From Gangubai Kathiawadi to Jalsa, here are the best Hindi films of 2022

This has been the toughest year to select my favourite films from. Not because we were spoilt for choices, but for the want of choices. Through most of the year, I found myself trying to squeeze some joy out of a joyless year in the cinemas. Even some of the films that I enjoyed while viewing this year seem in hindsight, disappointing compromised. Here is the ones that survived the test of time.

Gangubai Kathiawadi

Hands down, the best film of the year. Original, provocative, savage, passionate and supremely optimistic in spite of its bleak setting, Gangubai Kathiawadi shows us why Sanjay Leela Bhansali stands heads and shoulders taller than the, ha ha, competition. This is the magic of Sanjay Bhansali at its crest. He touches the highest notes and yet remains lucid and articulate. Every episode in Gangubai is exquisitely crafted and punctuated by an exclamation mark. Every emotion is italicized. The revved-up energy of the storytelling never compromises the protagonist’s inherent gumption and a sense of selfworth that makes her a natural-born leader among the sex workers of Kamathipura. Gangubai’s tryst with destiny is a gorgeous metaphor on the ‘Fallen Woman’, a favourite prototype of Hindi cinema since Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa. Except that Gangubai refuses to fall. Her ‘Fallen Woman’ stands tall.

Jalsa

Suresh Triveni’s film is very special. It is more layered, provocative and evocative then the outer skin of the product would suggest. There is much going on beneath the surface than outwardly visibly. And how intellectually equipped are the two female heroes Shefali Shah and Vidya Balan to address the rush-hour traffic that the plot’s emotional velocity thrusts on them! Balan and Shah are the kind of actors who always let us know the storms that hide their characters’ calm. It’s a grim impossibly tangled situation where the well-to-do single mother and her househelp are locked in a fight to the finish even before they know they are on opposite sides. The conflict is bloody. The cut runs so deep you don’t see the bloodstains. As levels of class discrimination come out into the open, Jalsa becomes a celebration of a progressive nation’s lip service to class equality , not quite what the Constitution promised and certainly not what any self-respecting disempowered Muslim woman would want her life be defined by.

Matto Ki Cycle

In its simplicity and charm and its deep connectivity with the grassroot Matto Ki Saikal takes us back to the days of Pure Cinema when movies informed and entertained. It’s directed by a complete newcomer M Gani, a talented directorial discovery from Mathura who had no experience in movie making before this. Gani is a talent to watch . He insisted on casting Prakash Jha in the lead role, not because Jha is the producer but because he seems the perfect fit to play Matto, the Dalit daily wage earner who somehow manages to eke out a living for his family of wife and two daughters and for whom a buying a new bicycle is not just a distant dream but a living nightmare. Like Vittorio de Sica’s imperishable 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves, the bicycle in Matto Ki Saikal is the fulcrum of Matto and his family’s existence. Take away the rickety contraption , and Matto is as bereft as Balraj Sahni’s Shambhu Mahato without his rickshaw in Do Bigha Zamin.

Darlings

Catty, lissom relevant, wicked and funny, Darlings ticks all the boxes and is a beast of its own kind. No one has ever thought of doing a film on marital violence where the abused wife and her mother get together to squeeze the life and breath out of the man who thinks it is his birthright to flare up on his wife when she inadvertently leaves a bone or two in the chicken biryani. Or, worse still, when she orders stilettos online. The writing is done in broad strokes, subtlety not being too much in demand among the characters who inhabit this world where only thick skinned survive, to highlight the humour that underlines what Tolstoy described as the “tragedy of the marital bed.” Shefali Shah and Alia Bhatt’s mother-daughter act is so slyly self-serving we never know when these two women go from victim to perpetrator. Both the actresses helm the proceedings with a commanding force. They are both brilliant. But even Alia Bhatt would agree that Shefali Shah steals the show every time.

Rocketry

Every moment of ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan’s story has stayed with me. Great wrong was done to a great man. But at least one good thing came out of it. This film.Writer-director Madhavan divides Nambi Narayanan’s story into two halves. In the first-half we see the young scientist’s stint in Princeton and his audacious plans to make India a leader in the filed of aerospace .Then it all falls apart, as espionage charges are hurled at the bewildered scientist. As writer, director and actor Madhavan is in full control of the sprawling life story. He knows where to let go and how to tighten the screws in the storytelling. Although the plot is perpetually pacy, there is a sense of unhurried introspection at the heart

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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