Nihit Bhave on his debut short Phir Kabhi: Started wondering about couples forced to live under a roof during Covid-19

Writer-filmmaker Nihit Bhave seems quite captivated by holy matrimony. “Marital discord has shaped most of my stories,” he says. His first feature film as a writer _Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai_, directed by Anurag Kashyap, had a dysfunctional marriage at its core. His upcoming film, _Dobaaraa_, again directed by Kashyap, also features unhappy spouses.

Bhave himself is of the view that modern marriages are much more flexible, malleable, adaptable and hence wildly different from how they used to be a decade or two back. “I find the idea of a monogamous companionship slightly unrealistic and hence fascinating,” he says, counting Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy and Gulzar’s Ijaazat as the films that have influenced his perception of the institution.

No surprise then that he ventures into a close examination of marriage in his debut directorial short Phir Kabhi, starring Amruta Subhash and Manav Kaul as a couple, seemingly happy but not quite. While he is trying to play the role of the ideal husband, she finds their relationship incomplete, her desires unfulfilled. He is never with her in the
moment, leaving her thirsting for more.

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It was not a real or reel wedlock, but COVID 19 that proved to be the trigger for Bhave’s marriage story. The lockdown was weighing heavy on his mind and subconsciously, all his ideas started to have a tint of claustrophobia or an element of being trapped. “I started wondering about couples who were forced to live under a roof through the pandemic and their bubbling anxieties. Pretty soon, it was clear to me that I needed to write about one who were at the edge of spilling secrets to each other, but first had to own them up to themselves,” says Bhave.

Quite like Scenes from a Marriage, Phir Kabhi, is about the couple talking. The entire action is centred on conversations between two people. However, instead of a give and take, the film begins as internal monologues and imagined chats that each appears to be having with the other. A bit like the dual perspective device of Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. Then slowly it leads on to a final exchange between the two, but one which remains inconclusive, doesn’t have a closure. The resolution is left for another day; Phir Kabhi.

Bhave says the uncommon structure came about from how he himself is as an individual. “When I must make a big speech or have a confrontation, I often write it down first, then run it in my head, several times over. Which is where the idea of monologues came about. I needed the protagonists to have a full conversation, but without the disturbance of a response from the other side,” he says. He also wanted the audience to walk away with the feeling of having sat through their confrontation, irrespective of whether it happened in the film or not. “As you get to know the protagonists, you know their fears and their sorrows and their joys, to the extent that you can guess their reactions to the confrontation without having to actually see it,” he says.

Phir Kabhi would bring Badhaai Do to mind for some, but it is not an exploration of a lavender marriage, one of convenience. It is about an alliance between a gay man and a heterosexual woman that is built on deceptions but one in which neither can quite be counted as guilty. If at all there is anyone to blame, it’s the familial and societal structures. Bhave feels women and gay men have a lot of overlaps in a society as restrictive as India. “Both are held to certain archaic standards, both are oppressed by patriarchy, and both have to work to find their own voices and come out of their shells,” he says. So, you have the gay man in the film talk about having to live like a criminal and the
woman speaks about how she has always had to make do with things and sell herself short.

How much is the format of the film rooted in theatre and how do actors with a grounding in stage, like Kaul and Subhash, then help in actualising his vision? I ask Bhave. “I was keen to get actors who were quick on their toes and could give shape, form and feeling to these characters on the page,” he says. Not only did Kaul and Subhash grasp the characters well, but thanks to their theatre background, also finessed them with their improvisations, played around with their body language. “Amruta even got some of her own wardrobe to set. When I went to meet her to discuss the film, she had bought strawberry ice creams for us, because they played an important part in the script. Manav and I discussed the morality of his character; but apart from that, he just wanted to be completely spontaneous [with his
interpretation],” explains Bhave.

Despite being “fixed” in a defined space Phir Kabhi remains fluid and cinematic in its narrative. Bhave claims that he knew monologues can get boring so he tried to infuse them with as many relatable, nostalgia- inducing moments as he could. Structurally he wanted to place one whole monologue first, which would answer a lot of the questions raised in the latter one. “So even as the wife is pouring her heart out and asking for clarifications, we’ve already been made privy to the cause of her concerns; I wanted the audience to keep connecting the dots, so they wouldn’t just be passive listeners,” he says.

“The other fixed elements like the spouses being seen in the same parts of the house, doing similar chores, with similar shot-taking, was just my way of showing that two people can be perfectly in sync, without being perfectly in love,” he explains. Bhave might be the first person in his family to have ventured into films but is a third-generation writer with his mother and grandmother being published Marathi authors of short stories. In fact, he has been
trying to pitch his first feature film, co-written with his mother, based on her Marathi short stories. “But it deals with grief and it’s a bleak time to be trying to sell this story,” he says.

Bhave started out as an entertainment journalist with the Times of India and Hindustan Times. But while writing on films he realised that he wanted to try his hand at writing them as well. 2013 onwards he decided to focus on writing scripts that kept getting rejected till Kashyap took a shine to Choked in 2015 and decided to direct it. But before it could go to sets, Bhave went on to assist Kashyap in Sacred Games S1 and Lust Stories, and co-wrote Sacred Games S2, until they finally got to do Choked in 2020. “Over the years of assisting him and writing for him, I’ve learnt the importance of patience and spontaneity. His focus on emotion as opposed to technique has shaped my way of writing and thinking,” says Bhave.

The other mentor has been Marathi filmmaker Umesh Kulkarni, who supported Phir Kabhi by giving it a screening under his Arbhaat Short Film club at National Film Archive of India in Pune and was insightful with his feedback as well. Bhave feels Kulkarni has mastered the independent film genre and his films have the best kinds of plots, where a hyperlocal small incident is used to spin chaos of bigger proportions. Bhave wants to live in this indie space. As he
himself puts it, “somewhere between Anurag’s boisterous vision and Umesh’s subtle nuances”. Amen to that.

Namrata Joshi is an independent writer and national award-winning film critic. She is the author of Reel India: Cinema off the Beaten Track (Hachette, 2019).

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