Ex Stream Benefits: From Trial By Fire to Cinema Marte Dum Tak, looking at the best on OTT in January

For the streaming platform in India, January was a remarkably unproductive month redeemed by two outstanding serials, both intimately inured to reality.

Netflix’s Trial by Fire was easily the best of January and bound to be counted among the most important happenings on the digital platform in 2023. Not too many films or series possess the power to change lives. Trial by Fire, based on the harrowing first-person account of Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy on how they lost both their children in the fire that engulfed the ill-fated Uphaar cinema in Delhi on 13 June 1977, is the kind of rare work which makes the collective audience re-think its priorities in life.

Neelam and Shekhar fought a lumbering legal battle with the big sharks of Delhi’s entrepreneurial ambit for eighteen years. They never thought of giving up, even when those others who had lost loved ones in the fire, backed out due to financial and emotional pressures. The seven tightly edited adroitly directed episodes(by Prashant Nair, Randeep Jha and Avani Deshpande) do not let the Krishnamoorthy’s down. Neither do Abhay Deol and Rajshree Deshpande who play the bereaved couple with dignity and understanding that has no room for over-sentimentality. The monstrously underused Deshpande is especially moving. Why is mainstream Hindi cinema so blind to real talent when it is staring right into their face.

The other big OTT event of the month, on Prime Video, was Cinema Marte Dak Tak, an affectionate respectful look-see at the pulp Hindi cinema of the 1990s, Series creators Vasan Bala and Samira Kanwar, writer Rigved Siriah, and directors Disha Rindani, Xulfee and Kulish Kant Thakur evidently have a huge amount of respect for the cheesy cinema targeted at rickshaw-wallahs, hawkers and the likes who knew exactly at what time the heroine would begin to take off her clothes and run across the beach with a seriously heaving bosom. They would enter the theatre precisely at the moment when the sexy parts(often added illegally) began and leave when they ended.

The series doesn’t allow us to feel sorry for the technicians and actors who were part of this sleazy caucus, as THEY never feel sorry for themselves. In fact the actors, directors and other architects of this kinky joyland speak of their commitment as though they were all great film artistes making Gunda and Angoor instead of Sholay and Naseeb because, well, they didn’t have the budget. What makes the series stand out is the bedrock of dignity it confers on the pulp directors. We would think the series was spoofing the architects of perverse entertainment. If we didn’t know that these directors were taken so seriously, we would think their solemn pronouncements on their revolutionary cinema was a joke.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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