Bollywood Baatein: Extraordinary films about ordinary people

There is something to be said about conscientious filmmakers with tight budgets. They understand the need for economy as well as their characters do. Which is why when conscientious filmmakers are given unlimited budgets to shoot, they go haywire: Shyam Benegal in Zubeida, Govind Nihalani in Dev and Ketan Mehta in Mangal Pandey: The Rising are prime examples of this murder-by-excess syndrome.

Which is why I wish Gaurav Madan, Prateek Vats and Uday Gurrala the directors of Barah x Barah, Eeb Allay Ooo and Mail never get more money than the shoestring budget given to their maiden feature films.

Gaurav Madan’s Barah x Barah is a moving gently nudging saga of mortality and memory. Like the Ganga splashing against the eroding river banks of Varanasi, this precious little film with a big heart captures the undulating rhythms of life with such subtle seamlessness, we almost miss the point: there is no point to life; we live, we die.

Barah x Barah, a remarkably tender subtle and unostentatious debut by director Gaurav Madan, captures the essence, the nullity of existence in mundane images and dialogues. The characters, their homes, lives and words have an assuaging life-like feel and texture, as if the director forgot to yell ‘cut’ and the actors continued to live the lives assigned to them by the script. There is a listless continuity to the lives led by the characters.

No fancy music, no lingering lenses define these lives. They are who they are. To look so naturalized one has to be a part of the Varanasi’s complex cosmopolitan culture. Madan never lets the narrative forget PM Narendra Modi’s ubiquitous presence. His voice floats out at us from blaring television sets and politics never far away from the characters’ range of topics, though the hero Sooraj (Gyanendra Tripathi) is outwardly apolitical and wholly taken up with the task of making a living for his family: an ailing father (brilliantly played by Harish Khanna), a silently supportive wife Meena (Bhumika Dubey, so natural she makes the camera seem like an intruder) and their little son.

Later this small silently struggling family is joined by Sooraj’s sister Mansi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) who has moved to Delhi, a betrayal for which the father has never quite forgiven her. None of this is spoken. Most Hindi films make the mistake of overstating their case. Not this one. As in most middleclass families very little emotional energy is expressed. Everything is to be understood.

The film tilts its pugdee at all those faceless people in bustling towns who toil from morning to night without any hope or expectation of a reward. There is an uncelebrated tragedy at the heart of lives lived on the edge. Gaurav Madan’s slim flab-free noiseless film understands the human tragedy of obscurity.

The very strangely titled Prateek Vats’ Eeb Allay Ooo is about the monkey menace in parts of Delhi where Sarkari Babus dominate the scene, and those wretched ground-level workers who are hired as monkey repellers. Luckily Eeb Allay Ooo succeeds in staying float despite its bizarre cultural specificity. It is a slice-of-life tale of a reluctant monkey repeller, played with extraordinary sensitivity and rare understanding of characterization and personality-momentum by Sharadul Bharadwaj who was lately seen as Ratna Pathak Shah’s autorickshaw companion in Unpaused. Bharadwaj belongs among that rare breed of actors who sublimate their own personalities and are so submerged in their characters that we can never recognize the actor when he is not on the screen. So before I ask the real Bharadwaj to stand up, shall we pause to consider the exceptional realism in the way Bharadwaj’s Bihari migrant Anjani Prasad’s character interacts at home (a seedy airless chawl) and at work where he needs to scare monkeys away but ends up scaring his job away. It’s a wretched life. The writing by Shubham is so immersed in the immediacy of living that there is no pause to sentimentalize Anjani’s desperately poor life. While the backdrop of the plot is squarely squalid, there is never any room to revel in that squalor.

Eeb Aalay Ooo (the sounds used to intimidate monkeys) is exceptionally freed of conventional cinematic props. The background music is used sparingly, and the sound design (Bigyna Bhushal Dahal) is such that we hear much more than just what is relevant to the scenes.

Eeb Allay Ooo doesn’t mean to startle. It just wants to remind us gently but persuasively of those who exist outside our range of vision.