Cinema yearender: What makes Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL best Hindi films of 2024

The cruelty of an aftermath permeates the final minutes of Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL — a screenlife thriller about unreliable online identities — as well. Over the course of the film, we witness Nella Awasthi (Ananya Panday) reflected back to us on different screens, as if the insides of her mind is an endless search engine. Sometimes, it’s a text message or her face plastered on Facetime, other times it’s a random shuffling of tabs left open on a laptop or Nella vlogging herself.

Two films about consequence

But for a film diminishing the distance between being seen and being consumed, these last moments crystallize the idea of shifting identities into something tragic. The action shifts from Nella’s manicured Mumbai apartment to the abrasive air of Delhi. Here, she is Nalini Awasthi, a living, breathing person forced to live at the mercy of her immediate surroundings. The camera glides around, distancing her from its gaze and the film’s tone acquires bleakness. It’s an uncomfortable sight: watching anonymity cripple Nalini as she is stripped off her followers and subscribers. If CTRL were an Imtiaz Ali film scored to A.R. Rahman’s tunes and Irshad Kamil’s lyrics, the subtitles could have easily read: Jiss wajah se chamka woh, uss wajah se tapka (the reason for his rise also signalled his downfall).

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That is to say, both Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL are films about consequence, their unrelenting brutality distilled through the sense of resignation that the hindsight of fate lends the narratives. Often, these films rely on underlining the contrast between how their protagonists see themselves and the precise manner in which the world looks at them — a combative blend of perception and reputation facing off against the fickle nature of memory. The image of Nalini conjured up in our heads can only emerge when Nella’s performance of her own life is erased from it. And whether Amar Singh Chamkila is remembered as a trailblazing artist or a despicable misogynist depends entirely on how closely a nation wants to look at itself in the mirror.

The relatedness extends to the filmmakers behind these projects. More often than not, Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL strangely feel like the least Imtiaz Ali and Vikramaditya Motwane undertakings and simultaneously two films that only they could have helmed. There is a debt in Amar Singh Chamkila to Rockstar (2011) — another Ali bildungsroman — particularly in the urgency and brash energy that infiltrates every frame of the film. Yet, the filmmaker comes across more focused and controlled here, reinventing his signature romanticism into something that resists grand declarations. To say that Amar Singh Chamkila would have ended up as a very different film without Ali’s keen ear for music and affinity for situating it as dialogue, is stating the obvious.

Two filmmakers’ return to form

Similarly, over the last decade, Motwane has posited himself as a rare genre-defying filmmaker currently working in Hindi cinema. No two Motwane projects, for instance, bear much resemblance to one another. Still, I was taken aback by the precision with which Motwane, along with his co-writers Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh chose to inspect the internet as a social setting equipped with its unique mores.

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More so, because it is a perspective Hindi cinema seldom offers: the landscape of social media is usually a means to an end in films, reduced to caricature or treated as an afterthought (a grouse I have with the filmmaker 2018 film Bhavesh Joshi Superhero). Most Motwane protagonists have traces of repression in them — Nella feels cut from the same cloth, at least on paper. But CTRL unlocks a more agile filmmaker in Motwane, one who seems more interested in stretching the degree of inadequacy within his lead without feeling the need to classify them as underdogs.

An estimation of the risky gamble of making Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL is also visible in the casting of the two protagonists in these films and the performances that both filmmakers are able to extract out of their leads. Dosanjh and Panday lend a haunting quality to the films — their economy of emotion, at once in tandem with the material and the gaze of their filmmakers. It is equally a staggering achievement of craft and a return to form for two filmmakers who extend the possibilities of their storytelling in new, inventive directions. In an industry marred with derivative franchises and filmmakers who tend to get in their own way, Amar Singh Chamkila and CTRL stand out for being films that can be traced back to the singularity of its authors.