June Movies Part 1: Laapataa Ladies, Hit Man, Origin

I’ve already watched three great movies and we’re only midway through June! Dive in for some cinematic wonder.

Laapataa Ladies: It had been a while since I watched a Bollywood movie, but I knew director Kiran Rao could be trusted to deliver the goods, while working from a script crafted by Biplap Goswami, Sneha Desai, and Divyanidhi Sharma. What follows is a rousing tale about rural women in India, their hopes and dreams, the different paths their lives can take, and the stumbling blocks in their way.

Nitanshi Goel and Pratibha Ranta star as Phool Kumari and Pushpa Rani (or is that really her name...), two women who both get married in their respective villages on the same day. Following the wedding, they must now travel to their husbands’ villages, and they both end up on the same train. Dressed alike in their bridal saris, and conservatively veiled (because heaven forfend a woman show her face to anyone except her family), it’s impossible to tell the two women apart. Which means that in the middle of the night, when Phool's husband reaches their stop, he quickly grabs her and hurries off the train. Except he didn’t grab Phool, he got Pushpa instead.

What follows is a delicious comedy with plenty of social commentary. There’s a reason Pushpa got off the train with the wrong husband, but the movie patiently and carefully takes its time to reveal her past and what exactly she is planning to do now. In the meantime, Phool gets off at the wrong station and realizes she is completely lost. She doesn’t know what village she was headed to, and her own village has a common name that could be any of a dozen rural villages across the country. A ragtag group of folk who work around the railway station take her in, giving her shelter and food, but it’s unclear how she will ever find her way back to her husband.

I won’t spoil anything, but I will reassure you that this is a comedy, so don’t expect anything tragic to happen. Instead, this is a gentle movie with some great actors, all beautifully capturing the joys and heartbreaks these women will experience during this adventure. Ravi Kishan also stars as a police inspector who is the typical corrupt villain of the piece…until he isn’t. This is a film that is all about subverting expectations while still reminding us of the importance of women’s choices and giving them a chance to get ahead in the world. It’s a story that never gets old.

Hit Man: Directed by Richard Linklater, who co-wrote the screenplay with Glen Powell (who also stars), this is a wild and twisty movie about Gary Johnson (Powell), a college professor in New Orleans who also works part-time for the police as a fake hit man. He’s the guy they send in to talk to people who want to murder someone - he walks in, gets them to tell him the whole plan, hand over some cash, and then walks out while the cops show up to arrest the would-be murderers.

Of course, things go haywire when a beautiful woman, Madison (Adria Arjona), hires him to murder her abusive husband. Gary takes pity on her and gives her some advice, ensuring she doesn’t incriminate herself while the police listen in. And then things get increasingly murky as the two of them embark on a secret affair.

This movie is hilarious, dark, and twisty. And weirdest of all, it is (kind of) based on a true story, though the filmmakers have certainly taken a considerable amount of artistic license. I had no idea what was going to happen from one point to the next and every scene was yet another delightful surprise as I watched things spiral and escalate completely out of control. You won’t be able to predict a minute of this madcap mayhem so just settle back and enjoy the ride.

Origin: I loved Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, which re-framed America’s original sin of slavery as evidence of casteism, rather than racism. She laid out her argument by making comparisons to Nazi Germany and their treatment of Jews, and the Indian caste system with their treatment of Dalits, aka the “untouchable” caste. Well, in this movie, writer-director Ava DuVernay has audaciously decided to take the story of the real-life author and chart her personal journey while she was writing this book. What follows is a unique tale where we both get insights into Wilkerson’s personal tragedies that spurred her on to throw herself into researching this book, as well as a cinematic representation of the book itself, with all its central arguments about caste systems in various countries and their unifying pillars.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor offers up a tour-de-force performance as she plays Wilkerson, who endures tremendous personal loss and goes through a great deal of soul-searching while researching incredibly difficult and often incendiary subject matter. The supporting cast is filled with stalwarts like Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, etc. who all do great work. But overall, the tone of this film is a little hit-or-miss. Does it want to be personal, or does it want to be didactic? Is it offering up an impersonal history lesson or searing political commentary? Like the book, its scope is vast and ambitious, but unlike the book, it struggles to cohere into a fully incisive whole. 

DuVernay is a tremendous filmmaker, but I would have much preferred if she had adapted Caste in the style of her documentary, 13TH, that did such a terrific job of diving deep into the racist history of America’s prison system. This subject matter is meaty and complex and deserves many hours of cinematic justice, not just a two-hour movie that is trying to tug at your heartstrings about this one woman’s story while also educating you about entire swathes of history in three different cultures. The movie does call out all of the parts of the book that astonished me, and shows the eye-opening connections that led Wilkerson to develop the thesis for her book. But somehow, telling the narrative through her eyes instead of giving us the information in a more straightforward manner made the whole enterprise feel a bit too Hollywood. It’s still a good and unusual movie, but unfortunately, I was expecting something great.