Essay: Decoding the subtleties of Kanu Behl's "Titli."

Two weeks ago, Kanu Behl's Titli was unanimously hailed as one of the better Hindi films of the year upon release. It was not an exaggerated claim, as I found later, thanks to its meticulous structure and carefully written characters that I found worth raving about. 

Before I begin, I should attribute a large chunk of this naive essay to my friend, Ashwini Dabadge. She noticed an important metaphor that I missed, and she told me about it during a rather illuminating discussion I had with her after we both watched the film. 

There are several tiny throwaway details, little flourishes, that stayed with me many days after I watched Kanu Behl's debut. Many reviewers of the film have pointed out Behl's seemingly weird obsession with personal hygiene. A recurring detail where some or the other member of the vulnerable family of violent carjackers is brushing his teeth and clearing his throat noisily -- something of a morning ritual in the family -- hardly seems like a detail a filmmaker would want his audience to watch repeatedly. It's simply unpleasant. Unless that filmmaker is trying to indicate something through it. 

Behl introduces us to this incorrigibly evil male family that engages in small but brutal crimes to earn a living. And he tries to acquaint us with his characters by taking us through their routines, emphatically stressing on how they begin their day. Through the film, three of the four members of the family are seen brushing their teeth vigorously (I don't recollect seeing the character of middle brother, Bawla, doing the same), making nauseating noises throughout. 

As I soon discovered, this detail signifies how the family is trying to rid themselves of their inner evil but always fail to do so. As the character of Bawla only lends a helping hand in the crimes, never being a perpetrator himself, he is not seen doing the same. He is merely a slave of his volatile elder brother, which doesn't entirely redeem him of his sins but makes him a sorry figure. But because we see the characters of Vikram and Titli channelling their inner monsters through their immoral acts, we see Behl's careful placement of these sequences after they partake in something unlawful or unethical. The character of Daddy gets a brief "brushing" scene, too, for not trying to reform his eldest son, choosing to be a silent spectator instead. In Behl's eyes, that makes him as much a criminal, if not more, than his son. The confrontation between Titli and the patriarch near the end is actually Behl's speaking through a fictitious character, I feel.

This theory also applies to the scene where Titli throws up before taking the high road. I believe it alludes to him ridding himself of the evil he had kept bottled inside for so long. As soon as he is done vomiting, we suddenly see him in a new light. We see him as a better, stronger person.

Although this is not a metaphor, the middle brother's strongly implied homosexuality lends itself wonderfully to the intriguing bunch of characters. This detail is implied through brief scenes scattered throughout the film and is kept restrained, bringing a nice subtlety to the character of Bawla. It also demonstrates how thoughtfully Behl and co-writer Sharat Katariya have fleshed out the characters.

Yet another metaphor I observed which was pretty discreet was the house this dysfunctional family lived in. A crumbling, perpetually messy house might be an indication of the crumbling, messy lives of the gents who live in it. And that we never see the characters clean or redo the house and the fact that they don't even seem bothered by it might hint at them being criminals beyond reformation. In one sequence, we get a quick glimpse into the wardrobe of Neelu. It is a tidy one. This bit, I feel, suggests that she is the only upright member of the family.

There are many more such trivial details crammed in the film that might be symbolic. Starting with that framed picture of their forefather, a detail that shows up in many a sequence and which I tried to but couldn't quite understand the relevance of. Maybe another viewing might shed light on that. Or maybe, as I discovered mulling over it in the last two weeks, not knowing what it signifies makes the film all the more fascinating. Maybe like Titli himself, we don't really know whether we want to know. Well.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Kanu Behl's savage "Titli" is noteworthy but remains stubbornly short of greatness.

Kanu Behl's Titli isn't an easy film to review. It has sequences and ideas that flirt with greatness, a promising premise complete with a stock of great performances from an exemplary cast, and yet somehow it never quite comes together in a way indelible films often do. Behl's character study takes a grim peek into the household of a small, closely-knit, predominantly male Delhi family who moonlight as small-time criminals while the youngest member nurtures dreams of running away. However, in analyzing the dynamics of this volatile family, the film loses sight of its half-done plot that unravels amidst bursts of brutality.

There are a lot of things to admire from the outset. What needs to be applauded foremost is how precisely Behl has managed to capture the bubbling anger that lads from an urban Delhi locality harbor at all times. Borrowing bits from his own upbringing, Behl's vivid representation of how a sullen lower middle-class male family deal with everyday violence and their own enigmatic selves is refreshingly real, giving us an hopeless clan of wife-beaters whose dark past is revealed in sharply written exchanges. And there are little touches that are a stroke of genius; the old patriarch that grunts and garbles and dances impassively in a glum wedding procession; the middle brother's homosexuality is kept ambiguous, adding to the film's many layers; the protagonist dons fake t-shirts of classy brands.

Such fastidiousness speaks volumes about Behl's forte: he knows the city, his characters and the jargon they choose to speak in inside out, and how the city molds his characters. In a Delhi trudging towards development, a joyless place where a car salesman is bashed to near-death with a hammer in broad daylight and the perpetrators get away with it, not granting the poor guy any empathy before dumping his body near a desolate stretch of highway, lives Behl's titular protagonist whose life isn't any better. This, perhaps, signifies the lives of his own characters: bleak, perpetually stuck in the "developing" phase but without any hope of ever being completely "developed."

Titli has these moments, these references in handfuls. We aren't introduced to the characters or the world they inhabit in a straightforward manner. We observe them as they go about living their miserable lives, confronting their piling problems with exhaustion and fury. We sympathize with the impassive Titli's plight until he ill-treats his new bride, a strong-willed young woman who doesn't take domination lying down. (In her debut, Shivani Raghuvanshi is a revelation.) In a hazy sequence of uncomfortable moans and stubborn, silent opposition to his advances, she refuses to consummate her marriage. That's how her character is introduced to us. The sequence is barely two minutes long but we still learn all we need to know about her. And in a later sequence where a bizarre deal is cut in the eerie locality in the middle of the night, she handles a difficult sequence -- once again, brilliantly written and performed -- with grace and deftness. And it is the kind of grace and deftness we don't usually expect from newcomers.

But there is a more urgent problem plaguing this otherwise fine film. The sequences, each crafted elegantly, work individually but not quite as a whole. The plot seems rather simplistic for this complex bunch of people with no firm sense of right and wrong. There simply isn't enough of it. Behl crucially chooses to place them in scenarios of which we can predict the outcome instead of placing them in ones where we might get to see a different side of theirs that is not all black and grey. And when wonderfully fleshed out characters are left scrambling with little plot to work with, it adds up to a frustrating cinematic experience. The thread that ties up the tightly written individual scenes, alas, is too thin to bear the weight of the ideas this film boasts of.

As a character study on a personal level, Titli is probably the most evocative one in recent memory. A film where we see, empathize with and eventually come to care for a bunch of despicable characters is rare, and it is a film that still leaves us with a little hope. Still, there is such a thing as too much unconventionality. Titli makes our acquaintance us people and situations we might have not seen in Hindi cinema before -- at least not in the last decade or two -- but it is a film whose freshness is bogged down by its inability to remain entirely convincing. Still, for Ranvir Shorey's marvelous turn as the belligerent eldest brother and for the amount of potential Behl shows in his debut, this might be worth a second or even third viewing.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Colin Trevorrow's "Jurassic World" is a lackluster homage to the original.

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park is the first Hollywood film I remember watching. For a seven year-old kid with no prior experience in watching monster flicks, it was the kind of stuff that nightmares were made of. The small ripples of water in a glass, one of my favorite moments in the movies, became synonymous with clammy fear. And after I watched it for the umpteenth time a month ago, I was still left feeling slightly queasy as the vicious and merciless dinosaurs clobbered, crushed and chomped on everything that we saw on the screen. As a loyal Jurassic Park enthusiast, I chose to skip its sequels to not let the exhilaration I felt upon watching Spielberg's classic dampen. I should have kept it that way.

Colin Trevorrow, who delivered a rather smart debut in Safety Not Guaranteed three years ago, reinvigorates (or at least tries to) dinosaur flicks with this new cinematic diversion. Jurassic World, both a homage and a sequel to the first Jurassic film, adheres strictly to monster-movie formula, but somehow the affair with the big ones makes for a somewhat lackluster viewing. This showy Jurassic Park reboot might be toothier with ambition too bulky for its thin plot, but it's also detached from the very things that made the first part a triumph.

What made Spielberg's version far superior was the amount of suspense and chills he managed to wrest from his setup even when we didn't have dinosaurs on the screen. With little details that contributed in a major way to the terror, most notably torn-down fences and trampled-on cars complemented perfectly by John Williams' exuberant score, Jurassic Park made for a riveting ride that skillfully blended humor with thrills. Jurassic World, on the other hand, has a premise that makes similar promises, but the end product relies heavily on how desperate the audiences were to go back to dinosaur-land. That is not a good sign.

As mentioned before, this is a film that adheres to the formula that can turn any monster movie into a success. Pit humans against something that is gargantuan, cold-hearted and murderous and bingo, there you have it. It is easy to guess where Jurassic World is going with its cliche-ridden story, but the makers can't be blamed here. After all, the dinosaurs are what we want to see, and we get a proper eyeful of them. It impulsively presumed on the part of the makers that the audience would want to see, in broad strokes, humans getting gobbled at the precise moment when everything goes quiet momentarily on-screen and dinosaurs more fearsome than the ones that had been put on the screen in the past installments. If this was the basic idea, it would be fair to say that Jurassic World hits the right spot.

But therein lies its core problem. There are plenty chases that terminate with characters narrowly escaping being meals or irking a new creature enough for it to be hot on their trails. It has been seen before and there's nothing new to heave a sigh of relief about. We don't get a congenial bunch of characters we can invest in or a story that hints at something unique. Instead, imagination is substituted by stereotypes. And that is a major letdown. Essentially, for a monster movie to work, we need to build an emotional relationship with the characters. But with characters like these that are cut straight from the cardboard who try their best to be endearingly funny or anxious, it's hard to genuinely care as they scamper for safety hither and tither.

But there are some things that Jurassic World gets right. The amusement park is bigger, grander and more ostentatious twenty-two years later, and to see it in its entirety for the first time -- a panning shot across the skies supported by Williams' popular Jurassic Park theme -- inspires awe without even trying hard. It is this idea of guiding us through the place that we will be a part of for the next two hours, complete with a few quick glimpses of how meticulously this fictitious world has been envisioned, that really informs us about the ambition this film wants to meet. And the only sequence, I felt, that was reminiscent of the old magic of the first part was when we get to see the Indominus Rex, our fanged baddie, for the first time. It's a clever sequence, utterly unpredictable and executed with great finesse after a typically tense build-up.

Jurassic World culminates in a disappointingly loud, clunky and over-the-top climax that doesn't salvage its many flaws, grave and trivial. Unlike other great films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws or Bong Joon-ho's The Host that had plots where man was pitted against a more powerful and intelligent creature (and also where the "monster" was seen only fleetingly throughout the film), Jurassic World sees Trevorrow decidedly choose thrills over originality and put fang-baring dinosaurs before emotion and character development. It works to an extent if it's a joyride you are seeking. But, for me, I still wished I could see some of Spielberg's mastery at manipulating the slightest details to generate suspense. How unfortunate it is that Jurassic World's cheesiness can fetch it a place on pamphlets advertising pizza.

(Not For Reproduction)