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He nurtured two gorgeous flowers into existence, made them endure a season of rough weather, and just as we were admiring them in their full bloom, Nagraj Manjule created a diversion, and returned us to the sight of the two flowers, on the ground, plucked and withered. The ambitious critic had to write about Indian films with an intention of rescuing cinema discussions from banality (rhetoric such as, 'this film is great because it delivers exactly what a neo-noir is supposed to').Īnd so, with that credo pasted on my forehead, I present my list of the 20 Indian films from this decade that I believe fulfilled the Ezra Pound slogan of Make it New. With so many important changes dotting our cinema landscape, the role of the Indian film critic changed also. There are no Tamil film-makers around with deft touches, and for that reason, there's not a single Tamil film on this list. No other industry has churned out so many movies that have used everything from a character's sexual orientation to her caste to merely turn up the volume on brutality and sadism, while offering us no understanding of the malefactor (basic Cops and Robbers stuff made ultra-violent).
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While Raghavan purified our movie watching experience thus, Tamil Cinema spent these last 10 years passing off exploitation films as high art. The two best films of Sriram Raghavan were intentionally located inside well-defined genres, whose boundaries which he then exploded, so that you, the audience member, was brought into the stories, and made to examine your own allegiances and your own distastes, and how fickle your positions actually were. This decade also saw the emergence of a new kind of Indian film director, someone who was a tale teller as well as a mischief-maker who made you acutely aware of your reactions to the tale he was telling. Our frames became denser and details, which were traditionally used to aid storytelling, now became the stuff out of which stories grew.
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In the best films to come out of states such as Kerala, the bristliness of a moustache or the wall colour in some character's room, began to give writers and directors a better idea of how to develop those characters. These films, with no real aesthetic merit in them, were nonetheless deemed 'important' because they talked about women's safety or because they took the deification route to empowering women (conveniently forgetting that deification is just yet another form of enslavement).Īmong the glorified nothings were such names as PINK, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Soni, and that odd little Tamil film, 96, whose primary virtue, for many appreciators, was that it celebrated asexuality.Īnother trend visible in our notable movies this decade was Details, even Inanimate Details, acquiring almost a consciousness of their own.

The Nirbhaya Case also made it possible for excessive sentimentality (which retains its status as our national disease) to find its way into another set of films. These film-makers escaped the immediate, journalistic, anxiety and used the case to investigate in depth the Indian Character, to widen the Human Scale in their films, and to pose in its boldest form that Holy Question: Why we are, what we are.

The sheer brutality of that incident coupled with the sensationalistic nature of its coverage had a profound effect on the Indian psyche and, by extension, on the Indian film director.Īs the decade turns, it has become clear that the best Indian film-makers are those who swallowed that ghastly incident whole, complete with the reactions it generated. The story of Indian Cinema in this decade pivots around the Nirbhaya Case of 2012.

Sreehari Nair presents his Top 20 movies of the decade.
