My Mirror column:
From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?
Truffaut, a film critic who had made
his first short Une Visite in 1954,
thought of Les Mistons (1957) as his
“first real film”. Certainly, it already contains many themes he would continue
to explore over his cinematic career – women as objects of desire that seem to
mystify men, a certain realist poetry of everyday life, the unexpected rupture presented by death. What interests me most, though, is the theme of adult behaviour – in
particular, sexual passion or what Truffaut's narrator calls amour – as
seen through the eyes of children. The boys in the film are arrested by this
young woman’s beauty, transfixed by the stirrings of a desire they do not even
understand, and irritated by the fact of the lovers without quite knowing why.
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”
The Go-Between, with its sun-kissed sexual innocence and stark coming of age, is likely
to have been among the inspirations for Atonement, Ian McEwan’s
wonderful novel, which was adapted into the Joe Wright film. Like Leo, the 13-year-old
Briony is responsible for the betrayal that drives apart the two adults
she is close to, based on her childish misunderstanding of a charged sexual
moment she witnesses between the socially transgressive lovers.
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.
Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019
From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?
“Jouve’s sister was unbearably
beautiful,” begins the voiceover of François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (The Brats), as Bernadette Lafont cycles through the
historic streets of De Nimes – her slim, leggy frame suspended effortlessly
over her bicycle, her skirt billowing in the breeze, such a vision of lightness
that she seems barely to touch the ground. What we watch is five boys watching this young woman. The
eponymous “brats” of the film’s title follow
Bernadette everywhere, first with their eyes and then by actually stalking her,
alone or with her lover Gerard.
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”
The child on the cusp of adolescence
becoming smitten for the first time has been the subject of many books and
films over the years. In LP Hartley’s 1953 classic The Go-Between, which Joseph
Losey made into a famous 1971 film starring Julie Christie, the young narrator
Leo recalls the shaping summer of his childhood in which he first felt attraction. “My sister is very
beautiful,” his friend Marcus tells him one day, and after that, “for a time my idea of [Marian] as a person was confused
and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented.” Once
Leo helps Marian dry her hair, and Hartley describes the immersiveness of the
experience evocatively: “I was the bathing suit on which her hair was spread: I
was her drying hair, I was the wind that dried it.”
When Marian embarks on a
secret, torrid, socially unsuitable affair with a local farmer called Ted
Burgess, Leo finds himself turned into their messenger. The child enables the adult
relationship. But jealous, torn between his desire to please Marian and his own
inarticulate feeling for her, and childishly blind to what is really at stake,
he is also the one that brings it to its tragic end.
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.
Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019
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