Neel on Wheels movie review: A unique, enigmatic 'voice' elevates this short film from its technical inferiority

At first sight, there appears to be little to draw you towards Neel on Wheels, the Large Short Barrel Select Film screened at Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival. The images are shabby, with grain sprinkled all over the frames, eerily reminiscent of the .3gp video era. There is little by way of production value, the entirety of the film having been shot inside a typical Delhi bachelor’s rundown apartment, with minimal natural light. The shots are not all that impressive, the angles quite arbitrary. Neel, the subject of the film, is paralysed waist down, and one can be forgiven for suspecting that this must be one of those films hurriedly put together to make the deadline for some godforsaken short film festival. [caption id=“attachment_5827451” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  A still from Neel on Wheels. YouTube[/caption] But then, Neel (Nikit Gokuldas) begins to speak. More specifically, he starts chuckling and breaking into guffaws as he tells his story. The tale of the accident that laid his legs to waste; of his life, now cruelly a tale of two halves, quite like his body. Of his now non-existent love life, of his surges of sexual desire, of marijuana comforts and the music, always the music, and the guitar that gives this musician company in a world that seems more cruel, more distant, by the day. This lasts for just over six minutes. He ends on a blackly comic note, joking about his plans to start a food delivery service whose imaginary name gives this film its name. Suddenly, you realise that it is all over. You have spent six minutes with a young man whose story has moved you, sucked you in, without ever aspiring to cinematic legerdemain. None of the things that Neel mentions in his voice-over will seem remotely original. His increasing contempt for people, their endless placations and truisms, reaches a high watermark when he calls them the choicest of words at one point. He rides his wheelchair through his apartment, musing about how the simplest of tasks appear so difficult now; how everything seems so far away. Neel is angry. He feels alone. He does not want to interact with others because he does not want to be a burden on anyone. It is an anger we can empathise with, but will perhaps never understand. Maybe he realises that, and therefore decides to chuckle throughout his voice-over, laugh about the absurdity of the situation. But with this little addition to his voice-over, he turns this film and our expectations on their head, making it a tiny oddity among the shorts featured at the Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival. Neel on Wheels achieves a simplicity and universality by managing to keep its protagonist distant from the viewer, despite our increasing empathy. The minimal use of cinematic language has the effect of allowing Neel’s words to sear through the images, slowly acquiring the contours of a manifesto. A sizable portion of all that the film achieves can be attributed to Neel’s chuckling, harrowing, almost mocking, enigmatic and, for this reviewer, queerly saddening. His laughter appears to come from so far away, a place beyond our reach, but one that beckons due to its strangeness.     Neel on Wheels is far from a great film. But that does not matter. It should not. For it may not even be a film at all. It does not need to be anything. In the camera and a mic to provide images and audio respectively, it might just be construed as a setup to communicate one man’s voice to the world. A voice that could easily have gone unheard. But now, far away in a distant corner of Delhi, in a dingy apartment, a man sits on his wheelchair playing a little tune, perhaps alone, and the moment he becomes too aware of his solitude, he remembers the sound of his laughter from the film, and suddenly reminded of his audience, breaks into another guffaw. Watch Neel on Wheels here.