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]

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)