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)
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)
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