First Take: Bollywood & its portrait of desolation

Nothing comparable  with Shabana Azmi ’s portrayal of desolation in Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar. But three films in recent years came close to getting the dynamics of isolation right.

What would you do if you were trapped in a highrise for days without food, water or company? Eat a bird although you are vegetarian? Check. Drink your own urine to quench your thirst?  Check. Talk to a rat for company’s sake? Check. The incredibly gifted Rajkummar Rao, no stranger to internalized performances, immerses himself in Vikram Motwane’s Trapped with such arresting authenticity that after a while we cease to watch the skill that underlines the outstanding performance.

All we see is the suffering of the trapped soul, his desperation to get out of that apartment where Shourya is locked away far from civilization though not even a road away from the bustle.Unlike other great survival dramas like Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway or Ang Lee’s The Life Of Pi (the later exceedingly overpraised) Trapped is set right in the heart of a swarming city filled with people who ….how do we put this politely?….don’t give a duck about the next person.

Motwane who also  helmed the underwhelming Lootera brings out the apathy in the large city in a sequence where Rao announces his departure to his flat mates. They barely muster a response and one of them indifferently asks where he is going Answer not relevant. The preamble which includes a sudden eruption of romance with a woman Noorie (Geetanjali Thapa) ends just as suddenly once Rao’s character is trapped in an apartment so far removed from human contact that no scream of help reaches anyone’s ear. It’s terrifying premise executed effectively by  a script that relentlessly explores the theme of isolation and  survival.

Cinematographer Siddharth Diwan is as fearless behind the camera as Rao is in the front. Together they shoot Shourya’s growing decline and fading hope for rescue with minimalist magnificence. The shots are cut with no room for lingering woundedness. If Shourya bleeds we can’t look away.Rao’s projection of his character’s waning strength is as authentic as Tom Hanks in Castaway. Rao’s Shourya is no islanded recluse. The little apartment perched smugly and stoically in the sky is all the world that Motwane’s plot inhabits. There are no frills and no digressions. The background score  by Aloknanda Dasgupta is used with rationed effect, quite like time, food water and  hope running  out on the protagonist. The one time that the background score lights up the soundscape is when Shourya collects rainwater in every vessel he can find in his high rise prison. It is an interlude that reminds us of what we have and what we take for granted can be snatched away within moments. Even the flashbacks are severely restricted(just one , actually, when we see Shourya arguing passionately in favour of vegetarianism before being forced to eat a bird in the present crisis). What we get is the core element of survival. The very epicenter of self preservation where no action or reaction is prohibited. It is very difficult for one actor to hold our attention for two hours. Rajkummar Rao gets our undivided attention unconditionally. His character’s awful predicament is so tangibly tactile as to leave us shaken for good. Among the many remarkable hurdles that Motwane’s storytelling crosses with its beleaguered protagonist is the whole idea of getting the geographical periphery of the crisis right. The apartment building, the isolated flat and its distance from any human contact are all measured out by the storytellers, so that we never feel we are being tricked into believing in Shourya’s crisis. At one point during the actor’s journey from self assertion to self abnegation, and beyond, we see Rajkummar Rao’s trousers fall off from his waist to the ground. This is probably a random unscheduled crisis that was allowed to remain on the editing table. It helps serve two purposes. It shows the character’s complete repudiation of vanity in the face of death.  It also shows how much weight the actor has lost in the course of his journey. It’s hard to imagine Trapped working so effectively without Rajkummar Rao. He lives every second of Shourya’s struggle for self-preservation. His journey is so illustrative of a migrant’s metropolitan melancholy as to make any attempt to add signboards to the storytelling is akin to shining torchlight to supplement sunlight.

Rarely does the location serve as an antagonist. In  most films the  environment that nurtures the plot and the  characters is  captured with affection. Not so in Dipesh Jain’s  Gali Guleiyan. It is  the  first film I’ve seen that doesn’t  romanticize the  location that nurtures the  character’s innermost fears of being trapped in the environment that breeds  only stagnancy. Old Delhi, Chandni Chowk is the villain of  debutant director Dipesh Jain’s haunting parable on desolation and self-destruction. Manoj Bajpayee has portrayed loneliness before with remarkable resonance and restrain in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh . Here, it is a quality of  exacerbated desolation conveying such innerving decrepitude that we soon realize we can’t  trust Khudoos (Bajpai) to tell the truth to himself, let alone to his only friend Ganeshi (Ranveer Shorey, as realiably solid as ever) or to us, the bystanders who are sucked into Khudoos’ world of weltering disaffection.

There is a constant flow of ambivalence in the narrative, buoyed by the stifling location. The claustrophobic hemmed-in gullies of Old Delhi serve as suffocating relics of a mind that is  rapidly losing  touch with reality. Bajpayee plays the man on the brink of disintegration with a  remarkable degree of  anguished control. He is a man who can blow up like a  home-made bomb at any time. When Khudoos does explode at a seedy hotel where he is eating and (contrary to law) drinking on a cheap table ,he spares  us and himself none of his swirling  wrath.

Lekin Khudoos ko gussa kyon aata hai? As portrayed by Bajpai, Khudoos is the epitome of  bitter disenchantment. Life has offered him nothing. He has accepted  his  state of  nullity so far. But now the  CCTV cameras that he likes to look at the world through, has captured a young  adolescent boy Idris(Om Singh) being thrashed by his father (Neeraj Kabi, as defiantly fearless  as ever). The boy, played with unrehearsed sensitivity by newcomer Om Singh , spends  most of days  gallivanting with his  only friend Ginny,  and dreads going home to the cloistered sterile  environment  of dreaded domesticity. It is in the way the narrative brings  together the two disparate yet conjoined worlds of Khudoos and Idris that this remarkably sunless dim-lit drama acquires its piercing light of illuminated darkness.

At times, I felt Dipesh Jain had worked his way backwards from his clever and  startling  finale. But then there is so much here that is genuinely raw, hurting and  hurtful that I quickly banished all possibilities of subterfuge. Writer-director Dipesh Jain takes  us into the world of the young and the ones  who forsake their youth to  become  prematurely old . The narrative  brings  both the past and the present in the same line of  vision . It plays a cruel game  of deception with Khudoos’ mind allowing him access into a world of adolescent pain that he, Khudoos has experienced personally. This empathetic  knowledge  does not give Khudoos the right to own the pain  of a boy who is  a mirror-reflection of his own  tattered childhood.

For what it tells us about desolation and its consequences Gali Guleiyan is an enormously significant work of cinema. Do we care about the  person who lives nextdoor? Manoj Bajpai’s  projection of  disorientation doesn’t allow us to feel any  extravagant empthy for Khudoos. What we feel is his abject wretchedness. Manoj  owns every nervous twitch  every slurred  word of his character. This is  a  performance  of tremendous  skill, bringing to the  psychologically  disturbed character a sense of  imperturbable impunity. And debutant Om Singh’s scenes with his screenmother played by the wonderful Shahana Goswami are so filled with warmth you almost expect the tale to eventually embrace the growing sense of tenderness  that seems  to mushroom from somewhere  deep in the recesses of the suffocating setting.

But then life for those who lives in inescapable misery is not about a way out, but survival.Gali Guleiyan strips desolation and loneliness of  all  the romance that Mrinal  Sen had brought  to Shabana Azmi’s face in Khandhar. On Manoj Bajpayee’s face all we see is despair, and a longing for a better life that we know will never be his.

The meek can never inherit the earth. Manoj Bajpayee’s depiction of  human desolation in  Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh is the best since  Jennifer Kapoor in 36 Chowringhee Lane. In the acutely thought-provoking Aligarh, which is about a homosexual man’s right to privacy, Manoj Bajpayee playing the disgraced professor Srinivas Ramchandra Siras, sits alone in his dingy one-bedroom professor’s quarter, with a drink in hand and a Lata Mangeshkar song by his side. In the semi-darkness, in a room lit by dim hope, Srinivas listens to the Melody Queen Lata Mangeshkar’s Aap ki nazron ne samjha pyaar ke qaabil mujhe, that timeless Madan Mohan composition from the film Anpadh. The song plays on a rickety portable sound machine.

But its sound resonates across the professor’s silent universe, like a  melodic meteor cutting through a sky of solitude.It’s a life-defining moment. Director Hansal Mehta holds the unflinchingly intimate  camera(Satya Nagpaul’s lensing is lucid leisurely and  lingering)  with ruthless resilience on his protagonist Manoj Bajpai’s face. For a good 5-7 minutes we see Bajpai’s respond to the amazing lyrics by Raja Mehdi Ali Khan, with  Lata Mangeshkar’s voice imbuing the words with impassioned immortality, the Professor’s emotions swell up and spill over , his face gradually collapsing into a map of his broken heart. It’s a lengthy sequence with no cuts. For most of the film there are only two characters on screen . The Professor and his solitude. Sometimes they are joined by an affable journalist from Delhi . The greatness of Aligarh as a cinematic achievement comes entirely from the way Hansal Mehta captures the eerie stillness of  protagonist’s isolation .There is no attempt heighten the pathos of the professor’s predicament. Siras’ professional and social ostracism come only as further ratification of his stunning aloneness .Hansal Mehta and his cinematographer look for legacies of lingering loneliness in the mundane.The unremarkable acquires an immense importance in the way it qualifies Srinivas Siras’ state of alienation. For large stretches of storytelling Mehta favours a bare stripped-down soundtrack with incidental sounds, and of course the sound of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice where the Professor seeks solace in the singer’s audio portrayal of ideal love and its thwarting by social forces.

Aligarh begins with a shot of a small sleepy North Indian town one winter morning. A creepy quietude shrouds the dawn. A manual rickshaw comes into sight with an aging man in an ill-fitting suit as its passenger. The rickshaw stops before a weather-beaten apartment block. The man in the rickshaw gets up to go up, and the rickshaw puller follows suit with his passenger’s small polythene bags(probably vegetables for night dinner). We remain outside the apartment while a couple of noisy intruders barge right in without knocking. There is commotion, voices suggesting confusion and aggression. The opening tells us exactly what the director thinks of violation of privacy. Without getting defensive or self-righteous in tone Aligarh constructs a passionately persuasive case for an individual’s right to use his private space as he wills. Hansal Mehta and his writer Apurva Asrani go beyond the discursive borderlines that define the ongoing debate on legalizing homosexuality. This is a film that pierces the very heart of the matter. The protagonist’s right to privacy is represented in the abject stillness that surrounds him. Unlike Jennifer Kapoor’s Violet Stoneheim in Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane, Prof Siras does not crave to get away from his solitude. There is no desperate effort to woo or bribe people to give Prof Sirus company. When the convivial—and initially we don’t know whether the ‘con’ in that word is of particular relevance– journalist Deepu Sebastian (Rajkummar Rao) enters the Prof’s punctured privacy , there is a kind of excitement and movement in the lonely man’s life that he hasn’t experienced before. We get to know of his abandoned family duties, his love for his job  far away from home, and his inability to find love, through his conversation with the affable Deepu. The two form an asexual friendship where the younger man does what the Prof longs for the most. Deepu listens. Among the many things that Aligarh tells us about  the bereft life of the lonely professor is the crying need for attentiveness. Someone has to listen to the silently screaming  heart of a man who longs to be loved. Hansal Mehta’s narrative is constantly listening. Aligarh  is a very silent still cinema  punctuated by bouts of obscene intrusion by outsiders attempting to seek sleaze in the protagonist’s sublime solitude. For many intimate interludes the camera doesn’t move. It captures Sirus’ decrepit soul in postures of meditative anguish where Lata Mangeshkar’s singing serves as an antidote to loneliness. In Aligarh, Hansal Mehta’s shots often run into several minutes. He is not afraid that his audience would get distracted and restless. The director’s larger fear—and the one he constantly safeguards against—is that he may disrespect his protagonist’s space by moving around in it restlessly. A deathly stillness surrounds Siras’s being.

Manoj conveys his character’s broken soul in his eyes that never accuse but question us constantly without speaking out. When Sirus does get a chance to discuss his life he opens up with bashful caution in front of Deepu who is attentive and respectful. Bajpayee’s portrayal of solitude and dereliction is par excellence. The closest we’ve came to seeing such tragic isolation on screen was when Jennifer Kapoor and Shabana Azmi played ruined lives in 36 Chowringhee Lane and Khandhar. Bajpayee’s state of supreme seclusion starts in his eyes and makes its way into the slouching sitting postures where his limbs seem to be clutching at his soul for comfort.

The vivid camerawork by Satya Nagpaul captures Bajpayee in dark corners where he sits in near-uninterrupted silences . His quivering but dignified voice is sometimes heard pleading about injustice, for instance when the doctor at the dispensary refuses to meet him or when the landlord comes to cut off his electricity supply. Here, bewilderment and quiet acquiescence make way for bouts of feeble protest. But who is listening?  By the time Apurva Asrani’s poignant but dignified screenplay reaches the courtroom to seek justice for the protagonist, Siras is beyond caring. His frightening detachment from debates on homosexuality and social stigma –he frequently doodles or dozes in the courtroom while his defence lawyer played ably by Ashish Vidyarthi argues his case– serve as compelling counterpoints to what we normally perceive as societal approval. There are many episodes in Aligarh which make it eligible as Great Cinema. My favourite is Siras’ boat ride with Deepu Sebastian in the Ganga. The two men bond here beyond age and sexual preference. Bajpayee’s face crinkles in coy shyness when Rao asks him if he has ever been in love.If this is a performing triumph for Manoj Bajpayee then it’s no less of an achievement for Rajkummar Rao who brings a spot of sunshine into the Professor’s gloomy life. Rao is the Chunnilal in the gay Devdas’ life. Hansal Mehta could have avoided that sequence towards the end when Bajpayee’s gay love-making is juxtaposed with Rao making ferocious love with his journalistic colleague in the backroom of his office. This is to say,  if it is heterosexual screw..g then even public places are allowed. Such broadly definitive defiant depictions of social stigmatization could have been avoided. Manoj Bajpayee’s eyes say it all. The rest is just residual. Aligarh must be seen for its powerful eschewal of moral judgements of an individual’s private activities. It ends on a question mark on how the professor’s life ended.We come away haunted and stricken by an inexplicable guilt for what was done to Prof Srinivas Sirus . We come away thinking about the sad sorry life of a good professor who happened to be gay.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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