Essay: A Tribute To Ram Gopal Varma’s “Rangeela”

[Contains spoilers.]

It is Hindi cinema’s oldest story: The girl chooses love over riches. It is also the story of Ram Gopal Varma’s “Rangeela,” which turned twenty-five a couple of weeks ago. I desist from saying it has ‘aged like fine wine’, for it hasn’t aged a day. If anything, it achieves a rare feat, a hallmark of a great film: with each viewing, one gets to see a different film. A recent rewatch made it plain that this was no longer the fairytale I believed it was. “Rangeela” is far richer than it is made out to be, far more melancholic. Beneath its buoyancy is a tale of loss and discovery, an ode to a city that has time and time again taught people more about themselves than anything ever will, and to the city's cinema that has a say in not just what we dream about but also how we dream.

“Rangeela” arrived in 1995, when India, its mind fixed on globalisation, had opened its doors for the world to peek in; when Hindi cinema, resurrected after a bad run in the 1980s, delivered its most beloved romance with “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”; and when a young filmmaker, Varma, who had not made an out-and-out romance until then, decided to take on a fairytale set in Mumbai. And the approach he chose for his first romance was daringly novel: he recruited a music director who had not scored a Hindi film before; a young actress, while not new, had yet to get her big break; and a young actor, who was actively resisting getting typecast, was picked to play a street cookie. These elements gave “Rangeela” its face: a flock of young talents, eager to prove themselves, conduce to deliver a film that is, at its core, a crowdpleaser, but not in the way most Hindi films tended to be at the time. It didn’t have heroes and villains or even traditional action sequences. Even its love-triangle (if it was indeed one) was atypical: the two men never fight for the affections of the girl. They brood privately, hurt privately; there isn’t a grain of machismo in them. The two men, Munna and Kamal, are broken. Munna is an orphan and Kamal a widower, their shot at a happy life cruelly obliterated by fate. Mili, the woman they both love, is their best shot at happiness. They cling on to it, unwilling to let go.

The essence of “Rangeela”—and of Mumbai—is captured by this love-triangle. Mili, young and vivacious, dreams of becoming an actress. The fact that she is one of hundreds of thousands of hopefuls doesn’t cross her mind. Her naïvety is offset by the men who love her. Munna is a small-time black marketeer of movie tickets, dealing with life one day at a time, one problem at a time, with no idea of what his future looks like. But even his aimlessness is measured. He has had a rough childhood, one that may have involved a trip too many to the police station. A single scene in which Munna deals with a cop who comes sniffing without any trace of fear slickly establishes this.

On the other side is Kamal, a withdrawn and lonely movie star yet to get over the death of his wife in a car accident. The incident haunts him, stings him: one gets the impression that he blames himself for it. When narrating the incident to Mili, Kamal, brave at first, is soon overcome by remorse. For a moment, just a moment, his vulnerability is for all to see. Only Mili does, her face drained of all colour at the sight. It’s the first time she sees him for who he is, without the curtain of stardom to shield him from the lies that movies feed us.

The two Mumbais of “Rangeela” clash constantly—Mili’s fanciful, Munna and Kamal’s grounded. Cinematographer W. B. Rao uses light to great effect. When alone, Munna and Kamal are cloaked by darkness. For Mili, Rao chooses bright frames. When Mili is with either man, the frames are lit well, reinforcing how important she is to them. Disguised to appear as throwaway details, they colour this tale in their own little ways. But the film derives much of its magic from A.R. Rahman’s sublime soundtrack. What of it? The film just wouldn’t have been the same without it. My childhood wouldn’t have been the same, either. Nor would Hindi film music.

A sombre tale this is not. “Rangeela” is pure, unbridled joy. Any implication otherwise is put to rest by its upbeat opening number. The dialogue is rapid but witty, specked with wisdom. The relationships are carved beautifully. When Munna and Kamal first meet, Munna is aloof but Kamal is polite, not threatened by this man because he does not care to know him. At an amusement park, Mili’s father gets ice-cream for his family but not for Munna. Munna may be ‘like a son’ to him but he is still only a tenant. (An example of how “Rangeela” consciously avoids being goody-goody.) This is Mumbai’s middle-class: Amiable but not overly so, keeping one eye on their money at all times. And although Munna doesn’t try to hide what he does for a living, this law-abiding family couldn’t care less. He is still welcome to dine with them. Believing in the inherent goodness of people is one of the city’s many characteristics, and that Varma not only recognises this but understands it well enough to use it to lift the film puts him in a class of his own.

As with any great film set in Mumbai, “Rangeela” works the far-reaching impact of ‘Bollywood’ into the film. The lead characters’ fantasies and dreams are often based on the movies they watch. An extra movie ticket becomes an instrument to show you care about someone. When Mili asks Munna if he has an extra ticket to a new film starring Kamal, Munna wields it as if it were a slice of gold. A closer reading tells us why—it’s the only thing he can afford to give her. And it is from a cinema hall that Mili flees in the film’s charming climax to stop him from going so far away that they would never meet again. Varma plays to the gallery here; of course he couldn’t resist. And neither could we. Here is a film that laughs at ‘Bollywood’ (Gulshan Grover, as the Steven-Spielberg-worshipping Steven Kapoor, is a hoot) but cheekily slips in a final scene at dusk where Munna and Mili squabble, having just professed their love for each other. Once the tricky business of confessing one’s true feelings is over, there’s still a life to lead. But we need not worry. We leave assured that no matter what the world throws at them, these two will be all right.

[Not For Reproduction.]

Review: Devashish Makhija’s “Bhonsle,” a portrait of a dying man, ultimately comes up short.

[Contains spoilers.]

Early in Devashish Makhija’s “Bhonsle,” the parallels with Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” are clear as day. Both films feature old, lonely protagonists who have to get used to that fact that hate is now part of everyday existence. And both protagonists have seen enough of the world to know it cannot change. Walt Kowalski of “Gran Torino” and Bhonsle saheb of “Bhonsle” find themselves in similar quandaries: they have to protect ‘outsiders’ who have unwittingly been targeted by bad people. In Eastwood’s film, a Vietnamese family becomes a target of a neighbourhood gang; in Makhija’s, a pair of North Indian siblings is sucked into trouble when they set foot in a predominantly Maharashtrian chawl. Both films present a frightening picture of innocence on the wane. Putting a domestic spin on a very real contemporary problem, the glacially-paced “Bhonsle” could have been compelling, partly because the world it is set in is microscopic, so we understand how far the tentacles of hate politics have reached, and partly because it gives us a hero who makes up for in his bravery what he lacks in personality, giving the brawny ‘heroes’ of Hindi cinema a shrug. And yet, this is a curious specimen: a film that, despite its intentions and promise, fails to soar precisely because it tries so hard not to. There is such an eagerness to frustrate our expectations that it loses its potency through its repeated attempts to do so.

“Bhonsle” is Makhija’s second feature film after 2017’s “Ajji,” about a grandmother’s personal quest to avenge her granddaughter’s horrific assault when all else fails. Both films share some common elements: the focus is largely on the people we don’t see, the stories we don’t hear, and the truths we seldom engage with. “Ajji” had its share of uncomfortable truths; “Bhonsle” has its own. Early on, we see Vilas (played by a superb Santosh Juvekar), a Maharashtrian cabbie who’s trying desperately to become a politician, hoping to incite the residents of Churchill chawl to oust migrants from the North (‘outsiders’) through hate speech. A popular political tactic that is still casually applied to whip up local cultural sentiment, it’s interesting to see it being used here as a plot device. And for all the noise Vilas makes by calling Mumbai his ‘home’ and demanding that the migrants leave, he is homeless, living out of a cab with barely two coins to rub together.

His words, however, are unsparing. They infuriate Rajendra, a migrant who then tries to induct young North Indian boys in his ‘gang’ to fight for their rightful place in the chawl if it ever comes to that. When the migrant gang has to choose between keeping quiet and giving it back, they choose the latter. A young boy, Lalu, new to the chawl and to this world, is forced to deface the poster of the local political party that Vilas campaigns for with black paint. Hate ultimately yields hate. With much finesse, “Bhonsle” pinpoints exactly where the problem with hate speech and divisive politics lies.

Had this thread been developed a little more, it would have made for a more engaging film. But “Bhonsle” is not about this chawl. It is about a lonely man who learns after sixty years in this world and after a life spent in the police force, that being a mute spectator of wrongdoing is the same as being the perpetrator. Bhonsle, the newly retired constable, eats little, lives in a shabby room without electricity, and spends his days in wait. His application for a service extension is under review with his senior. One gets the impression that it is not the job he is passionate about: the job is simply to keep him busy, give him something to look forward to. It is something that gives him an identity. Without it, he has nothing, absolutely nothing. He has no family. There is nobody to bid him goodbye when he retires. Only his senior officer offers a sympathetic ‘Leaving?’ when he steps out of the police station for the last time. He rarely mingles with the other residents of the chawl. A friendly gesture towards him is often met with coldness. Constable Bhonsle gives Manoj Bajpayee, arguably one of the country’s finest actors, astonishing here, an opportunity to chew into a role truly worthy of his talent. But as tempting as this enterprise sounds on paper, satisfaction is rare to come by. Each scene is is drawn out till it is ready to snap, every painstaking detail lingered upon, every emotion pronounced. When momentum shows some sign of wanting to seep into the narrative, “Bhonsle” foils it. It gets exhausting.

There are some nice touches. In one shot, we see Vilas in his cab parked below a streetlight, looking longingly at it. The camera is positioned below, signifying how much he wants to be in the limelight, to be important. In another, Lalu imitates Bhonsle’s posture as if idolising the man. It’s a touching moment: a ray of sunshine piercing darkness. In perhaps the film’s most striking scene, Makhija juxtaposes a sequence of shots of Bhonsle waiting on his senior with shots of Vilas waiting on his mentor. Both men, quietly desperate for something, will soon learn they will never get it. (It’s rather clever how Bhonsle and Vilas are made out to be ‘outsiders’ in their respective worlds.) This scene culminates in a leisurely long-shot of a lost Bhonsle getting thronged by the city’s ever-swelling crowds. The metaphor isn’t subtle—and neither is the one the film is bookended by, and the others scattered throughout—but it shows, if nothing else, the sheer confidence of Makhija’s filmmaking.

The stagy ending of “Bhonsle,” where the good finally confronts the evil, wouldn’t be out of place in a potboiler. I am not too sure whether it manages to provoke the kind of response it wished to—a burst of violence is not always welcome. As with “Ajji,” Makhija makes us live through each painful moment, each blow. In keeping with the film’s prime problem, the climax blends theatricality with sluggishness. It’s unconvincing, and more so when one remembers the wonderful “Taandav,” an eleven-minute short film Makhija made in 2016 with Bajpayee. “Taandav” was made as a sales pitch for “Bhonsle.” It followed a police constable, Constable Tambe, who, after discovering that his personal and professional lives are falling apart, breaks into an impromptu dance to blow off steam, much to the surprise of his family and colleagues. The pay-off there was tremendous: out of nowhere the film sneaked up on us and left us chuckling. “Bhonsle" trades the ability to surprise for indulgence.

[Not For Reproduction]

A Short Note on Achal Mishra’s “Gamak Ghar”

[Contains spoilers.]

For a feature film debut, twenty-three-year-old Achal Mishra’s serene “Gamak Ghar” grapples with a formidable subject: home. Over three time periods—we open in 1998, return in 2010, and finally close in 2019—we examine the slow death of an ancestral house in Bihar’s Madhopura. As its inhabitants age, so does the house. On a strictly conceptual level, “Gamak Ghar” is magic: a story, our story, told in 90 concise minutes, leaving us with an ache in our hearts, a priceless offering. On a narrative level, however, there is something lacking, something that could truss the three parts up. Mishra’s primary focus here is mood and detail; there is an artfulness in his approach. When we open in 1998, the house brims with life. Children play in a courtyard in which a tulsi plant occupies the centre; men sit in the verandah playing cards; women gossip away in the bedroom. A newborn rests in a cradle, the apple of everyone’s eye. Everyone’s content. Every word exchanged quivers with feeling. Laughter is easy to come by. Mangoes are picked directly from trees. It’s a world that once existed but no longer does, and this recreation does it justice.

Snatching these moments from the characters is cinematographer Anand Bansal, whose work in “Gamak Ghar” warrants the highest praise. Each frame is is a painting unto itself, using colours and light intelligently, lending the film the wistful mood it strives for. Avni Goyal’s excellent production design deserves a mention as well, capturing the passage of time so skilfully that I wondered at one point whether the film was actually filmed over a period of twenty years.

When the family regroups in 2010, the walls have begun crumbling and the people have grown distant. Dinner is had in near silence, we get clumps of stilted conversation, and instant noodles is the kids’ choice of snack. The house is surrounded by taller, firmer, newer buildings. The emphasis on detail is as fascinating as it is exhausting, for we are always left observing from a distance, barred from engaging with the characters. There is a beautiful extended scene in which the matriarch, the one to whom the house was bequeathed, leaves it for the last time, to be with her son in the city. The camera is stationed a little further away, refusing to invade the moment. I wished with all my heart that it did. I wished with all my heart to share it with her.

The third part, taking place in 2019, is bereft of dialogue. The rotting house, neglected and forgotten, is now manned by an old watchman. It will be destroyed soon to make way for a grander structure, and only one member of the family shows up to supervise its demolition. By leaving a lot unspoken, Mishra prods us to confront who we have become. The house that accommodated innumerable memories, now rubble and dust. A brilliant shot of the family member taking the picture of the deceased family patriarch off a wall, maker and destroyer as seen through the half-broken roof, pops up near the end. It’s a deeply poignant image. One wishes “Gamak Ghar” found more like it.

[Not For Reproduction]

A Short Note on Arun Karthick’s “Nasir”

[Contains spoilers.]

At 85 minutes, one wouldn’t have imagined Arun Karthick’s remarkable second feature, “Nasir,” an adaptation of the short story, “A Clerk’s Story” by Dilip Kumar, to move along leisurely. A day in the life of Nasir, a Muslim garment store attendant, it’s a deeply intimate, lyrical portrait of a man who has long stopped living for himself. Capturing the rhythms of an everyday existence adeptly from the first frame, Karthick approaches “Nasir” with thought and sensitivity, choosing to observe than comment. We get long-shots and close-ups on the minutiae of Nasir’s life: counting money, standing in a queue for water, sipping on tea, waiting on his colleague, smoking a beedi. Karthick is unyielding—there’s a reason why “Nasir” is sketched so carefully. We aren’t supposed to understand him; we are supposed to be him.

There is ample skill on display here. Nasir resides in a mostly Muslim neighbourhood of Coimbatore. As he makes his way out of its sinuous lanes with his wife, the sound of prayer grows dimmer and is finally replaced by the babel of the world we now live in, where demagogues scream into microphones and hate is freely distributed over loudspeakers. The two worlds have co-existed peacefully till now, but by the end, one will have violently infiltrated the other. Nasir has inured himself to ignore the growing anti-Muslim sentiment that surrounds him; even as his colleague casually exchanges nasty remarks with a friend on the phone, Nasir’s face does not register even the faintest of flickers.

There is inexpressible pain here. Nasir’s mother has cancer, he has a mentally challenged adopted son, debt, an ordinary job. And yet, for someone has every reason to complain, he seldom does. He pulls two women shopping for saris into conversation with the warmth of a son. He pours himself into his poetry, expresses how much he loves his wife through a handwritten letter to her. We listen to its contents over a series of extended shots, each word bringing the man we have been watching throughout into sharper focus. There is a simplicity about him, about the way he does everything he is asked to, about the way he maintains the innocence of his minuscule world.

Films about communal violence often linger on the suddenness of it, and the emptiness. But it’s terrifying just how quickly we move on. “Nasir” is no different. In retrospect, the signs were all there: the provocations over loudspeakers grow increasingly vile. Karthick sets us up for tragedy with the flair of an old-timer. In the final shot, Nasir is sprawled out uglily on the ground in an alley of his neighbourhood. In the poetic opening shot, we see him sleeping in a foetal position. A streetlamp imparts light through a window. In both images we see his silhouette. A life has been cruelly snuffed out by a hollow act of violence. The world we see it as just another person dying. But we won’t; we will mourn it. Karthick’s triumph lies therein.

[Not For Reproduction]

Review: Bhaskar Hazarika’s stirring “Aamis” marks the arrival of a bold new talent.

[Contains spoilers.]

In the first meeting between Sumon and Nirmali, there is palpable uncertainty. She, a paediatrician, has been called upon by him, a PhD student, on a Sunday. She hesitates as he pleads: his friend has suddenly taken ill and is in pain, and he is worried. He’s just a couple of lanes away, Sumon beseeches. She doesn’t look away from his stricken face. Should she accompany him? What could a paediatrician do to cure an adult? And yet, there is something about Sumon, his childlike innocence being taken over by fear. She eventually concedes.

As it turns out, the friend’s first tryst with meat-eating had its consequences. He swears he won’t eat meat again if cured. Nirmali smiles, almost. ‘Meat isn’t the problem,’ she says. ‘Gluttony is.’

Bhaskar Hazarika’s sophomore feature, “Aamis,” pulls that line apart. How far is too far? What can you do for the person you love? Nirmali and Sumon are utterly ordinary in many ways, unable to show each other what they really feel, say what they really want to say. She’s a respectable name in the medical community, and he, someone who’d rather stay away and alone, in company of his preference. He is a member of a Meat Club at the university, where they catch, slaughter and cook different exotic meats to sample their original flavour and texture. ‘Do you know where frozen meat comes from?’ he asks her. ‘Where it is kept and for how long?’ He doesn’t touch frozen meat. She is intrigued. As payment for her services, she asks him to get a sample of whatever he cooks next.

Hazarika captures the initial stages of a growing romance with great care. When in Nirmali’s company, Sumon’s eyes betray a desire that we are not sure even he is aware of, and she is careful in her gestures, as if she is mindful of the fact that she’s toeing a line that mustn’t be crossed. Even when they text, Sumon is a bit reckless with his affection, whereas Nirmali is measured, slightly aloof. His passion for experimenting with food captures her fancy, and together they have rabbits, catfish with colocasia, and soon, bats. He eats with his hands, she prefers a spoon. Mental block, she says. She can’t touch food with her fingers. Eroticism flows freely during these meetings as glances are exchanged and fingers twitch in longing to touch one another. And yet, they don’t touch. Sumon is smitten; when Nirmali sends him a friendly picture of her with her son, he zooms in on her face, aching to touch it, drink it. He relieves his sexual longing by masturbating, but keeps himself in check when they meet. Nirmali remains enigmatic. She isn’t flattered by the attention he lavishes upon her; she is, after all, on a small and seemingly trivial culinary adventure.

The distance between them, between what they could have, is far greater than just a few centimetres. As it were, Nirmali is married to an insufferable and exceptional doctor who spends most of his time in rural medical camps around the country. Whenever he is home, he talks of little but his exploits in the field, and always with a trace of condescension, as if castigating everyone else for living comfortable lives. In his company, Nirmali is not an equal: she is his wife and mother to his son, never a doctor. He barely notices her, barely listens to her. She tells him about Sumon, but he’s buried in the happy memories of his achievements. Later, when Sumon is invited to their house party, she introduces him. ‘Ah, the journalist,’ her husband remarks, his hand outstretched. ‘The PhD student,’ she corrects him. But her husband isn’t mortified. He couldn’t care less.

“Aamis” explores the quiet power struggle between them in this remarkable scene. During the party, the men occupy the top floor of the house while the women are relegated to the ground floor (a detail reminiscent of Robert Altman’s fabulous 2001 film, “Gosford Park”). The women are tasked with arranging dinner while the men drink and discuss politics. Noticeably, Sumon is displaced. His world is away from such trivialities, far away. It has Nirmali, for whom he agreed to come to this party. And when Nirmali’s husband’s friends toast her later (as if it takes that to remind him of her place in his life), Sumon catches her eye.

Here, the film pauses and watches. Because in that moment, the two find each other, both silently desiring something more than just camaraderie, something perhaps they will never get. Hazarika holds that moment and uses it as a pivot to take the film in a thrilling new direction. Nirmali’s smile is stilted, but among everyone present, only Sumon knows that. It’s the first of many secrets they’ll share.

It’s hard not to wonder if the direction Hazarika takes “Aamis” in is only a gimmick, something sprung upon deliberately to stir the viewer, with little thought being paid to how dramatically it will change what we have seen till now. The transformation, evidently, is not without blemishes; it feels abrupt, as if the film was anxious to arrive here. The meshing of genres is determined, methodical. We are beckoned to watch closely.

Sumon is consumed by his obsession, but he doesn’t have anything else to give her. Nirmali isn’t starved of affection; it’s something else she desires. Something taboo, adventurous, even dangerous. When “Aamis” conveys her deeply-rooted hunger, it plunges into horror. With a deliberateness that is refreshing, Hazarika lays out the nature of their relationship through brief montages: Sumon visiting Nirmali in the hospital with a small box, or both of them looking at the sunset while enjoying a quiet meal. Physicality, or the lack of it, is no longer a hurdle; this is a bold new step for them, and it comes with new possibilities. It’s eerie but daringly funny at the same time, as if we are complicit in a depraved secret but curious to see how long it lasts before it is out in the open.

In the third act, Hazarika works the story into a thriller. Long gone are the characters we started with, and long gone is their romance. Now, Nirmali and Sumon appear to be characters from a different movie, and indeed, this appears to be a different film. Its ambition is compelling; I wanted to applaud. Then again comes the question of whether the film could have done without it. But even when the film stumbles—and ever so slightly—Hazarika’s filmmaking remains captivating, right down to that tidy final shot that brims with empathy.

With its bold exploration of the unpalatable and its stubbornness to not be limited by fear, “Aamis” will stay with me for a long, long time. It’s a difficult film to embrace, especially if one happens to be squeamish, but it’s a film to behold. Once I resurfaced from its world, I wanted to go right back into it.

[Not For Reproduction]

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: Lijo Jose Pellissery’s “Jallikattu” is a grim study of masculinity.

[May contain spoilers, many of them.]

In the opening sequence of “Jallikattu,” Lijo Jose Pellissery’s allegorical new movie, we hop between close-ups of people opening their eyes and drawing breaths. Set to the beats of an avant-garde score by Prashant Pillai, this spate of quick-cuts culminates in a shot of the sun rising, like life emerging from the dark, like people waking up from the dead. The symbolism, while scarcely subtle, is achieved with the flourish of a veteran. But Pellissery is somewhat of a veteran; “Jallikattu” is his seventh feature, a cinematic experience that is as hard to describe as it is to shake off, as tough to watch as it is difficult to leave. Based on S. Hareesh’s short story “Maoist,” it is a tale told more through sound than images, and one figures after two viewings that it is the only way to tell it.

In a small meat-loving village in Kerala, the local butcher Varkey (played by Chemban Vinod Jose) and his apprentice Antony (played by Anthony Varghese) are celebrities of sorts. People crowd around their little shop for the best cuts, and Varkey even parts with a few scraps for the dogs and a few bones for soup to satisfy his customers. People take the little black meat bags to the church, hanging them outside on the branches of a small tree before stepping into it. Meat, clearly, has this village in its clutch, and so when a buffalo gives its captors the slip seconds before they are to slaughter it and tears through the village, everyone sulks. A small group of men pines for its capture. The buffalo wrecks crops and crashes through shops, leaving local businesses in disarray. The men give chase, but to no avail; the animal is much too powerful, much too angry.

There are other factors at play, too. The men pride themselves on their masculinity: one woman is slapped for serving rice cakes for breakfast, another is molested, and many are haughtily told to go home by men because there is a buffalo on the loose. “Jallikattu” is about these men and their distending egos, and how man and animal are not so different when examined closely. (In fact, man comes off much, much worse.) The buffalo howls, the men scream. It grunts, they screech. At one point, when the buffalo has caused considerable chaos, the village enlists the help of Kuttachan (played by Sabumon Abdusamad), Varkey’s charismatic ex-apprentice who has served time. Kuttachan is Antony’s old foe, and now, with the stakes raised, neither of them wants to simply catch the beast; they want to do it publicly to relish the fact that they beat the other to it. The parallels between man and beast are alluded to several times, and at one point, it is laid out quite prominently. The buffalo gets trapped inside a dry well as men crowd around it, jeering and celebrating in a sickening display of brutishness, throwing their fire torches at the clueless, helpless animal. As she is lassoed using car tires and hauled out, Pellissery embosses the sequence with his signature touch, a motif he visits repeatedly in his work: divine intervention. It starts raining, the men disperse, and the buffalo, now given a new lease of life by the same men who jeered at her a little while ago, escapes. The sequence ends with a fleeting shot of the buffalo’s muddy paw print juxtaposed with a man’s. If it’s the throbbing energy of the filmmaking that leaves us winded, the panache with which it is accomplished answers why Pellissery’s work — more precisely, his recent output — ought to fetch a larger doting audience.

A furious whirl of sound and imagery, “Jallikattu” throws us off and pulls us back in cyclically, never letting us settle down or cling on. Pellissery uses lengthy tracking shots to disrupt the pace, then chucks in a series of quick cuts to brace the narrative. As the fugitive animal starts wearing the group out, more men join in, each laying claim to it. Old rivalries are rekindled and new rivalries formed, and soon enough the village descends into chaos. As the search party moves to the forest (a terrific long shot shows the men clenching fire torches between the foliage, like fireflies buzzing around), the men’s patience wears thin. They begin to turn on each other, as was inevitable, and this natural progression reeks of familiarity. We realise that it never was about capturing a stray buffalo: the risky challenge its capture posed would allow the men a chance to stroke their egos, showcase their virility. Then again, it can be viewed as a resonant political statement, which, I am told (for I have not yet read it), the short story aimed for: it discusses the itch for freedom and the corruption of morals in search for power. There are several ways to look at it, but they, more or less, arrive at the same cynical conclusion.

With its ambitious (and mercifully quiet) parting shot, “Jallikattu” leaves us a lot to chew on. We are no different from the cavemen, it indicates, still belligerently fighting over prey having not yet learned the language of peace. And the prey still is, and quite possibly will be, an innocent.

[Not For Reproduction]