A Trip through Trauma

A Real Pain | Director:Jesse Eisenberg | Cast: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg

A TRIP THROUGH POLAND'S holo­caust monuments as a metaphor for contemporary trauma? Ah, where have we seen that before? In Nitesh Tiwari's mind-bogglingly awful Bawaal (2023) which took itself so seriously that it became a joke. Actor-director Jesse Eisenberg does the opposite, he takes a cataclysmic historical incident and renders it with such a light touch that it is a delight without dishonouring its core mate­rial, which revolves around two cousins taking a trip to Poland to visit the camps where their relatives were gassed to death. They do this as a tribute to their late grandmother who leaves them a little money to look up their history. The boys couldn't be more dif­ferent. Eisenberg is David, tightly wound up, a responsible adult married to Priya and father to a boy named Abe. Kieran Culkin, carrying Roman Roy of Succession within him, is Benji, the loose-limbed, loose-tongued young man who has chosen to waste his life on drugs. His cousin feels for him, even as Kieran's dis­ruptive presence hurts and heals his fellow tour members, who are led by a very serious Englishman, played by Will Sharpe. The horror of the camps is never overwhelming but neither is it diminished. We enjoy our freedoms because those before us suffered for them. In another life, we could have been here, says Kieran, looking at the people around him in a park in Warsaw. For anyone who has been denied a homeland, even the idea of it, A Real Pain is well, painful.

Streaming Smart

The Tangled Web We Weave

Paatal Lok: Season Two | Director: Avinash Arun Dhaware
Cast: Jaideep Ahlawat, Ishwak Singh | Hindi | Prime Video

I am a permanent resident of Paatal Lok," says Hathi Ram Chaudhary as he returns for Season 2 of Paatal Lok after four years. The wistfulness of blunted ambi­tion, the genetic predisposition to honesty, hard work, and the humanity to admit mistakes, Chaudhary's character, played with rough gentility, is a gift to us from the comforting, lum­bering presence of its creator Jaideep Ahlawat. In his pain, we wash away our tears and in his suffering, we see ours. The permanent underling of Outer Jamuna Paar reunites with Ansari (Ishwak Singh, whose ability to embody sadness is remarkable) to crack open a case that connects a decapita­tion in Nagaland House in Delhi to the drug trade in Kohima. Women who pay for the sins of their men, sons who want to wreak vengeance on their cor­rupt fathers, and lost girls who keep returning to embrace their demons. Paatal Lok: Season 2 is a triumph of powerful storytell­ing. Keep a few hours aside and watch it in one go. It will haunt you, move you, and leave you in tears. Watch the brilliant cast of Season 1 return, weary but up for the challenge, along with a pitch-perfect Tillotama Shome, and some cheeky cameos by directors Nagesh Kukunoor and Jahnu Barua.