Monica, O My Darling

Post Credits Scene: Director Vasan Bala's neo-noir crime comedy, starring Rajkummar Rao and Huma Qureshi as two duelling social climbers, is a sharp ...

Both Monica and Jayant behave in the kind of cutthroat manner that you’d expect people like them to. He knew that even if Khurrana didn’t understand the tone of the movie they were making, the audience would. Khurrana said that he was under the impression that they had made a ‘serious’ thriller. By allowing you to assume that Monica is a devious femme fatale, the movie is gently disrobing the ‘doglapan’ of Indian audiences, and setting up an act of massive subversion that is paid off towards the end. We assume that Monica is a mastermind because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe. The movie has great fun subverting the idea of heroes and villains, especially because it’s packaged like the kind of retro entertainment in which these roles were so clearly defined. More importantly, Monica joins a small-ish list of Hindi streaming movies that kind of capture what it is like to live in India today. But they also balance out their pessimism with progressive politics; these films understand that life is more difficult for minorities, and that they mustn’t contribute to the narrative of oppression. Anybody who says that Bollywood is flatlining needs to know that after starring in one of 2022’s worst Hindi movies, Rajkummar Rao has now also starred in one of the best. These movies are the worst-offenders; in their desperation to pander to the only audience demographic that is still resisting the internet age, they’re basically sullying the image of streaming as a whole. And even though they might share thematic overlaps with the similarly rebellious cinema of the 70s, the characters that populate them aren’t at all idealistic. These are movies that pretend to have been designed for the online crowd, but whose sensibilities would’ve been ancient even in the 80s — widely regarded as the most deplorable era in Bollywood history.