What Kumbalangi Nights Teaches Us About Masculinities
Kumbalangi Nights is a beautiful glimpse into how masculinities are performed and what it does to the men performing them, as well as to their relationships.
Review: Offers You Can’t Refuse
It was a million dollar question. Literally. The Hollywood film Indecent Proposal (1993) had actors Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson playing, respectively, Diana Murphy, a real estate professional, and David Murphy, an architect, who are childhood sweethearts just within grasp of realising their dream house when recession strikes. They lose their jobs, default on house…
Review: Offers You Can’t Refuse
For many of us careening to adulthood at the time, these films pushed us to confront our own biases. They asked us to stand in Diane and Mansi’s shoes and ask ourselves, what would we have done? Would we spend one night with a man (Robert Redford, no less) for a million dollars? Would we be able to resist the option that opened up to Mansi? And the truth of it was that this was a difficult question to answer.
Review: Nishit Saran’s ‘Summer in My Veins’
In 1994, Delhi boy Nishit Saran left home to study filmmaking at Harvard University. By 1999 he had made the searing Summer in My Veins, capturing on camera his own trepidation at coming out to his mother. It is an important, lovely and poignant film.
Reel review: Bend it like Beckham
‘All I have to say is sporty spice is the only one without a bloke’ is the warning given by Kiera Knightley’s mother in Gurinder Chadda’s Bend it Like Beckham. The film was released in 2002, and launched the now famous career of Oscar winner Kiera Knightley and Jonathan Rhys Myers. Parminder Nagra plays the protagonist…
The Impossible Collective: A Review of Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan (1997)
In Rituparno Ghosh’s 1997 film Dahan The Burning], based on novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya’s novel of the same name, Romita Chowdhury - a newly married middle-class young woman - spends hours standing in the balcony of her conjugal home looking down at the road below. In the first letter she writes, after her marriage, to her elder…
Reel Review – Revolutionary Road
To their neighbours, as to themselves, Frank and April Wheeler are ‘special’.
Review: ‘Bound To Be Free’
‘Bound to be Free’ is a travelling exhibition of exquisitely shot personal and professional photographs, making its way from New Delhi to Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai this winter. Carefully crafted by members and supporters of the underground Kinky Collective, it is both a visual treat and a powerful step in the direction of building respect…