Masaan: Review

Trains, both metaphorical and literal, are at the heart of Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan. They are a surprising metaphor for the stirrings of first love. As two young people fall in love, a beautiful couplet unfolds on the soundtrack: “Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai/ Main kisi pul sa thartharata hoon”. Like the locomotive that ran past fields of kash in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, train are also symbolic of escape. It’s no coincidence that both Devi (Richa Chadha) and Deepak (Vicky Kaushal)—the central figures of Masaan’s parallel story strands, each looking to escape Banaras and its limitations—find jobs working with the railways.

Trains also contribute to one of the gentler moments of heartbreak in the film, which won two awards in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. We already know that Devi wants to leave her home in Banaras, find a job worthy of her qualifications and escape the moral censure of her father, Vidyadhar (Sanjay Mishra), a former Sanskrit teacher, now a pandit at the city’s holy ghats. She gets a job as a ticket seller at the railway station, informs her father she might move out. But one day, over lunch, her sweetly plainspoken co-worker explains that of all the trains coming to the station, only 28 stop, while 64 pass through. It’s easy to come here, he says, but it’s difficult to leave.

This is not what Devi—or the audience—wants to hear. The odds have been stacked against her ever since the opening minutes, when her maiden romantic tryst with her boyfriend at a motel is broken in on by the police. The boyfriend panics, locks himself in the bathroom and slits his wrist. Instead of hushing things up, the police officer in charge tells Vidyadhar that he must come up with Rs.3 lakh—a sum way beyond his means—to prevent a video of his daughter turning up online. Vidyadhar—conservative, shattered—takes his frustration out on his daughter, asking her why she brought shame upon him when he “let her free, like a boy”. Devi lashes out at him at well, accusing him of contributing to her mother’s death.

As Vidyadhar scrambles around for money and Devi gathers up the shards of her dignity, another, seemingly lighter story unfolds. Deepak, a young college student in a family of professional cremators, meets Shaalu (Shweta Tripathi). She lives in a nicer part of town, and her surname—Gupta—indicates that her caste is a lot higher than his, in a city that really cares about such things. As the already-fragile relationship between Devi and her father frays, Shaalu and Deepak become close, a progression played with delicate humour by Kaushal and Tripathi.

By the end, you feel like you know these people very well: Vidyadhar, trying, failing, and then trying again to be a good man; Devi, whose mortification gives way to righteous anger; the small-town coquettishness of Shaalu and Deepak’s inability to keep whatever he’s feeling from registering on his face. Even the smaller roles are beautifully etched out—Devi’s railway station colleague (played by Pankaj Tripathi) is as loving a parody of a small-town government official as I’ve ever seen.

Masaan doesn’t strive for effect—it achieves it by degrees. No one stands out, but everyone does an outstanding job. Grover’s screenplay has a depth of observation and a sense of timing that point to his twin careers as lyricist and stand-up comic. Cinematographer Avinash Arun comes up with the same unfussy, simple compositions that marked his own directorial debut, Killa. Indian Ocean contribute three evocative songs (the score, by Bruno Coulais and them, is over-insistent). The performances are near-perfect: Mishra tortured and prickly, Chadha tamping down her natural combativeness until it’s no longer possible, and Kaushal making a supremely confident debut. And in his first film, Ghaywan (who assisted Anurag Kashyap, one of the film’s producers, on Gangs of Wasseyur) sees that everything comes together simply and movingly.

I don’t think there was any great need for the two stories to intersect—it’s one of the few times the film makes a decision that’s a nod to convention and not something that deepens our understanding of the characters. (One could argue, on the other hand, that the idea of sangam (confluence) is teased throughout the film.) Yet, apart from this, hardly anything happens that’s inconsistent with the film’s world or its elegiac tone. This could have been a film about gender rights, caste and small-town corruption, but these issues are only acknowledged to the extent that they affect the characters. We’re wrapped in their lives, and like any great film, we’re anxious for the future well-being in the end. I left the hall thinking not of pandits and funeral pyres, but of sooji ka halwa as atonement, of a young boy desperate to dive for coins, of red balloons loosed into the night-time sky.

This review appeared in Mint.

Killa: Review

It’s not surprising that the opening shots of Killa are a slow glide down a forest road, a diminutive figure sitting on the beach after sunset, and a young boy coming in from the rain. Nature registers with astonishing force in Avinash Arun’s film. It never just rains, it barrels down. Winds howl. Waves crash. And when the sun shines, the light is clear and touched by something other-worldly. It’s visually impressive, yet it also serves a higher purpose. In a film that’s so focused on childhood and memory, the fierceness of the elements prevents the narrative from slipping into sepia-tinted nostalgia.

Eleven-year-old Chinmay (Archit Deodhar) and his mother (Amruta Subhash) have just moved to a tiny seaside town in the Konkan region. His father died recently, and that’s obviously on his mind, but his biggest problem at the moment is adjusting to life in a small town (his mother requested a transfer from her government job in Pune because she thought the change would do them good). His school life gets off to a rough start: introducing him to the class, the teacher announces that he’s a scholarship-winner, an announcement that does nothing for his street cred. Still, he eventually falls in with charismatic, authoritative Yuvraj (Gaurish Gawade), class clown Bandya (Parth Bhalerao) and their gang.

Killa’s central scene—the clearest example of Arun pitting human drama against the backdrop of nature—takes place when the boys cycle down to an old fort. Chinmay has just beaten the highly competitive Yuvraj and the others in a race. While they’re fooling around, he wanders off to explore the fort. There’s a sudden storm, and he’s forced to take shelter. When he emerges, he realizes that the others have left him and gone. We see him screaming their names, but the wind is so strong we can’t hear the sound.

Was the abandonment intentional? Did Yuvraj have a hand in it? Or was it just bad luck that Chinmay disappeared from view? We’re never fully certain. At any rate, Chinmay reaches home, physically unharmed but emotionally dented. The betrayal seems to unlock the sadness and rage in this hitherto placid boy—he acts out, accuses his mother, who’s dealing with work troubles of her own. For a while, things are stormy. Then the seasons change. The sea becomes calmer. There’s a healing incident involving a drunkard and a boat trip. There are apologies all round. And there’s another upheaval, met with grace and acceptance.

Arun based this, his first film as a director, on childhood memories of living on the Konkan coast. His previous work has been as a cinematographer, and he took the decision—rare for directors—to shoot Killa himself. He has an eye for little details: a crab scuttling across the sand; the spiral of a staircase; a pencil box with compartments that pop out. Killa takes its cue from recent Marathi films about children (Shala, Vihir, Fandry) by resisting sentimentality and instead looking at childhood as a time of great uncertainty and flux. Yet, for all the turmoil, the film has charm to spare. The young cast is wonderful, especially Deodhar and the scene-stealing Bhalerao, and Tushar Paranjape and Upendra Sidhaye’s writing has a relaxed humour to it.

Even as a first-time director, Arun has the good sense not to push scenes into revealing their meaning. Early on, Chinmay and his mother visit a lighthouse, and a guide explains how its light guides ships home. Much later, Chinmay reads aloud a poem about a sailor surviving a storm and finds courage in the image of his mother. The film could have spelt things out at this point but Chinmay just smiles and says to his mom, “Deep, isn’t it?” It’s moments like these, which leaven emotion with humour, that make Killa such a pleasure to watch.

This review appeared in Mint. 

The boy in the well

It was November 2013, and Avinash Arun was in Goa with a rough cut of Killa. The film, his first as director, had been selected for the National Film Development Corporation’s Work-in-Progress Labs, in which directors are advised on how to see their films through to fruition. One of the advisers was British film critic and long-time supporter of Indian cinema, Derek Malcolm. “People said different things; it’s a little long, it’s beautifully shot, there’s nothing in the film,” Arun recalled. “Derek, on the other hand, just said: ‘It will be very cold in Berlin in February’”.

It was very hot in Mumbai in mid-May when Arun told me this story. We were sitting in the Andheri office of Jar Pictures, the film’s producers. As Arun was to find out, it was indeed cold when he travelled to Germany to attend the Berlinale, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. The film had entered in the Generation Kplus category, which is dedicated to children’s films. It won the top prize, the Crystal Bear, awarded by a jury of 11-14-year-olds. Earlier this year, a considerably older panel declared Killa the Best Marathi Film at the National Film Awards.

A young boy (Archit Deodhar) and his mother (Amruta Subhash) arrive in this small seaside town. Still coming to terms with the death of his father, he has had to leave friends and family behind in Pune. Not unnaturally, he blames his mother for getting transferred. Yet, as the narrative quietly unwinds, we see him embrace his new surroundings and find a group of friends. There’s a sub-plot involving the mother that gives us a clue to why she keeps getting transferred, but Killa mostly sticks close to young Chinmay as he explores, fights, makes up, acts out; in short, behaves like any normal child.

Like many first-time film-makers before him, Arun mined his childhood for memories. His father had a government job, which meant that the family would relocate whenever he got a new posting. One particular stint early on in Arun’s life had a profound influence. When he was 3, his family moved to Murud, on the Konkan coast, for three years. “The film is about this introvert child who’s out of his comfort zone. It rains all the time, he has no friends. This was my experience.”

The film started to form in Arun’s head while he was studying at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. “Images from the time I was in Konkan would keep coming to me. After some time, I had to ask myself, why are all these things, I saw when I was very young, still following me? It was in trying to answer this question that Killa started taking shape.”

After graduating from FTII, Arun started working as a cameraperson on Hindi and Marathi films. His plan was “to work for a few years as a cinematographer, and if someone likes my idea and I find a producer, I can make my film.” While assisting Anil Mehta on Cocktail, Arun sought out a screenwriter named Tushar Paranjape, whom he knew from his FTII days. He narrated the idea that would become Killa, and asked him if he’d write the screenplay. When Paranjape agreed, Arun asked him to write a 40-page treatment and—sans producer or financier—wrote him a cheque for Rs.10,000.

The next piece fell into place on the shoot for Kai Po Che!, which Arun was again assisting on. The executive producer on that film was Ajay G. Rai of Jar Pictures, who happened to see Arun’s work on a short film by Gul Dharmani called Friday Night. The two of them got talking, and Rai mentioned that he was looking to produce a regional language film. He asked Arun if he knew of anyone with a promising idea. “Mere kaan khade ho gaye,” Arun said. He told Rai that he had this idea that kept haunting him, and began narrating an outline of Killa. Rai stopped him after 10 minutes, called his partner, Alan McAlex, and asked Arun to start again. Two days later, he got a call. He was going to be a director.

Arun decided to shoot the film himself (in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts), despite nearly everyone advising him against it. He wasn’t sure anyone else would be able to get the images in his head on to film. He was also convinced of the necessity of a protracted shooting schedule. Though the film took only 28 days to shoot, the production was stretched out over five months. “I wanted to wait for the right light, the right weather,” he says. “I wanted to have that difference. I wanted to have that feeling that time has passed.” The result is one of those rare films where changes in wind, light and scenery register with the force of emotions.

A curious and rewarding trend in modern Marathi cinema is the number of films about (though not always geared towards) children. Killa follows in the tradition of Shala, Balak-Palak and Fandry: its vision of childhood is clear-eyed and unsentimental, and there’s a darkness that offsets the charm of its young players (in particular, the irrepressible Parth Bhalerao as Chinmay’s friend Bandya). Arun didn’t include one of his darkest memories from the time, of being pushed into a well by another child. He was unhurt, but it triggered a fear of water in him, as well as a sense of betrayal that took a while to get over. This incident is transformed into the tremendous sequence at the fort (the titular killa), where Chinmay is left alone in a dark space, looking up at the light, the same way Arun must have been.

If you’re the kind who pays attention to film credits, you’ll see Arun’s name on screen a lot in the coming months. Killa will release in theatres on 26 June. The following month will see the release of two films he shot: Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, which recently picked up two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and his biggest project till date, the Tabu and Ajay Devgn-starrer Drishyam. “I didn’t plan all this,” he said. “If I’d thought about it, I don’t think I’d have been able to do it.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.