A Short Note on Kanu Behl’s “Binnu Ka Sapna”

[Contains spoilers]

Kanu Behl sure likes a wedding procession.

In “Titli,” his exceptional feature film debut, a wedding procession moves through a dingy lane, lit by men carrying neon green lights. The cavalcade consists of people gyrating energetically but their faces are oddly blank. It’s almost comical, but it helps detail the world Behl wants to create, a world where misery is so rife that people force themselves to be happy, but the despair never leaves their faces. In “Binnu Ka Sapna,” his impressive 32-minute short film now streaming on MUBI, Binnu, our protagonist, buys a bottle of phenyl and moves through a similar wedding procession lit by men carrying neon green tubelights. His glum, inscrutable face stands out as people dance wildly; immediately, we sense his disconnect with the world. Binnu’s family is splintered: his mother and father haven’t seen eye to eye in many years, their marriage broken beyond repair. At home, they barely exchange words. Binnu is lonely, alone. His periodic voiceover furnishes us with a brief history of why it has come to this: his mother, then young and happy, once walked out of a bedroom with her handsome brother-in-law, and his father saw them. When he slaps her publicly, to everyone’s shock, the first crack in the marriage forms. But Binnu empathises with his mother. ‘She just walked out of the bedroom,’ he says with a trace of sadness in his voice. This event is a portent of the film’s deeply unsettling ending.

In various interviews, Behl revealed that he wanted to make a film about the roots of anger. Through Binnu’s eyes, we see the seeds being sown (a dysfunctional, unhappy household) and bloom into a growing disenchantment with the world, with women in particular. We see shots of tea boiling away merrily in a pan and sense a bitterness brewing inside him. Tea is especially important to him: a reminder that, even as their marriage fell into decay, his mother couldn’t resist a cup of tea made by his father. He picked up this strange little ritual between his parents by observing them. He believes tea is a balm of sorts, a balm that heals tattered relationships.

Binnu wants to leave behind his past behind, a past that has shards of violence, but it’s now a part of him. (Whether separable or not we don’t know yet.) A menial job and a wise mentor do little to free him from the clutches of mounting cynicism. As he gets into a sexual relationship with his boss’s daughter, finally getting cheated on, the male chauvinist inside him starts gnawing into his conscience. As with “Titli,” Behl approaches this subject with the deftness of a specialist. Men who have grown up surrounded by violence, and those who end up perpetrating it, have some peculiar rationale explaining their actions. Binnu does, too. Behl, however, doesn’t simply tell us that; employing a 1:1 aspect ratio and a lean narrative, he charts Binnu’s journey from a confused young man to a resentful misogynist by putting us through various snapshots from his life, emphasising on crucial details that help us discern how he sees the world as he ages. Binnu liked a girl from his college, but never spoke to her; his first sexual encounter is awkward and passionless; his last girlfriend was too lovely for him, almost criminally lovely. Binnu chillingly puts this into perspective: ‘There was no need for her to look that beautiful.’ With that thought, Binnu’s cloning, as it were, is complete: he is now the spitting image of his father at the exact moment when he saw his wife emerging out of that room with her brother-in-law in tow. The hereditary nature of hate, and how it is unwittingly passed on from parent to child, is where “Binnu Ka Sapna” finally arrives, springing an ending that is as alarming as it is daring. In lesser hands it would have been blatantly exploitative. But Behl cuts away at just the right moment, allowing us to pull a deep breath and let our thoughts run amok.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Ivan Ayr’s terrific “Soni” is a shrewd examination of patriarchy in the new India.

[Might contain spoilers, many of them.]

Ivan Ayr’s “Soni” opens with an alarming sequence. We hear catcalls over black and the rustling of a bicycle, and it continues for nearly a minute. A woman races her bike on lonely road on a wintry night in New Delhi and a man chases her on his. He jeers, harasses; she ignores him in a practiced sort of way. Her body language and vacant face suggest that she is well accustomed to this sort of behavior. He continues gaily. Suddenly, she slows down, gets off her bike, and walks it through a dark alley. He follows her. A heated volley of words takes place, and the encounter culminates with her lashing out at him. She is finally pulled off him by her associates. He gets a broken jaw and swollen eye.

In any other Hindi film, this would have been a moment to rejoice. In “Soni,” it becomes a premonition. The general feeling is that she, a police officer, shouldn’t have reacted the way she did. Her superior, Kalpana, chides her for it. What if he had a knife? What would she have done then? Why didn’t she follow protocol?

What if she hadn’t defended herself, we wonder. What then?

Soni, the eponymous protagonist of Ayr’s feature-film debut, is a police officer working in the graveyard shift. In New Delhi, her credentials don’t guarantee her safety; lecherous remarks are leveled at her, and her frequent encounters with men inevitably touch a nerve for men do not seem to value boundaries. It’s a film shaking with rage, but it doesn’t permit us the luxury of catharsis by transforming this rage into quick-fix solutions. Instead, it finds other ways to channel it: through silence mainly, by making its central character silently bear the brunt of being a woman in India who simply defended herself from a ghastlier fate.

It has been so long since a Hindi film has understood and rightly exploited the power of silence. In “Soni,” long silences reveal what words don’t: the loss of courage, the agony of being a victim of a patriarchal system that tries hard to drown a woman’s voice, and the dawning realization that things won’t change, at least not right away. Soni gets reprimanded for her aggression, which is seen as a poor quality in a female police officer, and when she reacts in a similar manner in a situation involving a drunk Navy officer, the system finds a way to get her off her job.

The incisive, knowing script, written by Ayr and Kislay, examines not just the gender divide within the New Delhi police force but also the power structure within it, both bound together by an indiscernible thread. Kalpana and Soni’s personal lives are not any better; Kalpana, the wife of a newly instated senior Crime Branch officer, is inscrutable at home. She manages a tired smile when asked questions about having a child, and is talked down upon by her husband when she broaches Soni’s subject. In a particularly impressive scene, she gets into a brief argument with her husband after Soni’s third scuffle. Her husband rebukes her for consoling her juniors, something he finds distasteful in a police officer. The job doesn’t encourage empathy. But Kalpana cannot help it; she hopes to mend what cannot be mended. The two have disparate working styles, two different ideas of how the world works and should work. His is prudent, shaped by years of working in a system he knows too well. Hers is idealistic, driven by a desire to do things right.

When these ideas exist under one roof, as they do here, it is an open invitation for a clash. But “Soni” shuns the temptation to mine drama from it; Kalpana submits to her husband’s lofty barbs by staying silent. When she wants to get Soni reinstated, she quietly requests him to speak with his seniors. At that moment, she is not the IPS officer with a team reporting to her; she is his wife. And he agrees grudgingly, more as a husband than a colleague. It’s the chameleonic quality of this relationship that lends the film part of its acuity.

Soni’s life is not too different. She has an estranged husband who still cares about her, but is kept away by her stubbornness to not forgive him for his past mistakes. She regularly skips meals, a recurring detail that discloses the extent of how much her job consumes her life, and the only person with whom she seems to speak with a hint of affection is her motherly neighbor. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, the neighbor suggests, with outmost seriousness, a way to curb harassment: by wearing the sacred sindoor, the mark of a married Indian woman. It is a wryly comic touch and a terrifying one at that. In another scene, Soni suggests that a girl, who is caught with her boyfriend by two policemen in an old deserted building in the dead of night, wear a shirt and cap to appear more like a man. It begs us to introspect, to ask ourselves why we have allowed male chauvinism to be so deeply embedded in our social fabric that these suggestions, foolish as they might sound, have become credible solutions for women to evade harassment.

The film’s most significant achievement is its thoughtful exploration of the bond between Soni and Kalpana. Although the difference between their respective perceptions of the city is indisputable, with Kalpana being ferried around in the safety of a police car and Soni left to get around on a bike, their experiences are similar to some extent. There is a clear class divide as well, but patriarchy transcends it; whether it is Kalpana’s increasing dependence on her husband to get Soni off, or it is Soni’s brawl against three inebriated men in the ladies’ washroom at a restaurant, women are quite, quite alone. Their men and their country have failed them. In a beautiful moment near the end, Kalpana gifts Soni a copy of ‘Revenue Stamp’ by Amrita Pritam. This comes right after Kalpana learns that her niece is being harassed by boys at her school, and her niece, fearing ostracism, is reluctant to report it. “Soni” reveals itself fully here: the two women quietly accept that all they have is each other and that is how it is going to be, thus changing the nature of their relationship inconspicuously and irreversibly.

Although we are only into the second month of the year, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if “Soni” ends up being among the best Hindi films to release this year. Ayr, aided by exceptional camerawork by David Bowen, top-notch sound design and two excellent central performances, gives it the tactful treatment it deserves. Its fade-out moment is melancholic, leaving us with a little hope but also the feeling that the future looks bleaker than we feared. At one point, Soni looks on, incredulous, as a man flirts with a female police officer on the phone in the Control Room, and the woman laughs it off, saying she gets four or five calls like this everyday. It is possibly the film’s scariest moment: the acceptance of the fact that men most likely won’t change, so it is up to the women to adapt to the new India. Do we still deserve to remain hopeful, then?

[Not For Reproduction]

Essay: Kundan Shah’s “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa” and the Birth of the Likable Loser.

I still remember the first time I saw Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. I was nine and holed up in a hotel in Nashik, flipping through the channels on television, contemplating whether I should watch a talk show on MTV or a movie on the next channel starring Shah Rukh Khan which I happened to stumble upon. On instinct, I chose to go with the movie.

Back in 2002, when I was watching it, Khan had already established himself as a romantic hero. Tousled hair, a dimpled smile and a boyish charm accompanying a seemingly bratty persona, there was no question of imagining anyone else playing it with such aplomb, such ease, such grace. Khan seemed to be born into the skin of the role; as a child, I could scarcely believe the tales from his days as a struggling actor and that he didn’t come from privilege. But watching Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa was, I remember, a singularly frustrating experience, all because I was familiar with this image he had carved for himself. I put the channel on at that moment in the film in which Sunil, the character he plays, is at his most vulnerable, most innocent. He is at a carnival with the girl of his dreams, holding two cones of ice-cream, and has just been caught lying. The other man, the manifestation of the ‘perfect’ man and one of the two victims of this rather harmless lie, threatens to tell on him. But Sunil, suddenly panicky, does not want him to. He does, though, and Sunil is compelled to tell the truth. The truth is simple enough: He lied for her, because he wanted her to go to the carnival with him, just the two of them. He fumbles through his explanation but his reasons are genuine. He may not be bright but he is pure, purer than the girl and the guy, purer than most of us, any of us. His actions may be deplorable but in that moment I didn’t hate him. And after several viewings over several years, I still don’t.

I don’t know how Khan did it. And I don’t know how director Kundan Shah and co-writer Pankaj Advani wrote it. Sunil never wins at anything. He lies to his band-mates when he is late to a practice session. It's the second time in a week. He has failed his exams thrice. (Later on, when he fails again, he grudgingly agrees to lie to his father that he passed and back it up with a fake mark-sheet.) And then that lie to go to the carnival with the girl of his dreams. He tries, fails, and then tries again. Over and over. He hurts people. He hurts himself. And then he’s back to his cheerful old ways, trying to make amends. In the hands of a lesser actor with little charm to spare, the results would have been unsatisfactory, to say nothing of how unwatchable and bland it would have made the film. But Khan manages to pull it off by playing it just right. His performance is a mixture of empathy and courage, vulnerability and bravura. Sunil’s whimsical world is limited, his dreams are modest, and he keeps them together in his own clumsy way.

For a Hindi romantic-comedy or even a Hindi film for that matter, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa is a surprisingly testing watch. Sunil’s love evades him. The girl never cares about him enough to stop and consider him as a potential suitor, never takes him seriously. He is always, always a friend. And in his innocence he doesn’t push it, doing as much as he can with the little attention she gives him. He lets her slip out of his grasp, choosing loneliness and music to help him tide over his heartbreak when she falls in love with someone else. We see him suffer, helpless and distraught. And in the climax of the film that I now recall so vividly as if it were only yesterday that I saw it for the first time, right after he chooses to let her go purely for the sake of her happiness, and just after the cursed ring slips out of her hand and rolls into the benches as she’s putting it on the finger of the man she’s about to marry, which makes the whole church get up and look for it, he sees her as if in a dream, exuberantly happy, calling out to him. It’s a confusing moment for him: there is his sister is in the crowd, weeping silently for her brother for only she knows how much this would take from him, and there is the girl he loves, wanting to know if he has found the ring. He has. He’s seen it. But, he shakes his head. Emotion floods his face, overwhelming him. It’s Sunil at his most selfish, most human. This is one thing he cannot do. He can never truly let her go.

If a single moment can indeed define a film, this one is Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. It allows us a cursory glance into the mind of a character that Hindi films seem to fear, a character they put up so rarely, and never so exquisitely: a guy who’d rather be selfish than generous, who’d rather be flawed than saintly, who’d rather follow his heart than do what the world expects him to. 

Hindi films are often about the hero and heroine walking into the sunset together. This one rolls its eyes at it. It is, bravely, far too busy consoling the guy the hero beat to get to her.

[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)