Reviews, G5A-NYIFF screenings: Agli Baar, Absent, El’ Ayichi

Devashish Makhija is a Kolkata boy who was so shattered by his mother’s death that he got on to a Mumbai-bound train, in an unreserved compartment, and has been living here since. After a stint in advertising and after assisting debutant director Anurag Kashyap on Black Friday, he decided to go solo. Black Friday was about the Mumbai blasts and was stuck with the censors for years.

But for an unreleased Oonga, all his efforts to make a feature film have been unfruitful for about a decade. In the meanwhile, he got opportunities to make shorts, about a year ago, and made four of them—very very, short short films. Appropriately, he has named his production company Terribly Tiny Talkies. Taandav, which has Manoj Bajpai playing a head constable and was released on an online movie streaming website in February, is not part of this three-film pack, which was screened at G5A’s Black Box, on Tuesday, 05 July.

Agli Baar translates as Next Time.

Remember Martin Niemoeller?

Niemoeller was a German Protestant pastor, born 1892, died 1984. He was anti-communist, and initially, supported the Nazis, until they made the church subordinate to state authority.

He is best known for his powerful statement about the failure of Germans to speak out against the Nazis:

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Makhija takes the essence of this ‘poem’, creates a milieu within the slum demolition scenario in Mumbai, with a female battling advocate and a contract killer on their respective missions. He adds a religious angle to it, and sledge-hammers the message of standing up for the poor and defenceless, in just three basic scenes. His cinematic phrases consist of tight frames, smaller frames within frames, just about three locations in the same vicinity, silences to enhance the impact of ghastly events, mobile phone cameras as ominous, two-way tools, mirroring grim reality and sending out SOS signals, crisp dialogue, a pan-freeze that screams out, and performances that leave you spell-bound—all within 7 min (approx). Agli Baar’s win in the Best Short Fiction Film category at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) was well deserved, and I am glad I caught it, albeit six months later.

Though he denies any influence of Anurag Kashyap, Makhija undoubtedly shows a penchant for choosing subjects that would identify with the choices of Kashyap, and, to an extent, Ramgopal Varma. He is a gifted writer too, as the screenplays and dialogues of his films suggest. Trimala Adhikari as the petrified Rukhsana is dynamite, Abhishek Banerjee as the killer Mahinder is terrorising, though he does pretty little (it is all cleverly conveyed), Gazal Dhaliwal provides the girl-friend’s off-screen voice effectively, the tried and tested Rasika Dugal plays an entirely convincing advocate Faiza, and Tushar Pandey makes the lout Javed come alive, completely uninhibited.

Rating: ****

Absent (the e is missing in the film’s title)

Theatre of the absurd, acted out as realistically as possible. A man on death row makes an impassioned plea to his Warden that he be allowed to see his daughter one last time. It was premièred in April, at a private venue, in Mumbai.

Iqbal talks about his little girl Aziza, recalling the time she emerged from his wife Shaheen's womb, “bum first”, about the day she walked for the first time, about the day she will get married. And how he has been missing these milestones.  Distraught, he now makes one last desperate attempt to get time-off to see her one last time, before going to the noose. But the off-screen warden remains unmoved.

Barely three lines break the monologue of Javed, most of it shot in tight close-up. As writer, Makhija remains ambivalent. You are drawn into sympathy by the character’s sheer intensity of delivery. At the same time, both the situation and the enactment are also farcical. Is he talking about human rights abuse here? Or is he poking fun at a recent real-life hanging of a man convicted for his role in the Mumbai blasts of over two decades ago? It is one location, with one on-screen actor, another who provides 2/3 lines of off-screen responses (the Warden) and the executioner, who just comes in at the end, as we see the noose and the hood. Unlike his other two films, there is definite end here. But his real story comes across as what happens before the events depicted in the film, and what was happening off-screen even as the hanging was taking place.

It is political dynamite, and though he is an activist, Makhija lets his film take only one skewed, weird, fictionalised historical excerpt from time within memory. As writer-director again, he is a little below par, after the high standard he set for himself in Agli Baar. Vikas Kumar, playing Iqbal, is a discovery. He can mouth inane, contrived, as well as heart-rending, emotive dialogue with equal élan. And in close-up, he is amazing too. It’s a great help that he is basically a dialogue coach. Hindi, Urdu and English flow easily from his chords.

While he needed the camera to say a lot of things in Agli Baar, in Absent, Devashish Makhija relies heavily on one actor. The title has confused many. One can hazard a guess and say that Iqbal was an absent parent, and regrets being so.

Rating: *** ½

El’Ayichi (Alternate title: Aise darraya mat karo/Don’t scare me like this)

After one straight and one metaphorical title, Makhija gives us a clever, stylised one. It is indeed cardamom that he is referring to, but in deference to the Mexican style of filming, that he takes-up towards the end, he breaks up the Hindi word elaichi (or elayichi) to read El’Ayichi, almost like El Dorado. He admits to using music that is a tribute to the Sergio Leone directed and Clint Eastwood starring Italian spaghetti Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s.

A woman keeps hallucinating about her dead husband, who keeps appearing as a life-like ghost and talks to her. The ghost tells her that he tried to commit suicide twice, but it did not work. A local train went through him the first time and even after jumping from a high-rise building, he suffered no injury. But how did he actually die? Good question, but not relevant. Do ghosts commit suicide? Maybe, suggests Makhija. The husband’s ghost follows her into the toilet and even enters her body, speaking through her moth in his own voice (sci-fi?). In the end, he asks her to check if their maid, who keeps shooting a mix of stupefied and ghostly looks at her, is a ghost too, like him. A jar of elayichi will decide, before the 4 min 55 sec. duration runs out.

El’Ayichi almost works as a black comedy, falling short, literally, by falling short. It’s too short to let the comedy sink in. As a bizarre ghost story, with humorous treatment (the toilet scene, him entering her body, the cowboy Western crescendo as she approaches Bindu in the kitchen, holding a burning cigarette), it does hold attention. And the idea of a ghost wanting to commit suicide is truly worth a laugh. Some influence has probably percolated down from the film versions of Vijaydan Detha’s rustic Rajasthani story, Duvidha, which was adapted into cinema twice.

Amol Palekar's Paheli (2005) is the story of Lachchi (Rani Mukerji), who is married to a man only interested in making money. A ghost (Shah Rukh Khan) falls madly in love with her. On the wedding night itself, the husband leaves home, for five long years, on business venture. The ghost takes on the husband's appearance and enters Lachchi's life. A few years later, when the husband returns home, the villagers and relatives are bewildered. How this situation gets resolved is the Paheli.

In Detha's original tale, the story ends on a less dramatic note. A wise shepherd tricks the ghost into a bag that is thrown into a deep well and the real husband returns home in triumph.

His wife silently picks up her homely tasks again with tragic submission, for it is the ghost whom she loves.

Mani Kaul filmed it in 1973, with an unknown cast (Ravi Menon, Raisa Padamsee). The film is set in rural Rajasthan, and relates a popular folk-tale about a merchant’s son, Krishanlal, whose relationship with his young bride, Lachhi, is thwarted by his work, and a ghost, who falls in love with her, resulting in the ghost soon impersonating the missing husband.

For those who don’t ‘get it’, and wonder what the ‘ghost of an idea’ was, Makhija, at the post-screening Q &A, cited two master directors: French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian legend Abbas Kiarostami (Kiarostami had passed away the previous day). Godard agreed that every film should have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Kiarostami, when asked why his films ended at points where there was no real ending or resolution, and he said, “But the story does not end there. It continues outside the film!”

As is his norm, Makhija hand-picks his cast and gets the best out of them. Nimrat Kaur (Lunch-box, Airlift) and Divyendu Sharma (Pyar ka Punchnama, Chashme Baddoor, Ekkees Toppon Ki Salami) are right there. Divyendu evokes sympathy, though it is suggested that the character is a loser or a bad husband or both. Vibha Chibber (Chak De! India, Saawariya, Ghajini, Jolly LL.B.) is given just a couple of lines, but it is the couple of eyes that create the ambience.

Rating: ***

On Tuesday, 12^th July, at the G5A-NYIFF, you can see

The Threshold (Winner – Best Actor and Best Actress, at NYIFF)

(Not to be confused with the Marathi short, Daaravtha, screened earlier at this festival. Daaravtha, in Marathi, is also translated as The Threshold)

Director – Pushan Kriplani

Cast – Neena Gupta, Rajit Kapur

Hindi | 87 mins

A North Indian couple, in their early 60s, at their mountain retreat. Their son has just gotten married, a reception has ended and all the guests have left. She chooses this moment to tell her husband that she is leaving. What follows is an endless day: the avalanche of this long-gathering decision and what it means to a decades-long relationship. Fragments of conversations, silence and chaos, as nostalgia mingles with menace and tenderness with cruelty. What will they succeed in rescuing against the landslide of memory and emotion?

 *Post Screening Q&A with actor Neena Gupta and Producer Akshat Shah