My Mirror column:
A new crop of Indian short films brims with droll humour, sharp ideas and unusual juxtapositions
A young man wants a Western-style commode in Devvrat Mishra's short film Number Two
Leisure can
sometimes make one lazy. When one has the luxury of time, utilising it to the
fullest can be a challenge. What’s true of life is also true of film.
Especially in a film culture as verbose as ours, where the narrative dictum of ‘show,
don’t tell’ is more frequently observed in its breach, the tautness of a short
film feels like a welcome change. The form – defined by the Academy Awards as
“an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less,
including all credits” – imposes a certain economy on the storytelling, while
also being more playful with form. Indian short films, long starved of
distribution channels, are beginning to find place on OTT platforms like MUBI
India and MovieSaints, apart from YouTube.
Reflecting the state
of the country, the current crop of shorts ranges in tenor from parodic
takedown to darkly dramatic. The Wolf of Chawl Street (2017),
written and directed by Pranav Bhasin, takes the form of a faux-documentary
about a Banksy-inspired Indian street artist called Luv, who claims
responsibility for the countrywide declarations of modern love on our ancient
and medieval monuments. By scrawling or spray-painting “Rohan Luvz Lolita”(or
innumerable other couples’ names) on a wall of the Red Fort, the ‘artist’ not
only immortalises those lovers, for a fee, but also manages to include his takhallus:
“Luvz”. Apart from sending up a certain kind of rags to riches slumdog
narrative (think Gully Boy), the film has a kind of droll humour
that works more than scathing criticism: the ‘interview’ with Luvz’s mother,
for instance, where she says she was worried about him because he just spent
time drawing, ticking none of the recognisable markers of dysfunctional male
adulthood: “Woh sharaab bhi nahi peeta thha, toh uski shaadi kaise karne ka?”
Devvrat Mishra’s Number
Two, also about a directionless young man who isn’t well-off, couldn’t
be more different in tone. Mishra’s camera does not so much follow the film’s
teenaged protagonist as let him show us his Lucknow – a city of often
garbage-strewn streets, faded pillars and peeling posters, where he goes to
school in his faded blue uniform, comes back and irons clothes, which he then
delivers to people’s homes. This is a city still slow enough to make a bicycle
ride seem fast, with a night dark enough for glowing ice cream carts to seem
like islands of imagination. Ritik, awkward adolescent of the toothbrush
moustache and unrequited crushes, is quietly besotted with a girl he has never
addressed in words, not even when she stands across the ice cream cart from
him. His laborious writing of a letter to her – in English – seems of a piece
with his desire for the broken WC someone has left outside: the unfulfillable
promise of posh modernity. The West, for so many Indians, is a career: a hard
one.
Shazia Iqbal’s
wonderfully crafted 2018 short Bebaak, award-winner at MIFF,
examines westernisation from a different vantage point. A sharp young
architecture student called Fatin (Sara Hashmi) finds herself battling her
instincts when faced with a conservative cleric (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) whose
misogyny comes clothed – literally – in the language of religion. The film’s
most haunting moment is not in the battle of nerves between the two. It is the
two little madarsa girls who speak in the same breath of how women must wear
the hijab to avoid being possessed by djinns – and of their own giggly desire
to become English-medium because “English wale scarf nahi pehente”.
Even when not
announcing their politics upfront, Indian short filmmakers seem to be
responding with more immediacy to the country than most feature filmmakers are.
Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Kush (2013), which won Best Short in
the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, points to the present by
looking back to the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. A female
teacher must make sure that her class gets home safe from a school trip – but
one little boy on her bus is Sikh. In an instant, the harmless child becomes a
target for the majoritarian mob; for grown men, agents of ‘the law’, go from
being protectors to hunters looking for prey. Such a story offers great scope
for drama, or even surreal excess – think of Dibakar Banerjee’s segment in a
recent ensemble of shorts, Ghost Stories, where the zombie genre
allows us to perceive another cop at the head of a newly cannibalistic world –
but Bhutiani keeps things simple.
Necrophagy of another sort is at the centre of Prasanth Vijay’s 2013 short Amguleechaalitham (Manipulated by Fingers), in which two young men find themselves addicted to the consumption of a rather bizarre delicacy, one that demands greater and greater physical sacrifice. It is a strange, strange film, and yet unpretentious enough in style to make you stay and wonder: does desire feed on us rather than we on it?
Abhiroop Basu's 11-minute film Meal takes cinematic tension to its limits
The last of the
shorts I want to mention here is also about eating: Abhirup Basu’s multiple
award-winning Meal, which came out in February 2020 and runs a
harrowing 11 minutes without dialogue. Spatially, Meal is a
perfectly designed film. Its four characters occupy four rooms, with two
adjacent spaces often framed at the same time, a real-life split screen. But
there’s no internal symmetry: things are awry, and how. The juxtapositions are
deeply unsettling: the family sitting down to eat at a Rexine-covered table on
the left, a filthy washroom to the right. Basu strews the screen with clues – a
pregnant belly, a bruised face, a bloody gauze bandage, a hissing pressure
cooker, a broken clock, a torn sticker – but leaves us to connect the dots how
we will. The smaller the canvas, it seems, the sharper the etching.
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