#1. The MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023
Our inaugural issue covers the films we caught at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023
As a consequence of being at a film festival, it was but natural for our writers to rub shoulders with some of the artists whose work is written about in this issue. However, any acquaintance thus formed has no bearing on the opinion of the writer in question or on that of the group.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Cut, and Print!, which delves into the diverse voices showcased at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023, primarily focussing on the South Asian Competition films, which explored stories from varied lands, tackling themes like migration, identity, and culture. The newsletter also features a couple of non-competition films from the Festival which writers caught up with at their leisure.
1. Against the Tide (d. Sarvnik Kaur)
Prakhar Patidar
The Koli community of fishermen in Maharashtra, illustrated in the very first scene of Sarvnik Kaur’s second documentary feature, welcomes a newborn with a prayer to the sea, as an elder woman of the house massages into its limbs the strength that is needed for a life against the tide.
Placed at a low angle, the camera shows her tossing the supine baby in the air, up and down, evoking the waves that’ll mark its life. Of all things, it is “movement” – unrestrained sea to forced modernity – that is what stays with one in this intimate experience of the sea placed under the undeniable context of humankind’s relationship with nature.
We follow two friends who grew up in the same tradition but took diverging paths. Rakesh, father to an ailing newborn, living a hand-to-mouth life, struggles to abandon the age-old Koli practice of respectful symbiosis with the sea – put on a brave face, take what the sea gives you, give back what you don’t need. Early on we see him catch and return a big fish: keeping it for “wants” is not the Koli way. His friend Ganesh, a seventh-generation fisherman from a well-off family, trades it for selective modernity to fuel his failing business and that has made all the difference.
This is a risky job, whether you wait on a small boat in shallow waters for the fish or follow them into the tide in big motor boats with a crew, both sequences skillfully used by DOP Ashok Meena to construct powerful visuals, an implicit reminder of the power of nature: it is coming for us as it has for these two fishermen on the opposite ends of a Snowpiercer headed towards climate change. Igor Vasilev Novogradska's haunting use of the Koli shanty A Koli Knows No Fear coupled with Monica Bose's use of roars of water and the noise of men on boats invading the calm underwaters reiterates the philosophy that functions at the core of Koli beliefs – the sea is not to be antagonised but met with bravery, not to be feared but respected.
This forms the main conflict in their friendship – tradition versus modernity. What is the sea supposed to mean in this tryst? What is nature supposed to mean in an Anthropocene epoch? The use of LEDs for fishing sits at the centre of the conflict and the climactic top of the film. Scavenging deep waters with the aid of LEDs as practised proudly by Ganesh directly impacts the livelihood of fishermen like Rakesh. We see Ganesh’s wide red net bleed into the LED-lit emerald sea in an absolutely immersive sequence, juxtaposed with Rakesh’s solitary, barely successful mission in a grim storm. An expository scene earlier showed Ganesh’s car saying “Last Fisherman of Bombay” and cut to hoards of men from his community at the shore gearing up for the day. He isn’t the last, yet, but to be the last one standing, LED seems to be a must. This regularly comes up in his discussions with Rakesh, often over drinks. Swinging between opulence and restraint, these discussions are overpowered by Ganesh’s clarity of what he wants and his unwillingness to address it means indirectly taking it from Rakesh.
Interactions amongst characters are important to this style and in attempts to craft an engaging narrative, the film treats its subjects as untrained actors or perhaps it is the presence of a camera that brings out the effect – ranging from Rakesh and his family appearing as mere subjects, Ganesh with the awareness he is being seen as “somebody”, to an unbothered and uninterested Manali (Ganesh’s wife). The film marries verité with the cinematic; intimate in its observation of its subjects and expressive in presenting the world they inhabit, establishing itself as a commendable docu-drama.
2. Agra (d. Kanu Behl)
Vanij Choksi
At Cannes in 1960, famed Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni decreed man’s preoccupation with eroticism as an ill responsible for our collective woes. ‘This preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy –,’ he says, ‘that is if it were kept in human proportions.’ Eros is sick, man is uneasy. Agra co-writer-director Kanu Behl seems to agree, turning the lens of his camera on these excessive erotic impulses, picking up where Antonioni supposedly left off but drops it not nearly as eloquently as the master whose ideology I suspect he draws from.
Guru, a twenty-four-year-old sexually frustrated and repressed man, lives in his father’s two-storied home along with his mother and father’s mistress. The house is crammed with two bedrooms on the bottom level, one on top, capped with a half terrace whose usage is a matter of dispute amongst the entire family. Guru wants to construct a room for himself while his mum wishes to accommodate a clinic for her niece Chhavi, who is a dentist. Guru’s sexual repression borders on the predatory, he follows women, dreams up sexual encounters with women he sees on the metro, and even forces himself on his cousin. There is a scene where his mum questions her son’s mental makeup, convincing herself that its architect is his father’s longstanding affair. How does one help Guru when they don’t know any better? In the midst of all this, Guru has a girlfriend from work, Maya. He’s in love. He wants to marry her. He wants to construct the room on the terrace for both of them. He’s ready to drink bleach if his family resists their union. In a series of excruciatingly drawn-out scenes, we come to know that Maya was nothing but a figment of his imagination, a concocted balm to soothe his fragmented mind. Classic.
If it's not apparent by this description already, Agra is as fragmented a narrative as its unlikeable protagonist for whom it strives to win our sympathy. It raises its arguments in appreciable metaphorical form within the first twenty minutes, although, from here on in, the filmmakers quite infuriatingly jettison any thematic set-up in favour of cinematic and narrative beats that seem contrived and utterly out of place. Its frequent skips through its beats are presented as eloquently as a medley of un-tuned instruments played by an amateur orchestra. There is the set up of this whole mental illness angle with its schizophrenia plot point that the film suddenly turns a blind eye toward, characters whose purpose is evidently to swerve the film to some semblance of an ending are introduced about two-thirds into the film, and scenes play out for ill-intentioned and painfully long periods of time. Then come the explicitly nude and filmically glorified sex scenes. Guru somehow manages to get with an internet café owner, Priti, whom he followed in the film's early scenes. They frequently have sex in the backroom of the café and decide to get married. The very “make-it-look-real” aesthetic taken to these scenes sensationalises the act so much so that one’s left thinking, ‘Gosh, are they actually doing it?’
If one felt that the film hadn’t been cramped with too many blatantly digressive plot lines, allow me to replace that notion – the plot thickens, only one’s more infuriated by it as opposed to hooked. In a very convenient effort to outline Guru’s transformation after finding love in his life, we have an extended negotiation sequence with a builder. The family wishes to reconstruct their house to accommodate their growing clan. Suddenly, Guru is now a master negotiator, he has composure, he’s steady. Is sex the catalyst for this sudden transformation in spirit, temperament, and business acumen? The sequence with the builder is broken down into three excruciatingly long dialogue scenes. They are bland, slow, laborious, and although detail a growth in character they remain un-reflected in the images, shot with the same sensibilities as Guru’s unhinged days. As they play along, it becomes utterly noticeable that this sequence is unnecessary, and the filmmakers are overstaying their welcome. These qualities work only to make these scenes even more singular and monotonous than they already were.
It feels like Agra aspired to be something apart from the room it made for itself by a very promising and visually intriguing start. Ascribing way too many sensibilities to its lead only works to its detriment. Disappointing when certain beats that the film peculiarly ignores could have been its saviour. A lost opportunity, I’d stick with Antonioni when it comes to tales of outbursts of erotic uneasiness.
3. Bahadur – The Brave (d. Diwa Shah)
Mahika Kandalgaonkar
A little kid sits by the riverbank, throwing pebbles into the tranquil waters that kiss his homeland on the opposite shore. With childlike innocence, he looks at The Braveheart sitting behind him and expresses his desire to jump into the pristine waterbody that would effortlessly take him home. The Braveheart is amused. How foolish would it be to flow with that thought when the bridge that lies not far away could conveniently take them to where they belong?
But the heart wants what it wants. It wants to wander to an eccentric individual that The Braveheart calls his home, the one named Hansi but summoned as Bahadur (The Brave) by the characters of Nainital. Bahadur is one of the few Nepalese that keeps the town running, even amid the pandemic. Bahadur has a family, but what he needs is money. As the story unfolds, we realize that no amount of money shall make this migrant worker return home. Perhaps this no-man-lander prefers it that way. Writer-Director Diwa Shah seals the fate of her hero’s journey by introducing him as a street-smart bloke bargaining his way to his hard-earned money, only to lose it to a cop for failing to follow the mask mandate. The oh-so-naive Bahadur, with his silly-silly demeanour, shall sail the viewers through his exploration, making us wonder about the dynamics this static character has to offer to this sublime story.
Everyone knows Bahadur but not everyone understands him the way his brother-in-law Dil Bahadur (The Braveheart) does. The Braveheart precisely understands his childlike demeanour and seamlessly engages with the man-child's playfulness. The filmmaker impressively captures the chemistry between “The Brave” and “The Braveheart” in a series of still frames. However, as a viewer, I feel left in the dark because I am not made aware of the significance that these static shots hold. The film demands viewers to be proficient at dissecting the premise of the narrative before the director boldly highlights it at the end of a cathartic moment. It appears that the limelight of the plot is not necessarily the plot’s interest.
We realize that Hansi was built up as a mere caricature with the responsibility of stimulating our senses thrust upon him, thereby taking us away from the gravity of the foreshadowed plot. And just like us and The Braveheart, the director was captivated by the concept of Hansi, who was supposed to highlight a significant message; however it failed to fulfil its purpose of spotlighting The Braveheart’s journey, which I felt deserved prominence over another. I would love to reason that the director perhaps tried to play with the notion that society itself has manufactured its own Hansi that enchants their attention away from important matters, much like the movie’s treatment of its central theme.
During the film’s final moment as Hansi sits steady showing a glimpse of grief in his otherwise expressionless eyes, likely contemplating his role towards the vitality of the tale, we are left to wonder after witnessing an unclear chronicle that just like Hansi not far away, the bridge that could’ve been used to tell the bravest tale of the Braves somehow sits perfectly stagnant.
4. Barir Naam Shahana (d. Leesa Gazi)
Aadhya Kancharla
In South Asian societies, the vines of patriarchy creep their way into our homes as well – the idea of a home being a private space where women are allowed to just be themselves is foreign to many of us. Land and homes are not typically viewed as possessions women must have, privacy is a privilege, and staying in our own homes often feels conditional – either we abide by the norms of the patriarch, or we are expected to make it on our own without any familial support. In Barir Naam Shahana, this reality is explored through a tale that seems familiar, yet has a fresh voice. ‘Once they leave this house, they leave for life,’ the protagonist Dipa (Aanon Siddiqua) tells her father. Leaving this space of protection is seen as leaving the four walls of his prescribed rules, an act of defiance.
The director Leesa Gazi presents us with a story of femininity and friendship that, despite being set in rural Bangladesh, feels extremely modern. Based on real events, the story revolves around Dipa, who is forced to marry an old widower in the UK by her controlling uncle who has stepped into the shoes of her weak-minded father as the patriarch of the family. The introductory scenes of the film depict the societal response to Dipa’s decision to get divorced from her husband – even in her private space, a woman will be constantly watched over. Ignoring the men who stare at her and bump into her with malignant purpose, she runs in joy back into her room – it might not be her own completely but today is her “Independence Day”, and it is a much better space for her than the cold prison of her marital home.
Through flashbacks that feel like jarring cuts in an otherwise impactful storyline, one can feel the suffocation that Dipa felt in being married to someone who might not have been evil at heart but conducted everything in such a ritualistic manner that there was no scope of feeling like she belonged there. She is silent through all the conversations her husband has with her, and it is only when she looks in the mirror in her room (mirrors are a common motif for self-expression used throughout the film) that we see any glimpse of her true feelings. ‘Without shame, there is no faith,’ her husband tells her. It is perhaps in defiance of this that she wears a burkha after her divorce, even though she never chose to wear one before. ‘Even with a burkha, I am not free,’ she remarks in a later scene – ultimately, a divorcee, even if she is a devout doctor, is a blot on her family’s reputation.
There is no direct violence depicted in the film, every act of violation of her consent is hidden behind closed doors. The film truly gives her a space to show the viewer her own reactions to her circumstances, and I only wish the lead actress had taken better advantage of this. Her over-the-top expressions and attempt to communicate independence and Dipa’s personality through her behaviour around the people she loves, Jholekha the house help in particular, comes across as playing into the narrative of a “hysterical woman”. Another gripe I had with the scattered storytelling was the need to depict male characters who form part of Dipa’s support system. In my opinion, they break us away from the underlying theme of the lack of spaces for women and it appears as if the director attempted to achieve too much with this one film.
Ultimately, this film was an important one to make and I enjoyed the complexities the director examined – from no one in the family realising the house they lived in was indeed in Dipa’s late mother’s name because of her uncle controlling every aspect of their occupation of the house, to Pori’s storyline with Dipa ultimately bringing her into the space she has carved for herself. The use of music in the film is also particularly beautiful and tastefully done – ‘I find the shehnai terrible,’ Dipa says, as to her the shehnai indicates sorrow and the end of her freedom. From the song Jholekha sings about her love for her husband, to the song of a woman being surrounded by water that plays during the beautiful shot at the end, the music of this film carries a lot of the weight of sending the message across to the audience – perhaps because of the backgrounds of the director and the lead actress-cum-writer, in theatre and classical dance respectively. When the caged bird sings, one usually listens in awe but unfortunately in this case, it failed to make a lasting impact.
5. Dilli Dark (d. Dibakar Das Roy)
Prakhar Patidar
The thing that works most for Dilli Dark is the title. This is a film that keeps us in the dark because it doesn’t know what it is doing. A less critical reading would be it simulates the chaos it is about – when a Nigerian man, played by Samuel Abiola Robinson who seems as awkward on camera as his character feels in Dilli, and a coked-up godwoman, Ma/Mansi, played by the usually-convincing Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, cross paths, things as absurd as an original school play by kids who’ve watched too much YouTube happens.
Dibakar Das Roy’s Dilli Dark presents the city through the eyes of Michael Okeke, a Nigerian immigrant who’s stayed in India for six years and is pursuing an MBA in hopes of a job that’ll give him acceptance, dignity and a place in this city that ‘to Nigerians is what New York is to Indians.’ Could it be that everything in the film is on the nose because the racism Michael experiences every day isn’t layered in naive ignorance of one not knowing better but direct, commonplace and rigorous? He gets “kallu” hurled at him by almost everyone he meets. He has to pay higher rent. He prefers the night because it embraces him, and says it hides the parts he is ashamed of. Ironically he has to resort to the exact racist stereotype that irks him – a black man who sells drugs (but to finance his education). Akin to what they say about Dilli (dilwalon ki), the film has its heart in the right place. However, true to what Delhi is – ‘Yahaan kuch be hona gaali hai’ (‘Here being anything is a cuss word’) as described by Shantanu Anam’s Debu, Michael’s neighbour and the food-loving, high-on-vibes guide to this messy maze of a city, the film too is an incoherent mess.
Eager and earnest in its effort to tackle a very real and serious issue like racism, the film adopts slapstick, absurdist humour that is sometimes genuinely funny. It draws on conventions of the genre – confused characters pushed around wherever the barely-sensical plot takes them, laughter cues when humour is attempted, and a narrator to tie the threads together. Okeke, constantly confused with “ok ok”, ends up in a series of situations that are waiting to be turned into a lesson on racism. For example, when he is accused of eating human meat, Debu the food lover (remember?), takes his side by not only identifying the meat dish in question but also where it was ordered from. Using this momentary hierarchy created by food-related deduction, he denounces the ignorance that deems all Africans as “Habshi”. The same is repeated at a party when Michael is identified as Kevin the peddler by one of his cocaine clients. The supposed humour is in the irony that he really does deal drugs. And then again, in the most conveniently placed set-up for a political statement because – what use is satire if it isn’t political? Here, Michael’s dissent for Diwali crackers is misinterpreted as insulting Indian culture leading to a grossly racial altercation, resolved by yet another lesson on racism. At the beginning of the film, Michael narrates how Delhi is built in circles rendering the feeling of reaching nowhere when one walks its roads. The film’s form not only adopts but recreates the sentiment.
The Diwali incident also leads to Michael being cast as Raavan in the annual play at Ma’s ashram. Why is the Dussehra play happening after Diwali? Why is there a subplot of Ma conning rich women who long for motherhood? What happened to the soliloquies on alienation and a promise of dark humour? At this point, it is useless to ask questions. One important question does remain: Dilli Dark was an official selection in MAMI’s South Asian Competition. Perhaps, it’ll join the line of absurdist comedies that were ahead of their time. For now, it is a film that thinks it understands the issue enough to satirise it. In a scene when Debu attempts to make Dilli palatable for Micheal by implying that the city doesn’t spare anyone and offers solidarity, proposing India's rampant colourism gives leeway into understanding racism, Michael reverts with a frustrated ‘You don’t get it.’ This holds for the film as well.
6. Guras (d. Saurav Rai)
Sanskar Agarwal
Guras is the name of a beautiful red flower – the Rhododendron – that grows in Darjeeling (where this film is set) and is the national flower of Nepal (directed by Saurav Rai, the film is an Indian-Nepali production). The aptly-named protagonist Guras is a nine-year-old girl who too is the most beautiful thing in these majestic mountains. She bubbles of hope, curiosity and stubborn love as we follow her on her journey across villages where most are weighed down by everyday reality to find her lost dog Tinkle. Guras, instead, is more concerned about stealing the shiny orange growing in her neighbour’s house. When asked in school to read the essay she was supposed to have written, Guras looks into her notebook to see nothing but a badly drawn stick figure; staring at that very page, Guras “reads” out a moving essay about her dog. Yes, I too never thought a nine-year-old girl in an Indian-Nepali film at MAMI would invoke Shah Rukh Khan but here we are – and just like him, Guras lights up every frame she is in.
Perhaps the most beautiful part of the film is that, through KR Subal’s camerawork, we see this world as Guras does: the oranges are unbelievably bright and Tinkle’s fur impeccably shiny (as a dog owner myself, Tinkle made me constantly feel like I was not brushing and bathing my dog enough). We follow Guras through the many tea plantations with the camera at her height: this means the plants surround us entirely and even just going through them feels like an immersive journey.
Rai has very evidently grown up in these mountains and he soaks the film in traditional folklore and culture. There is a recurring dream sequence of a monk praying. Guras’ mother, on the other hand, prays to Jesus, that too in Hindi. Rai hints at the Buddhist-Christian tensions here (an extremely under-explored but very real religious conflict), but just never goes deeper. And so is the case with most other references: ‘I will get you an egg tomorrow, so please be attentive in your dream,’ Guras says to a voice who is talking to her from a grave; in bribing him with an egg, Guras hopes that when the voice dreams tonight, he will be able to recall his vision of where Tinkle is. Guras gives him an egg but nothing comes of it. Her best friend whom she goes on every adventure with randomly stops appearing after a point. There is a long buildup of a neighbour having stolen the dog, but that too is simply dismissed. Rai is trying to fit in so many things about his hometown that by the end of it, it is hard to tell what Guras is really about. This is a magical valley where everything eventually disappears, including the coherence in the screenplay. By the end, all I was left with was a loss of hope. The only meaning I could derive from most sequences was that they were designed as a reality check to Guras. Would I want to see a Shah Rukh Khan romance where he does not win the girl’s heart in the end? Perhaps. Would you?
7. Kayo Kayo Colour? (d. Shahrukhkhan Chavada)
Prakhar Patidar
Shahrukhkan Chavada’s Kayo Kayo Colour? (Which Colour?) feels like it is a deeply autobiographical but fictional tale of marginalised lives at the intersection of poverty, religion, and gender without ever holding a placard that it is making a socio-political comment. These realities flow as undercurrents, fleeing what is said, never too apparent but always impacting the lives of those on the screen.
The film is yet another day in the life of a lower-income Muslim family living in a contained locality, almost cut off from the rest of the city, reflected through Chavada’s impressive sensibilities as a debut director and cinematographer. We never leave the area, the story never leaves its focus, and the frame never falters, succeeding in conveying the restricted reality that Razzak and his family belong to. He is an unemployed man on the verge of finalising a suitable deal for a 2014 model auto-rickshaw to earn a living on his own terms. His wife has grown impatient with the dearth of money and wishes to lean into the lure of MLM schemes. In a scene where she discusses the ever-increasing cost of everyday survival with a neighbour, their conjectures on the exorbitant daily expenditures of the Ambani family become cheekily ironic in a festival sponsored by the very family. Their children, Ruba and Faiz, live the days as their reality dictates – they go to the nearby madrasa in the morning, practice lessons and lean into adulthood via the make-believe reality of games. In a particularly memorable frame, Chavada finds a way to present the gendered spaces, placing domesticity and worldliness inculcated through the games we grow up playing, in opposite corners of the screen, provoking thoughts on the nature versus nurture gender debate. While the form makes you think, the content invites you in. In this niche, carved further in an already boxed space, borrowing its name from a game played here, Kayo Kayo Colour? breathes. Its levity, found through the organic flow of conversation between the children on screen, the welcomed out-of-placeness of the camera as the only abnormal element to the otherwise regular day, intensifies the fact that on the margins, “regular” is a flimsy thing. It can shift and change in the duration of a short power cut.
Ruba, the older one and a daughter, contributes to small household chores, some involving a walk to the grocery store. Her walks are captured through sequencing lively stills she enters and leaves. It is here a canned soft drink appeals to her and begins her quest to arrange a hundred-rupee-note to taste it – paralleled with her father’s quest to buy the auto. Later in the film, when seemingly nothing has happened but much has changed, marked by a beguiling power-cut scene and a clever switch of aspect ratio, the walk to the same store seems longer, the drink seems out of reach, so does the auto. Ruba and Razzak both are distanced a little farther into the margins. The sacred tenet of writing – “show, don’t tell” – holds for films too. Chavada calls a film Kayo Kayo Colour?, shows it to you in black and white and impressively succeeds in exploring the communal connotations of the colours orange and green.
The stilled and durational approach, as often seen in documentaries with a realist gaze, when translated to fiction, becomes a slippery slope. In the former, the knowledge that despite all, it is a version of the real that is being captured, curbs the demand for polished conversational narrative. However, when a film like Kayo Kayo Colour? relies on conversational narrative, the mere knowledge that it is fiction, despite strong autobiographical tones, demands an acute formal sensibility of turning non-actor presence and semi-scripted dialogues into an engaging narrative. One could say the film threatens to falter in its ability to engage you with its awkward, repetitive verbosity but rarely does. Chavada is too aware of the limitations of the style and confident in his capacity to play with the form. His refreshing composition of frames, equally nuanced understanding of his characters' socio-political context and its impact on everyday life restores your faith in the film before any doubt takes root.
(Shahrukhkhan Chavada’s Kayo Kayo Colour? was awarded the Rashid Irani Young Critics Choice Award at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023)
8. Mithya (d. Sumanth Bhatt)
Sanskar Agarwal
The most arresting portrait in Mithya is its very first: a young boy looks out into the mountains from the open door of a speeding train. A dragonfly comes and sits on his shoulder. The moment is magical, expansive, dangerous, and when his aunt suddenly breaks it by scolding him to come in, we realise also just how fragile.
Mithya is the story of Mithun, an eleven-year-old boy who has just lost his parents and is having to move from Mumbai to Udupi with his mother’s sister and her husband. For a generation like mine that has grown up with Udaan carved in our memories, the fact that his new guardians are the most loving people he could’ve found is so refreshing. But we soon realise that for Mithun, “refreshing” isn’t enough. He has just seen his mother hang herself after being accused of poisoning his father. There’s more churning inside him than most could ever imagine. And through all of this, he’s dealing with new bullies, his father’s relatives trying to kidnap him (there is a Mumbai apartment at stake), and a growing internal hatred towards his younger sister Vandhana (things between his parents only went downhill after she entered their lives, he says). ‘Pinky pinky fonky, father had a donkey. Donkey died, father died, pinky pinky fonky,’ Vandhana sings along by mistake. It’s innocent, it’s sweet, and it’s also really really scary.
His first breath of fresh air comes in the form of Kishan, a slightly older neighbourhood kid. Cue the swimming in monsoon, eating fryums on fingers, watching dirty videos through a magnifying glass; and, of course, bicycle races. Well, bicycles and freedom go together in kids’ movies even more than adopted children and tears. And yet, when Udit Khurana, the film’s cinematographer, held his camera up close on a bicycling Mithun, I too felt a rush of fresh air. In fact, Khurana’s camera almost always stays with Mithun, either looking at him or following him from right behind, Mithun’s head occupying almost a third of the frame. Thus, Khurana and Sumanth Bhat, the film’s director, ensure we stay with Mithun as he starts treading in murkier territory.
Mithya, put simply, is a study of children’s minds: of how sponge-like they are, of how easily you can win them over and of how easily you can destroy them. It is a study of the origins of damaged individuals: while of course, I found myself fiercely advocating for Mithun against the world, I also found myself yelling at him for the decisions he took. At one point, all it took was for him to pick up a screwdriver for me to scream at him in fear. Mithya is also a study on how hard it is for us to talk about our pain. My mom’s younger cousins were adopted by her father when their parents died in a car crash. I only found out about this at the age of sixteen; I visited my nanu and nani every summer and knew they weren’t my mama’s real parents – he called them uncle and auntie, just like Mithun does. Yet, I never found the courage to ask why; and perhaps none of the adults found the courage to tell me why. Mithun’s uncle and auntie too spend most of the film only able to talk about what happened behind Mithun’s back. But I understand why it’s hard to talk to kids about things that hurt them; because when his uncle finally does ask Mithun, he is met with the response ‘If my mother was a good person, then why did she leave me?’
Despite all my points of connection, Mithya does have moments where it is hard to stay invested. Where the screenplay sags and there is never-ending sadness in repetitive circles. A lot of the story’s beats are ones we have seen before – the beats are personal but not necessarily unique or new. And yet, where the film ultimately triumphs is in its choice to make this a story one of humanity and hope in this world full of pain, loss, and dirt. Udaan positions the boy’s father as the villain in a story of an abandoned boy’s coming of age. Mithya, within the same framework, instead searches for where that villain resides inside us.
9. The Monk and the Gun (d. Pawo Choyning Dorji)
Aadhya Kancharla
‘One cannot see one’s own eyelashes because it’s too close to yourself,’ is a Bhutanese saying quoted by Pawo Choyning Dorji in an interview about his directorial debut Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019), in reference to the curiosity of Bhutanese people about a life beyond Bhutan. They could not appreciate their culture in the same manner as outsiders view the Himalayan kingdom, and he stated that it is ironic that as a poor, underdeveloped country, it is viewed as the “Happiest Nation” when the locals seek happiness in the world outside. It is an interesting decision that the central theme in Dorji’s second film, The Monk and The Gun, is that of a return to traditionalism and a rejection of Western ideals by villagers in Bhutan and presents an antithesis to the capitalistic society that is probably sought out by the urban population.
The opening shot of the film sets the tone for its visual imagery, beautiful expansive wheat fields, promoting the idea of Heaven on Earth. A melodic flute tune coupled with the clear blue sky evokes a sense of peace in the viewer – why would anyone choose a different way of life? The film is centred around the idea that the Buddhist way of living is ingrained in the Bhutanese, even when modernisation has allowed them to purchase satellite televisions, they bless the television sets with water before using them, they believe in karmic debts and “merits” from doing good deeds. Against this backdrop, in a country that uses Happiness as a tool to measure the efficacy of national policies, the bell of democratic elections tolls. Tshomo (Dekhi Lhamo) is to assist Tshering Yangden (Pema Zangmo Sherpa), the Election Officer, in conducting mock elections in the village of Ura in the “World’s Youngest Democracy”. ‘Why do people need to be taught how to vote?’ asks Ron Colman (Harry Einhorn), the caricature of an ignorant gun-loving American who is baffled by the simplicity of the Bhutanese, mistaking their innocence for ignorance. In a country where the teachings of the Buddha precede the law, their only understanding of the need for elections is that ‘to be democratic is to be modern.’ ‘We are indeed a modern country now!’ exclaims Tshomo's husband as he finds the state television channel on his newly installed set. Apart from their love for the now-accessible Bond movies, the locals cannot understand why the government would want to introduce discord in their tightly-knit community.
‘Tashi, I need guns,’ are the first words we hear from the Lama upon hearing of the local mock elections on his radio. Why would a monk break himself out of his meditation and ask for a gun? The villagers may dismiss this as yet another strange occurrence in these strange new times, but the filmmaker keeps the audience on tenterhooks with this question. We assume that since he is conservative, his indication to ‘make things right again’ by the Full Moon is a sign of an onslaught of violence. Could the devotion to the King of Bhutan (they have pictures of him in every house in Bhutan), to the point where voting against the candidate representing traditional values equals being a traitor, be so blind? As we see Tashi carry the gun across his shoulders Baahubali-style, with the confidence of a civil war general, and then treat the gun like a child treats their favourite Barbie, we wonder if he is aware of what we think the monk’s intentions are. However, there is gentle humour in every element of the film, even the haggling between the Bhutanese farmer and the American is adorable as the American struggles to understand the lack of importance accorded to money. Desire causes sadness and this film, just like the Bhutanese way of life, is a counterbalance to sadness. The filmmaker breaks the tension of the audience’s understanding of the monk’s intentions in an absurdist manner that is true to the celebration of Bhutanese innocence that the film is. It is the most delightful red herring, and one could feel the childlike joy surge through the theatre. This film evoked constant laughs from the audience, for a moment it felt like the filmmaker had given us a taste of living in the happiest country in the world.
Satirical comedy, when pulled off well, does more in terms of evoking a reaction from the audience than serious films that are more in-your-face with their political messaging and in my opinion, The Monk and the Gun succeeds at spreading an anti-gun sentiment than a lot of coalitions for gun control. Through its mimicry of the American fondness for guns (‘There are more guns than people in America’) and a depiction of the unity between the police forces and Bhutanese people that would make the writers of Monty Python proud, this film acts as a push back to the Western perception of mountain people and turns into a celebration of Bhutanese innocence. Despite having a smoking gun (pun intended), the film starts where it begins, with Tashi carrying a gas cylinder through a field of flowers, now pink to depict the unwavering simplicity of the Bhutanese in the face of change.
The self-awareness of the film because of and despite its humour, akin to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, is evident not just through exaggerated symbolism but through the villagers’ changing relationship with their religion – Tshomo explains the concept of “merits” to the American and self reflects on the reality that no one actually sticks to Buddha’s philosophy anymore.
‘Phalluses bring us closer to enlightenment,’ Tshomo tells the bewildered American as he is gifted a giant red model of a phallus by the Lama. Cheers burst through the theatre. We really are all simple beings at heart.
(This piece was originally published as “The Old Monk and the Gun” on the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival website)
10. The Red Suitcase (d. Fidel Devkota)
Avi Mandavia
Fidel Devkota’s The Red Suitcase opens with an audio of a phone conversation, interspersed with diegetic nocturnal sounds seizing a blank screen. It carries the voice of a lonely young mother requesting her immigrant husband – Dhan Bahadur – to come home to Nepal to see their newborn daughter and her. The ashamed silence of the husband eventually leads to them deciding their daughter’s name on the call before he ends it abruptly. We sense that this helplessness has crossed the line as this visually deprived scene, the only earthly part of the movie, gives way to Devkota’s aggravated response. The response is an ethereal and fantasy-like film about the functional tragedies of Nepal.
This ethereal film opens with a long shot of the unnamed protagonist – a delivery man, smoking on a bridge near the airport, where the sounds of the road amplify the oddness of his isolation. The sound design goes on to highlight the silence of his alienation throughout the film. B. Bishowkarma equips an awkward body language to play the man, embodying his detachment from Nepal’s surroundings. Later, we follow him wading through the grimly-coloured Nepalese landscapes.
The film mainly comprises long shots, which let me experience the mundanity of the protagonist’s life vicariously. This mundanity mingles with distrust in scenes where he hesitates to accept aid from locals. His struggle to reside in Nepal is shared by a war veteran, who prefers to have died in Jammu and Kashmir than live his doomed life in Nepal due to the country’s administrative apathy. The framing of their conversations, where the protagonist is positioned a little towards the centre of the frame and the veteran is shoved towards the corner of the frame reflects their magnitude of hopes for the country’s future. But, the subtext quickly gets undone by the heavy-expository dialogues, where they spell out these thoughts.
While the residents struggle to reside in Nepal, the immigrants too, are anguished by the detachment and deprival of their culture, family and love, which we see throughout the film as Dhan Bahadur trudges through the Nepalese terrain wheeling his red suitcase. Dhan’s utter hopelessness is portrayed beautifully by his shadow-bathed face when he reaches home. Also, the otherworldly imagery is flushed with pale blue hues when Dhan shares an intimate moment with his wife, as yellow oozes out in the frame, similar to their desperation for love. One might attribute Dhan’s absence and their daughter growing up suddenly in the very next scene to the horror elements of the film, but it feels more like the crystallisation of the irregularities and uncertainties of immigrant lives.
While The Red Suitcase isn’t designed as a film meant to move you emotionally, the languid pace makes the longevity and mundanity of sorrow palpable. All of which makes me wonder if this evoked feeling inside me would persist as long as the portrayed despair of these lives.
11. Rimdogittanga (d. Dominic Sangma)
Avi Mandavia
The camera snakes slowly to capture clusters of villagers hunting for cicadas, their fire torches constantly cutting the darkness covering the Garo forests, in the opening scene of Dominic Sangma’s horror-drama Rimdogittanga. The ambient forest sounds, the slow tracking shots, and the villagers’ careful gait are almost anticipatory of a wild animal lurking in the bushes. But nothing wild occurs as the tension is diffused by an overhead shot of the villagers wading through the forest, transitioning into a layer of dead cicadas spread over the ground in the morning. Similarly, animals coexist with humans visually and sonically throughout the film, where a dog casually intrudes the church premises, and the bird chirps incessantly cue the roaring of the electric saw chopping wood. Clearly, the fearful gait isn’t triggered by any predatory animal, but by something even worse – predatory humans, as revealed later in the film.
The villagers are fearing attacks by “strangers” who seemingly prey on them to use their organs for donation. We observe the onset of the fear majorly in the company of a night-blind kid – Kasan – when a man named Mangkunchi disappears on the night of the cicada hunt. There are numerous instances portraying the fractured togetherness of the villagers like when a group of kids run for their lives, leaving behind the slow ones when the onset of the attack is felt or when the villagers completely ignore the absence of Mangkunchi on the night of his disappearance. They take off to search for them just when the fear recedes, with their slow search sharply contrasting the urgency of their earlier survival instincts.
To dodge the prevalent horrors, they take refuge in the divine by filling the church with the gentle melody of their carols. But even here, the comfort of spirituality is jeopardised by the rise of their blind conformity to the suffocating side of religion propagated by the pastor. The toxic comfort in religion becomes tangible by static shots that observe the devotees not budging from their church seats even on the announcement of the disappearance of a villager. In these parts, even the language of the film seems disapproving of their behaviour as the camera mimics their tendency – it stays transiently with the villagers before going farther away to capture them from a distance. It also looks over the visible urbanised civilisation around the village, yearning for the villagers to break out of their irrational bubble. We begin sensing that the fear emanates not as much from an external predator as much as it does from the villagers’ prejudices and traditions, as so far, we have not witnessed these “strangers” even once, just the fear spreading like wildfire.
But the film goes on to drive this point heavy-handedly when the villagers finally catch hold of a “stranger”. They unanimously decide to bludgeon the person to death even as he begs for mercy. The narrative never built up to such extremities of their behaviour and the act comes across as a lazy and an out-of-place device rather than as a surprise. Similar is the case with Kasan’s dream, in which Mangkunchi spells out to him after he clandestinely watches the bludgeoning that the villagers have been staying in darkness all along. Even Kasan weirdly comes to the point of seemingly burning a creature in a coffin after the fear of death gets to him. Even the pastor confesses to having spread false prophesies among the devotees to his lover, needlessly nudging the viewers on what to make of the film. The film completely abandons its former clever language to replace it with such unearned acts and dialogues. What could have been a slow-burning narrative of the decay of a civilisation, simply becomes an impatient series of events screaming out its themes at us.
But even as the screenplay clearly faltered in subtly putting forth its themes, the film didn’t even succeed as an effective mood piece for me, as the mysterious visuals have no emotions to accentuate. Being burdened with things to say through a difficult form, the film ends up taking a detour into a no man’s land, torn between themes and ambience.
12. Shivamma (d. Jaishankar Aryar)
Vanij Choksi
Anyone with a mobile phone in this world has surely received umpteen faux advertising calls. The creation of the cold-calling industry birthed a unique sense of banter in us all. Some of us lead them on with devilishly false interest, others swiftly cutting them down, but has any one of us ever fallen prey to these assumed conniving schemes? While Shivamma doesn’t share the same premise, the spirit of the film is imbued with its idea.
Shivamma, an enterprising old lady, advocates for some sort of protein shake that supposedly cures whatever the user's ailment is – weight, hair loss, diabetes, you name it. She’s been entirely enamoured by the company's “I will do it” motto and decides to invest ₹ 40000 (a mix of savings, loans, and discretely nicking a couple of bucks from her son’s piggy bank) into a local nutrition club, staunchly advertising the franchise in her village. She has a lot riding on its success: the medical upkeep of her paralysed husband, her daughter’s wedding, and the repayment of countless loans. But who exactly owns this brand? Who are its creators? Is this shake even safe? What are its side effects? Questions left either unanswered or swept away with callous obliviousness, we’re introduced to doctors and businessmen who appear to be spokespersons for two mysterious men who came up with the idea. Is this some sort of pyramid scheme? When the shake is suspected to have caused a villager’s death, Shivamma is excommunicated, placed on trial before the panchayat, while she insists the man’s pre-existing health conditions as the true root cause. This is really bad PR!
Shivamma is everywhere. One can almost call her a driven businesswoman, a guerilla marketeer. She’s as ubiquitous as the sound of her mixer, grinding out shakes for the entire village. Initially, goodwill is on her side. The villagers buy into the shake's eclectic workings. Shivamma’s word is the gospel. Professing innumerable success stories, she grasps the impressionable attention of all village folk; however, what she has probably not comprehended is that she herself is just as impressionable to the fable-like monetary success stories spewed by corporations and men adorned in expensive suits, equipped with charismatic oration.
While the film is rich in idea and observational merits, filmmaker Jaishankar Aryar manages to imbue its visuality with an achingly impoverished sense of slow-cinema durational aesthetics. Its sense of pacing doesn’t particularly lend itself to any concrete meaning, especially when what occurs in the frame comes off in highly robotic tones of conversation. An incessant infatuation with dramatising the un-dramatic is a line toed too languidly, so far that if boredom was intended as a creative prerogative, its result has been mere boredom itself. This tale of discord between one’s determination and one’s environment turns laborious when the function of the image is repeatedly reduced to its duration with little to no relation to the ideological inroads posited by its promising premise.
In the end, although ostracised and blacklisted, the determined sound of Shivamma’s ubiquitous mixer is reprised, echoing its rumbles amidst the clanking and thumping of women washing dishes and clothes. She chose an enterprising path, ill-afforded in thought to all women in the village. The path chosen by this filmmaker, a resourceful and enterprising one in his own right; in this presentation, however, falls prey to the traps of an austere cinematic style.
13. Sthal (d. Jayant Digambar Somalkar)
Varun Oak-Bhakay
Dreams are the very fulcrum of Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal, which even opens with such a scene: the protagonist Savita and her friends interviewing a prospective groom in a room full of women. It’s the film’s best scene, more so because multiple iterations of it appear across the film after Savita has been roused from her dream of being the interviewer and not the interviewee and harsh reality has been established. Somalkar also has sharply in focus the idea of dreams that are more conscious, more purposely thought through, like Savita’s aspiration of becoming a provincial civil servant, her parents’ one-and-only desire of getting her married off, preferably to a teetotaller with a government job, and her plainly obvious daydream of marrying her college professor, with whom she has an “Aankhon Hi Aankhon Mein” classroom romance playing out.
As the narrative of Sthal unfolds, each of these dreams is brought into jeopardy, at times because a family deems Savita too dark-skinned to be their son’s wife, on occasion because her parents cannot afford the quoted dowry, and in one instance when two dreams clash such that only one can be catered to and the other must be done without for a year.
Much of how Somalkar informs the film’s milieu builds credibility around the setting: take an early sequence of a group of men coming to “see” Savita, action which plays out by following these men undertaking the journey on their bikes, their makeshift scarves making them look more like a goon’s men than a groom’s men. The song that plays in the background exhorts the woman to prepare for the guests who are enroute, selling to her the idea of a husband employed by the government and possessing land. Why Somalkar should choose to shoot this brief part of the film on a drone is a mystery, for the style-heavy use of such equipment instantly breaks the film’s contact with the places and the people it is attempting to explore. That Somalkar never again uses the drone, or anything that isn’t on the same physical plane as his characters, makes the whole exercise even more noticeable.
The film’s other noticeable interest is hypocrisy: Savita’s civil service hopes are put down as being of little use since she will ultimately get married, but she does more than her fair share around the house while her brother snores away; when her romantic dreams are shattered, it hurts more because the man who has done the shattering is one who has waxed eloquently great platitudes on women empowerment. This after the romance has been framed in the most progressive of settings, playing out through stolen glances in the classrooms and over the newspaper stand in the library. Somalkar chooses to halt the romance in the same spaces where it flourished. Later still, when Savita’s friend Gauri who is in love with a wastrel lacking her preferred suitor’s education calls the latter out, one feels a great hope for what Sthal might achieve.
Somalkar’s writing works tremendously to undermine the film’s many striking qualities, dragging it to a chequered flag that is all too suddenly painted onto the film’s canvas. In changing the focal character more than halfway through, albeit briefly, and trying to elicit emotions in a style that is too melodramatic in relation to the film’s nature thus far, the film completely derails. Sudden suicide attempts, desperate efforts to solicit matches for Savita, and a general sense of stretching the film past its breaking point derail Sthal’s efforts at telling its story in the manner it wants to.
Which is a pity, because Nandini Chikte is a real livewire as Savita, whose expressiveness is so stifled by the constant badgering she must endure that all she can do is hint at emotions she’s feeling. Chikte makes evident the restraints that have been placed upon her by sniping back occasionally, and then in truly expressing herself by accepting the fait accompli. She vents her anger at the bangles foisted upon her and looks wistfully at the study material that presents a liberation from the life she’s expected to live.
The dreams of the characters in Sthal remain unfulfilled, and so do those that the film itself may have wanted to fulfil. There are just no redemptions once the film commits to a certain arc of the narrative, and it all ends up feeling like a squandered effort, for viewer and filmmaker both.
14. Thadavu (d. Fazil Razak)
Vanij Choksi
In the film's second act, Geetha, having recently lost custody of her daughter, sneaks into her school bearing sweets for the child’s birthday. Finding her in violation of the custody agreement, her ex-husband blatantly and physically confronts Geetha while a herd of student onlookers gather around. He makes no attempt to be discreet in handling the situation, nor does Geetha seek a discreet escape when she spots the man from afar. It is perhaps this disregard for keeping a low profile that not only informs the characters in this scene but also Fazil Razak’s overall presentation of this film about one woman’s relentless struggle to reconcile with almost all occurrences in her guilt-stricken life.
Geetha’s being, as we find, is beset with a silent bearing of tragedy, guilt, and utter frenzy from the very beginning, where we see her in the middle of a bank robbery hostage situation, the robber picking Geetha’s daughter as a human shield. From here on in, she loses custody of her daughter in a messy divorce case, is beaten around by her ex-husband, obscurely enables the unfortunate passing of a child, battles bouts of depression, is diagnosed with a brain tumour, and when she finds out that inmates are granted governmental medical treatment, she hatches a plot to pawn off a stolen gold chain, which eventually backfires. There is no respite, moments of levity are ever so fleeting. Despite her constant worries, Geetha is surrounded by a core group of friends and neighbours who act as her interim family, people who truly care about her, but through happenstance bear the brunt of some tragedy by mere association with her. It’s as if Geetha possesses the opposite of the Midas touch – even the gold chain she steals turns out to be a fake. It feels as much of a tight, inescapable circle of people as a crowded bus, an image the film opens with. Her paths cross with everyone whom she affects and whom she’s affected by to an extent where there is some sense that her being isn’t just beset with hardships but is perhaps even violently cursed with them.
Razak presents this narrative very matter-of-factly, the images sort of speak for themselves, devoid of any impressionism. In a way, one is compelled to perpetually confront Geetha’s suffocating guilt. We too are not allowed a moment of respite. Razak adopts a digressive attitude, swiftly moving on from one occurrence to another. Ruminating on these changing tides in Geetha’s life, we oftentimes don’t revisit moments that are casually mentioned. We learn that Geetha attempted to kill her firstborn Neethu, from a previous marriage, while suffering from bouts of mental illness. Now as a twenty-something, Neethu plays her role as the dutiful daughter regardless of a traumatising childhood perpetrated by her mother. The reasons for Geetha’s transgressions against her first daughter are never brought up, nor do we get any more insight into her previous marriage, all we know is it ended. I suspect this withholding of backstory and swift movement from one unfortunate beat to another ties Geetha as a character to an encumbered loop of deep misery and guilt, deliverance from which she attains by stretching her dignity to radical extremes.
Beena R Chandran’s performance as Geetha makes the film whole. She’s able to hold Geetha together expressing her grace in the face of tempestuous ordeals, specifically evidenced in the scene after the custody battle where she waves her daughter goodbye. A gesture held with such poise indicates that Geetha, although troubled, will find a way to get by. Performance here is inextricable from the meaning of the image. It’s the classic case where screen presence becomes the primary makeup of a film's mise-en-scène.
In the end, what comes of Geetha’s woes and diagnosis, we never know. Her fate is kept from us much like her past. For the moments in time that we spend with her, we may sculpt an image of her person, perhaps even speculate her motivations, yet what unlucky fate has befallen her will forever remain an enigma. In this study of a seemingly fallen woman, there are no real culprits, no one to blame. What remains may be even more haunting than any antagonist: the burden destiny has in store for some of us.
(This piece was originally published on the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival website)
15. Berlin (d. Atul Sabharwal)
Varun Oak-Bhakay
A wide shot of a picturesque location. Either mountains decked in snow or sloping dunes under the desert sun. One man at the centre of it, all by himself, a Beretta or a Colt or whatever’s the flavour of the season in Hollywood in his shooting hand. This is a staple image from a mainstream Hindi film about espionage, half of which are too self-serious to be wearing James Bond stereotypes, and few of which are particularly remarkable. Atul Sabharwal’s Berlin, starring Aparshakti Khurrana, Ishwak Singh, and Rahul Bose in major roles, is singularly interesting for its disposal of ‘locationeering’: Sabharwal (Aurangzeb, Class of ’83) strips away the trappings of the genre by seeking a geographical singularity. And like Khufiya (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2023), Berlin is not about engaging with another state; instead, it tries to look within, a rare instance of a Hindi film examining the two arms of the national intelligence apparatus.
Khurana plays the neatly-christened Pushkin, a teacher whose services are requisitioned by the Bureau when they take into custody the deaf-mute Ashok (Singh), whose only means of communication is sign language, something Pushkin knows like the back of his hand. Before too long, the two young men find themselves on opposite ends of a table, involved in a game controlled by the likes of Sondhi (Bose), Pushkin’s temporary boss and the man charged with getting to the bottom of whatever it is Ashok has planned.
Berlin is not the sort of film where plot is vital. In fact, it becomes subservient to visual style: in a post-screening Q-and-A session, Sabharwal and cinematographer Shreedutta Namjoshi talked about Soviet architecture and their filmic references for Berlin, the latter taking care to acknowledge Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Hoyte van Hoytema on camera), whose influence is writ across Berlin, be it through the many cloaks of mist that engulf the characters or the dour grey-white-brown colour scheme the film leans into. More interesting, though, is how close Sabharwal and Namjoshi get to their players: one can feel the proximity Ashok and Pushkin share. Only on occasion does the camera move away from Pushkin, as though it were placing what happens to him in a larger context while capturing the moments of action he drives from closer quarters.
The other remarkable element in Berlin is how it uses the sense of time gone by contrary to convention. The 1990s have become a decade soaked in saccharine nostalgia, thanks largely to the likes of TVF lending the period a sunlit gaze. Among those who can recall it, however, there remains a degree of suspicion as to whether the nostalgia has a basis in fact or is just a romantic idea. The latter thought appears to have stayed with Sabharwal: his idea of the 90s is to dabble with the likes of Pushkin, a man who is moving towards a more enlightened era through his choice of vocation, and Sondhi, who continues to attach himself to the Soviet Desk even after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has crumbled. Sabharwal’s notion of nostalgia comes from the film’s India Coffee House-type café, few of which exist anymore, and from the casting of Kabir Bedi who, in the 80s, played the muscle to a Bond villain in Octopussy (John Glen, 1983).
There is little lightness in Berlin, Sabharwal relies on wordplay rather than overt humour to add layers to the world, and there is a sense of efficiency about how he uses his actors – Singh stands out for the cockiness he brings to Ashok, lest the character’s disability suggest a stereotypical understanding of him, and though Khurrana is a tad bit too wide-eyed, he brings a genuine feeling of being out of his depth, both in the world of espionage and what should be more comfortable environs, making his Pushkin as much, if not more, an outsider as Singh’s Ashok.
The idea of the outsider is what the film largely boils down, and just who qualifies as one. Rather than make suggestions to that effect, Sabharwal brings to the board a bevvy of characters, each an outsider in their own way, necessitating some pondering over who fits and who doesn’t.
16. The Sweet East (d. Sean Price Williams)
Vanij Choksi
‘As sometimes happens, the interest of the plot comes from watching a gifted, resourceful scoundrel adapt his techniques to changing situations,’ writes David Bordwell in a blog post analysing Martin Scorsese’s 2013 quaalude-fuelled escapades of one Jordan Belfort: The Wolf of Wall Street. The life of a Wall Street broker is understandably chaotic. Numbers, stocks, IPOs, drugs, sex, lots of sex, the list goes on and on and on. Petulance and perversity are emboldened by frantic pacing, making for an unassailably gruesome and toe-curling account of a life lived in a closed circle of money-hungry tyrants of a time in history. Adjunct to that idea, ten years after the Belfort biopic, Sean Price Williams breaks open the mould of a close-knit circle, detailing the chaos that is inherently present in contemporary life itself, in the picaresque escapades of a resourceful high-schooler on the run: The Sweet East. Here again, we have an unassumingly naïve scoundrel adopting tactics to adapt to a chaotically ever-changing environment, as she’s exposed to what seems a survey of a recent anthropological past by way of strange emergences of factions in the American socio-cultural landscape.
Lillian (Talia Ryder) breaks from her tediously immature high-school tour group in Washington DC and begins an adventure, crossing paths with junkie punk rebels with penis piercings, a White Supremacist-cum-Nazi sympathiser academic, politically-attuned filmmakers and actors, and modern Islamic fundamentalist training camps. The essential moral of this episodic tale is riding the changing tides of life, learning how to live and make space for oneself in the chaos of the contemporary world. Lillian borrows anecdotes and statements from the people she interacts with, regurgitating them to others as her own. A sob story of a mistreated junkie lands her the sympathy, bed, and money of the academic. The academic’s loquacious political jargon primes her up for the lead role in a politically correct period piece. Perhaps that’s how this life must be lived, adapting into one’s repertory what one deems essential and pawning it off as one’s own.
The film ends with the title “Everything Will Happen”, and everything does seem to happen through the film's roughly ninety-minute runtime. As the history of the world unfolds, there will always be the convergence of disparate factions of society, some stranger than others. The inevitable mutation of culture, of everything, fuels the constant mutation of life as we perceive it. How is one meant to traverse modern life when one is supposedly exposed to EVERYTHING? With Lillian’s often unethical and problematic behaviour, are we to assume that to get ahead, we must exploit and take advantage of a polluted expansion of civilisation and the world surrounding us? That’s perhaps one explanation for the mystery of the contemporary human condition that the film, through its escapades, offers. Are we to accept it is a question of subjective reflection; after all, in our everyday lives, we too are exposed to these mutations. The film then, can be read as today’s equivalent supposition to the notion of “Survival of the Fittest” and “Every Man for Himself”.
Speaking of everything, the film converges many cinematic styles. Williams’ long-term partnership with the Safdie Brothers as cinematographer informs the film’s jarring neon look. It then swiftly moves on to more experimentation with unpretentiously, almost everything. When the production of the film within the film is halted by an extremely gory and, might I add, excitingly bloody accidental shoot-out, Lillian must take refuge in an AD’s tree house, which is situated on the grounds of his brother’s Islamic fundamentalist training camp. From hereon, the style of the film descends more into fantasy. The period-specific costume gown and corset become Lillian’s primary attire as she’s locked away from public view in a wooden den, almost like a Disney princess, who looks on, from the window, at men revelling around a fire. The sets begin to look enormously ‘setty’, like something out of The Princess Bride (notably a shot of Lillian and the AD, Mohammed, standing atop a cliff that is intentionally made to look like a medieval painting).
Just when we are led to believe that Lillian, done with her adventures and back home, is ready once again for life as a high schooler, she proves her newfound contentment with chaos when she quietly escapes back out into the world with a smile on her face, in the film’s memorable closing shot. Chaos is perhaps the catalyst that informs her worldview and brings her of age with a knowledge of how the world works and how she must live in it. That is then the challenge for us all: to confront the indigenous frenzy whose populace infiltrates the expansion of civilisation, that Lillian comes out the other side of changed and comfortable with.
Picks of the Month
A short list of the writers each choosing the best film/show they’ve watched in the preceding month (1st November onwards).
1. Avi: Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
2. Mahika: Nähtamatu võitlus (Rainer Sarnet, 2023)
3. Sanskar: Kaala Paani (Sameer Saxena, 2023)
4. Aadhya: Three of Us (Avinash Arun Dhaware, 2022)
5. Vanij: Das Zimmermädchen Lynn (Ingo Haeb, 2014)
6. Prakhar: Mukkabaaz (Anurag Kashyap, 2017)
7. Varun: 12th Fail (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2023)
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