Year In Review: The Best Hindi Films of 2019

In a year ending with anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests rippling across the country, India’s prime minister in a recent speech, to no one’s surprise, blamed “urban Naxals and Congress” for spreading rumours about an Act that openly discriminates against Muslims. There’s been an undeniable circularity in the relationship between Indian politics and Hindi cinema this year. 2019, after all, began with a political drama – The Accidental Prime Minister – that took potshots at the Congress party, a film that Narendra Modi would have enjoyed. (It is also not every Friday that the BJP’s Twitter account shares the trailer of a movie.) January 2019 was, in fact, a good indication of the rest of the year. Besides the Manmohan Singh biopic, that month gave us Uri (a slick propaganda extolling Modi and national security advisor Ajit Doval), Manikarnika (Kangana Ranaut’s induction into saffron nationalism) and Thackeray (a 139-minute hate speech).

Nationalism, Narendra Modi — and an exaggerated fear of “anti-nationals” — dominated Indian screens throughout the year. We had such films (and even web series) as Kesari, Tashkent Files, PM Narendra Modi, Modi — A Journey of a Common Man, Mission Mangal, Batla House: none of these were made with any nuance or finesse; not too surprising, for such are the demands of deference. Which doesn’t mean, though, that there were no pieces of resistance. They mainly came in the form of web series, in Netflix’s Leila and Sacred Games 2 (a pity, however, that they largely lacked artistic merits) and Amazon Prime’s The Family Man — my unambiguous favourite of the year across formats.

On the big screen, there were No Fathers for Kashmir (eerily chilling in the aftermath of the Kashmir lockdown), Bharat (a predictable Salman Khan fare that cherished the bond between Indians and Pakistanis), The Least of These (a long-due drama on the Graham Staines murder) — too unfortunate, then, that these movies failed to hold up as a whole. Good art is a messy, exacting affair: it doesn’t care for intentions.

Also Read: ‘No Fathers in Kashmir’ Shows Conflict and Violence in a New Light

Even beyond the overtly political (if at all you can compartmentalise the personal and political — in 2019, of all the years), there were movies that shimmered with promise but materialised with fading glow: Gully Boy, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, Photograph, Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota. (Gully Boy’s director, Zoya Akhtar, redeemed herself with Made in Heaven — an Amazon Prime series that she co-conceptualised and -directed — which was poignant and layered.) And then there was a small bunch that got it right: in a largely bleak movie year, in all respects, they provided some much-needed light.

My list of the top five Hindi films of 2019 runs below:

5. Article 15: Bollywood filmmakers have had a long tradition of upholding the status quo, depicting a small slice of Indian life. Caste, in particular, is seldom discussed in our films — a ubiquitous reality that continues to shape the lives of a vast majority of Indians, if not everyone, in subtle and overt ways. But Article 15 — centred on a cop (Ayushmann Khurrana) investigating the rape and murders of two Dalit girls — is a rare Bollywood movie that confronts the issue of caste discrimination head-on. Initially unfolding like a crime thriller, Article 15 is a deep examination of the disturbing biases in individuals, comprising the ‘system’ — the police, the media — and how they have, over the years, failed the founding literature of the Indian republic.

4. The Sky is Pink: Director Shonali Bose understands a vital fact about grief: that like nearly everything in this world, grief, too, has an expiry date — that it, too, passes. It’s perhaps one of the reasons her last two dramas — Margarita With a Straw (2015) and The Sky is Pink, inspired by grim real-life stories — felt like quasi-comedies. Narrated by a girl (Zaira Wasim) about to die a tragic young death, The Sky is Pink, despite its inherent bleakness, is filled with… joy. This drama is several things at once: a cruel reminder that how life is — and has always been — unfair, a snapshot of a crumbling marriage, a small love story. But the movie is fundamentally an affecting ode to remembrance. As The Sky is Pink gets over, its end credits tells us about Aisha Chaudhary — the young girl who inspired the movie — and a song starts playing, written and composed by her elder brother. A line from it goes, “Umra main saariyan ji laiyan, roshni me saariyan pi laiyan” (I’ve lived all of the lifetimes/I’ve drunk up all of the light). Aisha would have smiled at the cruel wordplay.

3. Hamid: This movie, at its core, is about a friendship as unlikely as any: between a seven-year-old Kashmiri boy, Hamid (Talha Arshad Reshi), and a CRPF officer, Abhay (Vikas Kumar). Hamid’s father, like countless men in the Valley, ‘disappeared’ one night, many years ago. Hamid thinks he’s with Allah, finishing an urgent task. After finding out that “786 is Allah’s number”, he concocts a 10-digit combination and calls: Abhay’s phone rings. By making a seven-year-old boy — untainted by ideology and propaganda — the ‘hero’ of the movie, Hamid reframes the conversation around Kashmir: turning it from a political land dispute to a human rights issue. Because no matter where we lie on the ideological spectrum, we can all agree that a kid deserves a normal childhood, that he needs a father. Yet, at the same time, there’s a story from the other side: of the mainland CRPF jawaans (a lot of them Hindus) — small pawns in the chessboard that nations often are — who can’t seem to fathom the discontent of Kashmiris. Empathetic, lyrical, and profound, Hamid portrays the resolve of standing firm on a jagged cliff, when the entire world is telling you to jump.

2. Soni: “Madam-sir” — the portmanteau that sticks with you long after Ivan Ayr’s stunning debut folds. A word that encapsulates Soni and Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) in near-perfect terms: a female cop, battling patriarchy, in the masculine world of Delhi police, where she’s seen for who she is, a woman, but respected for what she represents: a man. Both Soni and her boss, Kalpana (Saloni Batra), are planning an operation to make Delhi safe for women, but the fangs of patriarchy — in the form of partners, in-laws, extended family — sting them at home, too. This world, seen through Soni and Kalpana’s eyes, seems riddled with inequities and dead ends, but Ayr also peppers it with hope, drawing a wonderful relationship between the two cops: one marked by friendship, sisterhood, and a mentor-mentee bond. Evocatively shot (featuring fluid long takes eliciting the feeling of living with the protagonists), superbly written (never sacrificing nuance or compromising on social commentary), and wonderfully performed (Batra and Ohlyan, in their debut features, acting as veterans), Soni, made by a debutant, gives Hindi cinema abiding hope.

Also Read: From Reel to Real Life, Challenges Faced by Women in Police Are Manifold

1. Sonchiriya: ‘Bandits dealing with existential crisis’ sounds like an unusual logline for a Bollywood movie, but Sonchiriya, directed by Abhishek Chaubey, was that rare beast. At a basic level, it was a masterful subversion of a staple Hindi film genre — the dacoit drama — but if you dug deeper, you’d find a contemplative, philosophical movie, discussing dharma, atonement, and redemption. Set in the mid-70s, Sonchiriya revolves around Lakhna (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Dadda (Manoj Bajpai), two bandits haunted by their past, and the rival cop Virender Singh Gujjar (Ashutosh Rana). Then there’s Indumati (Bhumi Pednekar), a young woman on the run, shielding an ‘untouchable’ girl: the light of the film, the redemptive key to Lakhna’s restless soul, Sonchiriya. Besides telling a compelling, poignant story, Sonchiriya was also marked by other impressive features: a layered commentary on the ravines’ gender and caste politics, dialogues in lyrical Bundelkhandi that soothed and slayed, long tense shootouts coming alive with wonderful cinematography (violence punctuated by songs and slow-motion shots). Hardly any Hindi film, in recent times, has been as committed to finding its moral centre as Sonchiriya. I saw the film nearly 10 months ago, but a dialogue from it, said by Lakhna, still rings in my ears: “But that is vengeance, Dadda — that is not justice.” Sonchiriya, almost always alive to human failings, was that gem, where we watched the movie and ended up seeing ourselves.