A fresh gaze
Saibal Chatterjee
Their films may not make big bucks at the boxoffice but an exciting new breed of independent Mumbai filmmakers has created a viable alternative space for themselves. Their films are increasingly finding their way into metropolitan multiplexes.
In the past few months, films like Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan and Kanu Behl’s Titli have played alongside Bollywood potboilers and held their own in a marketplace dominated by superstar-driven vehicles.
Riding on the back of positive reviews and word of mouth publicity, these defiantly non-mainstream Hindi films have earned encouraging commercial dividends.
“The audience for small, independent films is definitely growing,” says actor Kalki Koechlin, whose Margarita With a Straw, directed by Shonali Bose, made it to multiplex screens earlier in the year.
Ghaywan and Behl are a class apart because despite having learnt the ropes from the likes of Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee, they have, in their critically acclaimed directorial debuts, refrained from aping their mentors.
Masaan has nothing in common, stylistically or in terms of substance, with any of Kashyap’s films. Similarly, Behl’s Titli has its own unique tone and tenor, far removed from the world of Banerjee’s cinema. The new brand of realism — raw, natural, and shorn of all vestiges of melodrama — is theirs, and theirs alone.
With the exhibition space expanding slowly and steadily to accommodate a kind of cinema that defies the industry’s norms, these young filmmakers are carving a niche for themselves.
First-time directors Shlok Sharma and Bikas Ranjan Mishra, too, are poised to do just that.
Sharma worked under both Vishal Bhardwaj and Anurag Kashyap, but the narrative kernel of his first feature film, Haraamkhor, featuring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Shweta Tripathi, is anything but derivative.
Drawn from real life in the Indian hinterland, the story of the film centres on complications sparked by a middle-aged mofussil school teacher’s infatuation with a 15-year-old girl student.
With his first film, former journalist Mishra, whose directorial debut, Chauranga, has been produced by Onir, has delved into the darkness at the heart of a village in the grip of class and caste oppression.
Neither Haraamkhor nor Chauranga embrace any of the conventions of the more regular strand of independent films emerging from the Hindi movie industry.
Chauranga is scheduled for release in the second of January and its producer is confident that it will receive an enthusiastic response.
Says Onir: “Films like Talvar, Killa and Masaan have done well despite not being mainstream films. I feel this is a very good time to release a film like Chauranga. The audience is opening up to stories like these.”
With Onir’s own upcoming film shot in Delhi, Shab, and debutante Ruchika Oberoi’s Island City, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, in the pipeline, Indian filmgoers looking for adventurous storylines can expect the trend to continue.
What sets these films apart from the rest of Mumbai’s independent cinema is the source of inspiration. These filmmakers aren’t taking their cues from Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie. The violence they depict is of a non-physical nature. It is perpetrated by social systems and urban pressures, and not by men wielding guns.
Oberoi, who has passed out of the Film and Television Institute of India, regards the Finnish master Aki Kaurismaki as her favourite filmmaker.
Kaurismaki’s black humour, understated drama and minimalist style make him a different kettle of fish from the American and Hong Kong filmmakers, who inspire Anurag Kashyap and other Hindi film directors of his ilk. If that is what Island City delivers, it is bound to be a clean break from the conventional.
In 2013, films such as Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox and Hansal Mehta’s Shahid were commercially released to a strong popular response. Mehta’s latest film, Aligarh, which had its world premiere at the Busan Film Festival, is slated for release next year.
Significantly, apart from the aforementioned Hindi-language films, several films from the other film production centres of the country have also garnered applause at the multiplexes of late.
The successful release of non-Hindi films like Avinash Arun’s Killa (Marathi), Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court (Marathi, Gujarati, English), M. Manikandan’s Kakkaa Muttai (Tamil) and Bengali filmmaker Vikram Aditya Sengupta’s wordless Labour of Love has made a deep dent in a business in which starless and songless films had no chance until recently.
Kashyap and Banerjee have gravitated towards playing ball with established mainstream Bollywood banners. The space vacated by them has quickly been taken over by Ghaywan, Behl and the rest. Setting their own rules and bringing a new sensibility to bear upon the craft of filmmaking, they are set to take the story in an all-new direction.
