Like many of my favourites this year (and every year), this re-telling of one of South Asia’s most important romances wants to know what love is. It’s about how something as innocuous as a tube of rolled up tobacco hanging out of your mouth can act as a fragile crutch for the entire weight of the world.
It isn’t about that horrible sooty smell at the end of your fingers, or yellowing teeth or a decreased sperm count. And while this is a film with a main character who wants to quit smoking, it isn’t about cancer. During my time in India this year, nothing brought more joy than an ice burst and cutting tea at the side of the road, perching on the side of the pavement and watching life carry on around you. It’s a story about the nature of habit (rather than the disease of ‘addiction’), of locating the source of your personality, your soul, and trying to change it against the will of nature. I’ve seen this film being described as an “anti-smoking movie.” I couldn’t disagree more. While the most interesting mainstream movies from South Asia over previous years on this blog have excelled when they chose to experiment with the language of cinema itself, the 10 I’ve written about here have, similar to great literature, embraced pain, longing, love and everything else that comes with being alive. 2018 in the movies mirrored my own life a lot the films on the list are films to love, make you feel something human, and they force you to take their characters and hold them close to your chest as if they were your own.
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