of platforms, and they all exhibit the country's diverse range of filmmaking approaches, from ongoing indie movements to mainstream sister industries with their own rich histories of actors and aesthetics.
Vikram
Director: Lokesh Kanagaraj
Language: Tamil
Vikram is a perfect illustration of how even star-driven, extravagant extravaganzas can fail to resemble RRR. It's a nasty action spectacle starring 68-year-old actor Kamal Haasan in filmmaker Lokesh Kanagaraj's second installment in his shared black-ops world. However, you don't need to have seen Kaithi to follow along. Haasan plays an intriguing dual role of sorts (the less revealed beforehand, the better). He leads a series of theoretically unique action scenes that blow Vikram's crime-drama plot to pieces with his trademark buttery-smooth confidence in tow.
Black operations agent Agent Amar (Fahadh Faasil), whose clandestine squad evades the law in search of drug lord Sandhanam (Vijay Sethupathi, one of the world's most alluring character actors in an exceptionally hilarious role), crosses paths with Haasan's intriguing figure. However, a parallel story about a militarized, masked cult trying to eradicate corruption before all hell breaks loose in a sequence of tightly wrapped, nail-biting set pieces collides head-on with this genre romp's appearance of being uncomplicated. In one of the most ludicrously delightful films of 2022, cinematographer Girish Gangadharan's camera follows each individual along muddy moral roads and dark passageways, creating a lurid atmosphere.
Gangubai Kathiawadi
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Language: Hindi
Gangubai Kathiawadi, the newest period musical from Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the creator of modern Bollywood's most visually arresting works, stars Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn (both of whom also appear in RRR). His stylized expressionism supports the idea that settings may be characters as well. It depicts Ganga (Bhatt), a young girl forced into prostitution, and her subsequent ascent to crime-boss madame and, ultimately, pro-sex work politician in the 1960s. The film is a rough biography based on the book Mafia Queens of Mumbai.
It's the kind of operatic character work Bhatt specializes at, based on a tough-as-nails woman with hidden weaknesses and set in an elegant, elevated red-light district. Despite playing a minor part as a neighborhood gangster who adopts Ganga, Devgn plays a crucial role in the feminist tenet of the movie, which seeks to normalize and even valorize sex work, which is frequently demonized in Indian society, while also making unexpected appeals to mainstream sensibilities (in the tradition of Bollywood's "social issues" filmmaking). It convincingly argues that sex workers are already an essential component of conservative society rather than trying to carve out a new position for them in it.
Dhuin
Director: Achal Mishra
Language: Maithili
In Dhuin, Achal Mishra's controlled, 50-minute filmic novella about a young stage actor during the epidemic, his training in photography is evident in every frame. An up-and-coming master of composition, Mishra's thoughtful 4:3 landscapes highlight unsaid social dynamics as protagonist Pankaj (Abhinav Jha) endures the minor injustices frequently meted out to young artists in a utilitarian environment and occasionally even administers them himself.
Over the little town of Darbhanga, a chilly mist descends. Soon, Pankaj's aspirations of relocating to Mumbai also become cloudy as he attempts to balance his obligations to his old father, a COVID-displaced worker who served as the inspiration for the film's narrative, Gamak Ghar, and his growing awareness of his own artistic deficiencies. A somber image of uneasiness and the frailty of dreams afflicted by harsh realities is created by Mishra's camera rarely turning away from Jha's nuanced performance, even in group moments.
Jhund
Director: Nagraj Manjule
Language: Hindi
A perfect biopic to watch in a World Cup year is Nagraj Manjule's Bollywood breakthrough, one of the leading voices in Marathi-language cinema. Jhund, an Indian sports drama starring screen veteran Amitabh Bachchan as Vijay Borade (based on Slum Soccer founder Vijay Barse), adds a distinctive flavor to the genre and, even after three hours, makes you wish you could spend more time with the characters.
Ankush Gedam gives a fiery first-time performance as a listless youth who battles not only perception (of caste and economic circumstance) but the legal limits of personhood in a society where something as fundamental as identity requires money and paper. The ensemble of newcomers was recruited from actual slums, along with a few regulars from Manjule's previous films, Fandry and Sairat. In order to create a stylish, compelling, and emotional story about frustrations channeled through sport, Manjule and cinematographer Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti fill each action with grandeur (almost every second shot in the early act is a dolly zoom) and each dialogue exchange with intimacy.
A Night of Knowing Nothing
Director: Payal Kapadia
Language: Bengali, Hindi
Although Payal Kapadia's first film is the complete antithesis of RRR in terms of ideology and aesthetics, it employs cinematic images with just as demanding of a hand (if not more so). It is a melancholy work of documentary fiction that tells the story of some lost film reels that were discovered at the elite Film and Television Institute of India, the director's alma institution, along with some anonymous student's love letters. As these somber notes are spoken aloud, Kapadia weaves together this tale with actual video of student resistance and protest against Narendra Modi's right-wing Hindu administration, providing a clear mosaic of life in contemporary India.
A Night of Knowing Nothing is a stirring example of cinema as activism and a means of confronting the profound, unavoidable entanglements between the personal and the political. It is a tapestry born of light and physical texture (its digital impersonation of 16-mm. film grain is nothing short of magical).
