Book review: "A Bollywood State of Mind" by Sunny Singh (Telegraph 09/10/23)

Where to begin with Bollywood? The question has foxed overseas observers for almost a century now. One might start with the B-word itself: imposed on the Hindi cinema by outsiders conflating Bombay with Hollywood, it’s subsequently been rejected by senior industry personnel and frequently misapplied to films in neighbouring languages.

Indian cinema is, in fact, many regional cinemas in one – Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and so on – each with their own stars and specialities. While the barrelling action of one current hit, Jawan, prompted breathless responses across northern India, many southerners sniffed, claiming it was but a pricey impersonation of those rowdy crowd-pleasers their industries have turned out for decades.

Such films remain swirling melting pots of fisticuffs, gunplay, romance and song, earning themselves the (homegrown) sobriquet “masala movies”. Long before old Bombay morphed into latter-day Mumbai, this cinema contained multitudes, setting eyes to widen and minds to boggle, and leaving casual onlookers – even some of our shrewdest critics – feeling overwhelmed.

Expert guidance is required, then, and with her new book, Sunny Singh, well-travelled novelist and professor of creative writing at London Metropolitan University, makes a true heroine’s entrance. Part-history, part-memoir, A Bollywood State of Mind details how Singh caught the cinephile bug as a diplomat’s daughter shifting around India, her alienation from Hollywood’s prosaic, single-track narratives, and her inability to escape the movies and songs of her homeland, wherever life carried her.

The essence and art of masala, we learn, is a balancing act, “a combination of transitory moods and permanent internal states”. If so, A Bollywood State of Mind might be claimed as a masala book, its prose alternating between professorial wisdom and something dreamier besides. 

Uppermost in the mix is the history, spanning from 1913’s Raja Harishchandra, the foundational silent regarded as the first Indian feature, to January’s Pathaan, blockbusting vehicle for reigning Bollywood king Shah Rukh Khan. Here, Singh identifies key stars and directors, familiar archetypes and tropes, and discusses how and where cinema intersected with the wider Indian project: the push for self-determination during colonial rule, the Modi-backed resurgence of Hindu nationalism.

One idiosyncrasy is the near-sacred text the author clings to as an interpretative secret weapon: the Natyashastra, an ancient Sanskrit encyclopaedia of the arts which sought to elevate creative endeavour to the status of the divine. (It makes Stanislavski and Brecht’s writings on theatre seem like child’s play.) 

Expanded from the author’s doctoral thesis, this reframing of movie history is where the book flirts openly with an academic register. The Natyashastra’s dramatic pointers reminded me of film theorist Christian Metz’s narrative paradigms, bane of many an undergraduate. 

Yet, in Singh’s hands, they point towards a fuller and deeper understanding of Bollywood norms: the unapologetic repurposing of what some would dismiss as cliché, for example, or the recurring reincarnation theme. They even provide spiritual reasons for the intervals that still come as standard with Indian cinema.

Whenever the book leans toward the arcane, Singh shifts approach and demonstrates that this cinema’s singular power is more than typically bound up with emotion and memory. It’s just that her memories have been rescaled by the movies themselves. Even her footnotes suggest frames from some thunderous widescreen melodrama: a grandmother remembers fleeing an earthquake “clutching her infant sister and a cage with her parrot… as the ground around her opened up in deep cracks”.

While disconcerting at first, Singh argues, masala cinema’s extremes of emotional colour, and sudden tonal and perspectival shifts ultimately provide a fine preparation for life’s vagaries: the highs, the lows, the sudden outbreaks of frenzied dancing. What’s more, they function wherever you are. A local whom Singh encounters on a research trip to Senegal bursts into Hindi song, and confesses Indian films “taught me a different way to see”.

If recent admission numbers are anything to go by, Western cinemagoers would seem to agree: the (joyous) romcom Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani held down a screen at my local Odeon for nine weeks – while more floundering Hollywood options came and went. Arriving at a moment when streaming services are further lowering the barriers that have traditionally separated us from adjacent cinemas and cultures, Singh’s book serves as both a greeting party and a gentle re-emphasis.

In her introduction, Singh writes of the goals she set her younger self: “I would study and learn, and develop the language I needed to share the films I have loved all my life. And I would find ways to share that love with my colleagues, friends and even strangers, in words they already knew. Gradually, I was sure, they’d learn my words as well as I had learnt theirs so we could sit together before a screen to watch, and to love, the same films.” Her adult self now bestows that language on us – and a watchlist to keep Netflix devotees going for several lifetimes.

A Bollywood State of Mind (Footnote Press, Hardback, 272pp, £20) is published October 19.

In memoriam: Terence Davies (Telegraph 08/10/23)

Terence Davies, who has died aged 77, was a literate, high-minded British writer-director known for an intensely personal form of filmmaking that set him in conflict with the moneymen of his chosen industry, and which generated works more often appreciated overseas than they were at home. Yawning gaps in his filmography speak to long years of struggle within an ever more commercial medium; only late on in his career did he consistently find the acclaim, and the audiences, he deserved.

Davies broke through in the early 1980s – a golden age of publicly funded British cinema – with a trio of medium length works pieced together under the aegis of the British Film Institute: Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983). (The three were released commercially under the title of The Terence Davies Trilogy.) 

Their protagonist Robert Tucker – encountered as a young man in Children, in middle age in Madonna and Child and in his dotage in Death and Transfiguration – was a surrogate of sorts for Davies’s own experiences growing up gay and devoutly Catholic in a working-class Liverpudlian neighbourhood. Rigorous and exacting, searing Tucker’s troubled recollections onto the scratchiest of black-and-white film stock, the films were uningratiating in the extreme – the New York Times critic Vincent Canby asserted the Trilogy “makes Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis” – but they announced a defiantly individualistic talent capable of finding flickers of redemptive poetry in the everyday.

Davies used the Trilogy as a springboard to complete a pair of dramas that, if they weren’t entirely autobiographical, nevertheless felt very close to home. Both Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), centred on a family living in the shadow of an abusive alcoholic patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), and The Long Day Closes (1992), a love letter to the picture palaces Davies frequented as a boy, were distinguished by their immersive, poignant detail. An elegantly roving camera panned over wallpaper faded by sunlight to reach a mantelpiece crowded with family photos; in the raucous pub scenes, you could all but smell the best bitter soaked into the carpet.

The leading American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of Distant Voices: “Years from now, when practically all the other new movies currently playing are long forgotten, it will be remembered and treasured as one of the greatest of all English films.” Yet Davies’ non-linear narratives, measured pacing and melancholy tone marked him out as both an emergent film artist and a distinctly tough sell as the movies pressed on into the modern blockbuster era. 

He sought to expand his canvas with the Film4-backed The Neon Bible (1995), a starry adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s 1940s-set novel. Though not without its virtues – Rosenbaum observed “there are many fleeting poetic moments… moments so ecstatic that you may feel yourself rising off your seat” – it struggled to match the specificity of its director’s domestic features, and disappeared without much trace upon release. Davies was brutally honest in his assessment: “It doesn’t work, and that’s entirely my fault.”

There were higher hopes for The House of Mirth (2000), Davies’s filigreed adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, which came to the screen with a bankable star attached in The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, serving early notice of her considerable dramatic gifts as Wharton’s doomed heroine Lily Bart. (The perennially lofty Davies insisted he hadn’t seen a single episode of The X-Files before casting Anderson.)

Yet despite rave reviews and a BAFTA nomination for Best British Film, it too became a box-office disappointment, failing to find an audience amid the first wave of superhero movies and hipper, flashier diversions from the reinvigorated independent cinema. Davies later confessed to the despair he felt at the film’s underperformance: “I really did think: it’s all over now.”

Several wilderness years followed, yet his old friends at the BFI boosted his visibility by awarding Davies their Fellowship in 2007, and the following year, he returned with the essay film Of Time and the City (2008), a triumphant excavation of both his own memories of post-WW2 Liverpool and the National Film Archives. 

After two tricky literary adaptations, this potent collage of found footage felt like Davies rediscovering his own voice: with its idiosyncratic phrasing and onomatopoeic riffs on such uniquely British minutiae as the football results and the shipping forecast, his narration was almost as evocative as the images. Critics adored it; audiences – keen to see themselves or their forefathers on screen – showed up; and two questions Davies posed at the top and tail seemed to crystallise his entire filmography: “Do you remember? Will you ever forget?”

Terence Davies was born in Liverpool on November 10, 1945, the youngest of ten children. His was a brutal childhood: the incident in Distant Voices, Still Lives where the abusive father viciously beats his son in the cellar with a broomstick was apparently drawn from reality. Suffering from cripplingly low self-esteem, the young Davies sought shelter in the cinema and the church. “I was terribly devout,” Davies later recollected. “I prayed literally until my knees bled.”

While Catholicism appealed to his masochistic side, it was the cinema – with its promises of guiltless pleasure – which exerted a more enduring hold on his affections. Though voracious in his tastes, he favoured melodramas and the films of Doris Day, eventually listing Day’s 1954 vehicle Young at Heart among his ten picks in Sight & Sound magazine’s Greatest Films poll.

He left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk and then a bookkeeper in an accountancy firm, yet found scant enjoyment in either: “I was twelve years in a job I absolutely detested; you just felt you were dying by the centimetre. I saw a lot of people go under. In the offices I worked in, they hated every minute of it, and dread[ed] when they got to 65, being given a Teasmade in the boardroom.”

In 1971, however, he left Liverpool to study acting at Coventry Drama School, and it was there that he started writing the screenplay that eventually became Children. After that script found favour with the BFI Production Board, he signed up at the National Film School in London, shooting Madonna and Child as his graduation film.

Though he never appeared on film, his acting studies didn’t go entirely to waste. As a series of Q&As attached to Of Time and the City first suggested, Davies was an eminently quotable interviewee, cinephiles flocking to hear this waspish, snowy-haired figure speaking wittily and often vituperatively about the state of the industry, and his status within it. Asked by one sceptical audience member why his films were so slow and depressing, Davies’s response was immediate and priceless: “It’s a gift.”

After receiving the BFI Fellowship, there was a sense that Davies was at last being embraced as something like a national treasure. His contemporary romcom Mad About the Boy and Stefan Zweig adaptation The Post-Office Girl remained unfunded, but he retained a sure touch with period material. The Deep Blue Sea (2011) – a handsome adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, shot in 25 days – was boosted by the star power of Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, and its modest commercial success enabled Davies to realise a long-cherished passion project. 

Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel about a farmgirl’s unsentimental education, had struck a deep chord with Davies: “It’s about forgiveness and accepting what has happened, and not being bitter, which is what my mother did. These are the cards you are dealt, so you get on with it and don't complain. That I find enormously moving.” His big-screen adaptation of 2015 met with generally favourable reviews, critics praising the sumptuous landscape photography and a deeply felt central performance by the former model Agyness Deyn.

By then, Davies had seemingly learnt how to pursue his own interests within long-established systems of funding and exhibition: Sunset Song was rapidly followed by A Quiet Passion (2016), a distinctively wordy biopic of the poet Emily Dickinson, with Sex & The City star Cynthia Nixon in the lead. Ever frank, Davies told Nixon he had found her breakthrough show “pernicious”, and that he watched several episodes with the sound off, casting her based on the truthfulness of her reaction shots. 

Nevertheless, theirs was a fruitful collaboration, earning Davies the support from American critics he hadn’t received upon the release of The Neon Bible. His final film was Benediction (2021), a characteristically elegant and moving biopic of Siegfried Sassoon that cut back and forth between Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the war poet's younger and older selves.

Davies himself enjoyed writing poetry (“It's just you and the paper and no one is going to say: this is going to cost £50,000”); he also penned a novel (1984’s Hallelujah Now, resuming the story of the Trilogy’s Robert Tucker), a memoir (Travels in Celluloid, 1998) and two radio plays: A Walk to the Paradise Garden (for Radio 3, 2001) and an adaptation of Woolf’s The Waves (for Radio 4, 2007). He spent his twilight years living alone on the South Coast: “I am celibate, although I think I would have been celibate even if I was straight because I’m not good-looking; why would anyone be interested in me? And nobody has been. Work was my substitute.”

Terence Davies, born November 10, 1945, died October 7, 2023.

The losers: "BlackBerry"

The latest feature to have been torn from the financial pages, BlackBerry, has a welcome USP: it's funny, then tragicomic. The eponymous product at its centre - the short-lived telecommunications device that offered the then-revolutionary combo of phone plus computer keyboard - was but a mere stepping stone, as it turned out; we're not meant to go starry-eyed over it, as I think we were over Facebook or the Air Jordan trainer or Tetris in films of a comparable ilk. It may also be significant that this was a Canadian rather than American innovation, and thus more amenable to gentle mockery. The director here is the Toronto native Matt Johnson, whose The Dirties (on the planning of a high-school shooting) and Operation Avalanche (reworking the urban myth about NASA faking the moon landing) were sly 21st century updates of the men-on-a-mission movie. He continues that project here, shooting fast and loose, with lots of shakycam peeping at schlubby tech bros through the slats in wonky office blinds. Collectively, this footage illustrates the unlikely and finally doomed alliance between two dorky manchildren and the one grown-up in the room. On the side of youth: nervy fiddler Mike Lazarides (Jay Baruchel) and his partner Doug Fregin (Johnson himself, looking more like a Doug than anyone has ever managed on screen), brains behind the none too professional start-up Research in Motion. (A business card underlines the unfortunate acronym.) Providing the money and corporate steel: Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), the angel investor turned CEO who found himself serving as besuited babysitter, arrived at an exasperated tolerance for his charges - doubtless helped by the vast sums BlackBerry was generating at its peak - before looking on helplessly as Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone that made their own product obsolete overnight, the movie's ultimate punchline. A bigger boy made Mike and Doug do it, and it still all came to naught.

This is by any index Johnson's biggest film to date: it features recognisable names and faces rather than the director's friends, and the kind of logos and needledrops for which any director typically has to pay top dollar. Yet the funniest thing about it may just be that, despite its presence in our more adventurous multiplexes, BlackBerry remains resolutely small of scale and independent of spirit: watching odd little men shuttle around nondescript backstreets in notably shitty cars, it finally has more in common with a mumblecore curio like Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess than the state-of-the-art flash of The Social Network. Johnson and his co-writers see very little that counts as aspirational in this story, and even less that might be mistaken for inspirational. Mike and Doug cobbled together something that was considered useful for a while; it was then overtaken and outsold. That, the movie concludes, is just how business goes sometimes. Having nothing to sell us on allows Johnson to maintain a rewardingly close focus on his performers. Baruchel is pretty good as a born tinkerer possessed of the urge to get things right - hence his film-long obsession with quelling the white noise emitting from Balsillie's faulty intercom - but also what in modern business circles is likely considered a tragic flaw: a need to do things perfectly, rather than successfully. Johnson's Doug is all too clearly along for the ride, and defined chiefly by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet he produces to pay for one early business meeting. Still, his T-shirts conspire to tell their own story of limited ambition, and he clears room for Howerton, superb as an arsehole who's also the kick up the arse Mike and Doug need if they're ever going to compete in the big leagues.

Granted, much as most recent Steve Coogan characters have in some way been Partridge-adjacent, there's an element of Dennis Reynolds, the hilariously sociopathic, Andrew Tate-predating character Howerton has made totemic in his small-screen work, about this performance. (Balsillie's "thirst is a display of weakness", offered as terse rationalisation for refusing a secretary's benign offer of water, is somehow very Dennis.) Yet this bald-headed eagle of finance remains the one and only person on screen who seems to know how to get things done at all: aggressively, unethically, if needs be - and with no consideration greater than that of selling yourself - but again, Johnson shrugs, that's business for you. The film may be at its most Canadian around Balsillie, with his very Canadian, literally part-silly name: everyone associated with BlackBerry the company and BlackBerry the film looks to have gone on the record to assert that the character of Jim Balsillie as so entertainingly portrayed by Howerton owes scant resemblance to lived reality - but eh, no harm, no foul, and no expensive litigation. Unlike Wall Street or its bastard son The Wolf of Wall Street, this is a film about business where no-one comes away looking especially cool; even the supporting artists, whose expressions, haircuts and wardrobes prove reliably good for passing chuckles, look more like spare or remaindered parts than slumming pin-ups. If it's true that you learn more from failure than success, then Johnson's film also demonstrates it's possible to have far more fun with the process leading us to fail: BlackBerry has the feel of a footnote very precisely, even lovingly inhabited and described.

BlackBerry is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 29-October 1, 2023):

1 (new) The Creator (12A) **

2 (new) Saw X (18)

3 (1) A Haunting in Venice (12A)

4 (3) The Nun 2 (15)

5 (4) The Equalizer 3 (15)

6 (new) A Little Life (18)

7 (new) Stop Making Sense (PG) *****

8 (2) Expend4bles (15)

9 (new) The Old Oak (15)

10 (5) Dumb Money (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Exorcist

2. Stop Making Sense

3. BlackBerry

4. Beetlejuice

5. Dead Shot

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Barbie (12) ***

2 (2) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (12) **

3 (new) Blue Beetle (12)

4 (3) The Flash (12) **

5 (5) Fast X (12)

6 (7) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

7 (4) The Meg 2: The Trench (12)

8 (6) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (PG) ***

9 (19) Asteroid City (12) **

10 (new) The Wicker Man (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Fine Morning

2. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.

3. Medusa Deluxe

4. Return to Seoul

5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Don't Look Now [above] (Monday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

2. So Long, My Son (Saturday, BBC2, 1.05am)

3. The Secret Garden (Saturday, Channel 5, 12noon)

4. Minority Report (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)

5. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Tuesday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

Animal house: "Beetlejuice"

Hallowe'en never used to be a thing in British cinemas, nor really on our streets in general. In recent years, however, we've started to see a handful of supernatural or paranormal-themed titles clustering around the October 31 weekend, hoping to snatch up that disposable income that hasn't already been blown on costume hire or supermarket novelty candy. In 2023, that's expanded to practically an entire month of horrors, and some element of diversity - or as much diversity as spare multiplex screens will allow. (No silent horror, of course, and nary a subtitle to be seen.) You don't get much more diverse than last week's The Exorcist followed by Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, which returns to our screens this weekend in its mid-thirties: a brisk and sprightly comedy, propelled by Danny Elfman's antic score, here to remind us of a time before the studios slipped into terminal cynicism (Saw X) or ran out of ideas altogether (The Nun 2, The Exorcist: Believer). This was Burton's snickering, mordant take on 1980s property porn, beating Joe Dante's The 'Burbs to the satiric punch with its vision of a rural all-American dream house that becomes a hangout space for ghouls and freaks after bland owners Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin (back in the day when he was being cast as milquetoasts) snuff it. Foremost among these weirdos: Michael Keaton's eponymous bug man, a lascivious huckster who does for prospective new owners what Rentokil do for termites and cockroaches, and in passing claims to have seen The Exorcist 167 times ("it keeps on getting funnier every time I see it").

Three decades on, and with a shiny new 12A certificate to show for itself, the film offers other reminders, too: of a time when studio doors were open to outsider sensibilities such as Burton, John Waters and David Lynch (Beetlejuice is Burton's Eraserhead), and when Burton in particular wasn't entirely drowning his films in CGI. There's a modicum of effects work here, certainly: the stripey sandworms bedevilling the house from without look like this director's response to Dune, and may have factored into the genesis of 1990's Tremors. But they're less well integrated than those tossed-off, doodly sightgags so essential to the fabric of certain 1980s comedies (I'm thinking Better Off Dead..., although I'm often thinking of Better Off Dead...): the leaflets tumbling out of Jeffrey Jones' copy of Practical Homeowner, the waiting room for the undead, complete with Man Half-Devoured By Shark and Tar-Blackened Victim of Fire, the human Test Your Strength machine that knocks a chuckle out of you amid the finale. Burton was at that stage where his sole aim was to make pages from his sketchbooks come to life, and if Beetlejuice barely seems to hang together as a narrative these days, it fair spills over with visual invention, gags that both do and don't pay off. Something (read: lots of things) went wrong after Burton gravitated towards Johnny Depp, with his blank-faced anomie, because here the director is still searching for eruptive displays of personality: he allows Keaton's horny hellbeast, all but repressed for the first 45 minutes, to gradually take over the whole show, livens up a dinner party with the help of Harry Belafonte (an enduring setpiece), and recalls Sylvia Sidney to snipe at Davis whenever the latter starts whining about how unhappy she is ("What did you expect? You're dead"). All this, and one genuine rarity for a 1980s motion picture: a scene where a character picks up binoculars with the intention of birdwatching, and somehow doesn't spy a comely neighbour in her bra and pants.

Beetlejuice is now playing in selected cinemas.

Which side are you on?: "The Creator"

The Creator arrives amid a decidedly pregnant pause. The old world of exclusively human creative endeavour looks to be at an end, as far as Hollywood is concerned. (Hence the ongoing labour disputes, hence the weird yet perceptible production slowdown that has seen our multiplexes stocked with more reissues than ever before.) Yet the turbocharged new world of Movies by AI™ hasn't fully emerged as promised or threatened. Into this interregnum comes a new movie from the director of 2010's Monsters that tries to imagine where we might all be some forty years from now, and winds up inhabiting a halfway house, neither one thing nor the other. In its visual design, The Creator is plainly the work of a singular, hands-on creative imagination, capable of endowing scenes with agreeably idiosyncratic choices. (It will likely be the one film you see this year where a detonator ends up in the paws of a monkey, an image that sustains the overarching thematic interest in evolution.) Yet the film's ghostly, often intangible plotting appears to have been scraped from any number of more forceful sources, and even momentarily feels like an attempt to monetise social media's enduring Baby Hitler meme, revolving as it does around a child who holds the future in the palm of a tiny hand. The ambition is state-of-the-art speculative sci-fi, picking up where the Avatar sequel left off at the start of the year. The results, alas, mostly go to illustrate what a tenuous state that art is still in. The Creator is a placeholder movie fashioned by a business stuck in a holding pattern - it's really scant surprise audiences want something more clarifying and decisive for their ten bucks.

Narratively, Gareth Edwards' film vacillates between two worlds. The big idea is that, by 2065, Asia will have fully embraced the possibilities of artificial intelligence, and in so doing been deemed responsible for a nuclear attack on L.A. that would at least put the film industry out of its misery. America, meanwhile, grows only more hostile, to the extent of dispatching special patrols to hunt AI's so-called creator, much as Navy SEALs were once sent to take out Osama Bin Laden. Foremost among these soldiers: John David Washington's pill-popping Marine Josh Taylor, an amputee whose robotic limbs indicate some affinity for technological leaps and bounds - though these prove no help when his pregnant wife (Gemma Chan) is taken out in a reel-one retaliatory strike. Thereafter, Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz spend some time outlining the editorial back-and-forth. As The Creator has it, AI isn't as bad nor as inimical to human life as some folks on screen are heard saying. (The counterargument is proposed by a range of Asian characters, offering a way for the film to make back internationally what it loses at home.) There's a corollary: that humanity isn't always as good as we like to believe. To prove this, Edwards and Weitz engineer a run of scenes that dig back even further in the American consciousness, past 9/11 to Vietnam: lots of gruff, gung-ho grunts doing grim things in South East Asian villages. The real litmus test comes when, instead of the fabled/feared Creator, Taylor's platoon encounters a shaven-headed kid (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) with a processing terminal where her ear should be. Here, at least, the film demonstrates some classical screenwriting savvy, pairing a bereaved father-to-be with a youngling his instincts (and orders) are telling him to kill. Great, you think: it's an inversion of Terminator II, or The Omen with helmets on. Either of those movies might have played, but the one we have suffers from a near-pathological reluctance to grasp the nettle when it counts.

Two worlds, two screenwriters, two cinematographers, too; maybe it's to be expected the film finds itself caught in two minds, vainly trying to clear room for some human interest between the noisy smashing together of pricey kit. Edwards has been this way twice in the decade since his breakout feature, first with 2014's Godzilla (which relaunched a franchise) and then, less happily, with 2016's Rogue One (which helped bury Star Wars as a cinematic proposition). The Creator makes a less than promising start to this task. Washington - one of our unhappiest stars, bright enough to intuit he's made it long after the best films and parts have gone - doesn't get any cheerier for witnessing his loved ones vapourised, and it's vaguely dispiriting to see Allison Janney playing Sigourney Weaver in Avatar. (She gets off lighter than Ralph Ineson, apparently cast as "Mr. Bronson from Grange Hill, only Army".) The movie starts to come into focus in its centre stretch, a road movie that notionally carries Edwards away from the studio suits and back in the direction of the movie that made him; it helps that this hour of bonding between jockish Josh and the iPod Nano (or whatever the kid is supposed to represent) was shot against actual Asian backdrops rather than green screen. Even so, you can't help but wonder whether the faxes came through insisting Edwards tone the film down. The central pair skirt nervily around images and ideas that hint at a more striking, horror-adjacent, R-rated treatment of this material: a gag about facial recognition that demands ad hoc facial surgery, a factory churning out androids at heinous pace, what look like radicalised airfryers, repurposed as suicide bombers. One reason I was never quite sure about The Creator is that Edwards always seems ready to cut away at any moment, where the Cameron of the Terminators would have held firm and landed the punch; the film is temporary in its very form, as if constructing its own bowdlerised in-flight version of itself.

It's not that there's nothing going on here. Quite the opposite, in fact: the ideas Edwards raises prove more interesting than the framework they've been encased in. But it's rare to see would-be escapism that reminds you so directly and so frequently of its own creation: how our bigger movies are themselves made of multiple moving parts, and how these parts get tinkered and tampered with before being set before the consumer. (The hole in the child's head extends to the film itself: you can see right into it, and possibly even out through the other side.) Back when producers cared that their product was fit for purpose, movies like this used to be rigorously audience-tested in shopping malls across the Western world. I don't know whether that process has been abandoned post-Covid - it's hard enough getting people out to watch films they want to see nowadays - but for better and worse, The Creator doesn't appear to have been tested at all, which may account for the fact it plays like a very early, uncommonly tentative and hesitant cut. Edwards - as directors go, a combination of traffic cop and centrist dad - keeps hedging his bets narratively and thematically. In this version, at least, he's not picking sides out of a self-defeating desire to keep everybody (middle America, Asia, techbros and Luddites alike) reasonably happy. The tactic hasn't worked commercially, if the opening weekend figures are anything to go by, and the two-and-a-bit hours of this distinctive, instructive failure only carry us all that much closer to a rapidly approaching line in the sand: turn left to rescue what remains of humanity, and right to follow Elon Musk into techno-oblivion, the revenge of the machines. The Creator can't make its mind up about its material because the movies haven't yet made up their mind up on this subject: it's a perilously expensive way of kicking a pressing issue into the multiplex long grass.

The Creator is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Love Per Square Foot"

At last, a romcom with a worldview, or at least one foot in reality. Set Anand Tiwari's Love Per Square Foot against recent Western equivalents, and it even begins to seem faintly Godardian: it scans overcrowded houses in an overcrowded city (Mumbai), before wryly noting how hard it might be to get away for assignments of a personal nature. Sanjay (Vicky Kaushal) is a thirtysomething male, with a thirtysomething male's aspirations and desires, stuck living at home with his parents while working in a bank's IT department; as we join him, he's in an altogether masochistic relationship - one that both literally and figuratively can't go anywhere - with a boss who's already seeing someone else. We soon get the picture: too many people on the scene and in the frame. At a colleague's wedding - yet more people, and a wistful sense of what could be for folks like Sanjay if they were in a higher wage bracket - our boy is introduced to Karina (a good Godardian name, proudly worn by newcomer Angira Dhar), though the promise of their first encounter ebbs away after it emerges she's the one who turned down his application for a home loan; she's also being set up for marriage with a loaded but overbearing fellow, chosen by the mother she lives with. Brick walls everywhere, and neither roof nor warm body to keep above one's head. Unlike a lot of stock romcom business, this actually happens: it's a film that makes sense of all those young couples forced to conduct their courting on the leafy fringes of Juhu Beach, but also one that might well resonate in any location where even lock-up garages are presently being rented out for a full month's salary.

The solution Sanjay and Karina find for their snafus - posing as a couple so as to access a nearby housing scheme - carries Tiwari's film into the realms of convention and convenience, yet these aren't the breezy hucksters who waft through Western romcoms, eminently capable of sustaining such deceptions. They're visibly nervy kids, doubtless more dependent for having spent so long at home, who at every twist of this plot appear out of their depth and unsettled in a dozen ways besides. (What the film locks down most precisely is the connection between domestic and romantic insecurity.) Any pleasure depends on us wanting to cohabit with the leads, and Tiwari hands himself the advantage of relatively fresh faces - performers who don't necessarily own four-storey townhouses with attached waiting staff, who retain some sense-memory of what it is to live cheque to cheque. Kaushal isn't an obvious catch, and at one point Sanjay is rude to a waiter, which raises a red flag, but his unforced and natural responses are appealing: he plays even regulation scenes in ways no established star, with their tried-and-tested array of tics, would. (Watch him underplay his big speech, while still appearing to speak directly from the heart.) Dhar, for her part, ensures Karina isn't some common-or-garden romcom kook, but - more poignantly - a sensible young woman who's done the right things all her life and still found herself no closer to Mr. Right or the home of her dreams. Tiwari keeps things snappy without ever forcing anything in the plot, rooting each interaction in character: he makes smart use of such seasoned comic players as Raghubir Yadav and Ratna Pathak Shah among his variably fussing parents, and pulls off something quietly inspired late on in having domestic upheaval spill over into first the workplace, then a shared courtyard. Everything is unhoused, and the boundaries separating private and public get comprehensively trampled over. Still, at every stage, it feels as though someone behind the camera lived through something like this, and Tiwari takes an extra care to ensure this plot's sudden flurries of intimacy - a night on the sofa, a kiss on a metro train - count double. Rare to see a romcom take so little for granted.

Love Per Square Foot is streaming on Netflix.