Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015)

Bajrangi Bhaijaan arrives with the solemn weight of a national hug, a 2015 Hindi blockbuster in which a devout Hanuman devotee escorts a mute Pakistani girl home across a border that has no interest in being crossed. The film's moral engine is religious tolerance, and it runs hot. A conservative Hindu host recoils when the child's Muslim identity surfaces, then a cricket match finishes the job. The movie treats this small betrayal as the central wound of the subcontinent and spends two and a half hours stitching it. The sentiment is genuine, the manipulation is expert, and the result plays like a sermon delivered by someone who knows exactly when the audience will cry.

That said, this is a commercial crowd-pleaser, not a manifesto. The progressive content is confined to one axis: Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. On every other front the film is content to be a 1980s melodrama with better production values. The female characters exist to support the hero's journey and nothing more. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no critique of wealth, no interest in bodies or brains that deviate from the norm. The girl's muteness is a device for generating third-act tears, not a study of disability. The rich trafficker gets punched, which is not the same as an economic argument.

The film does possess a sincere, occasionally clumsy faith in cross-border decency, and it earns that faith honestly. Whether such decency constitutes a political program or merely a very effective box office strategy is a question the film declines to answer. It prefers to let the border fence do the talking, and the fence, as ever, says nothing.