The method in his madness
Saibal Chatterjee
Vasan Bala is the first-ever Indian filmmaker to break into TIFF’s Midnight Madness, a section devoted to films that are out to shock and startle. Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota thrives on defying expectations. The narrative whimsicalities of the film impart a staccato, delirious rhythm to the plot
It took Vasan Bala as many as six years to bring his second film to fruition. But when you watch Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (The Man Who Feels No Pain), you quickly understand why. It is an action flick that is unlike any that the Mumbai movie industry has produced in the recent times. His debut, Peddlers, an evocative neo-noir drama, premiered in Cannes in 2012, but it remained unreleased. Happily, that is unlikely to be the fate of his new film.
The Grolsch People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award at the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival is a major shot in the arm for the film, a vote of support from an informed, exposed audience for the writer-director’s refreshingly unapologetic love for the genre movies that have nourished his creative vision.
But no less noteworthy is the fact that Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota competed with Hollywood biggies like Shane Black’s The Predator, David Gordon Green’s Halloween and Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation, and yet got the Toronto audience on its side: no mean achievement for a film made on a minuscule fraction of the budget of an American production.
Post-TIFF awards, Vasan Bala also singles out Gaspar Noe as one filmmaker that he looks up to among all those who had Midnight Madness entries this year. The maverick French-Argentinian filmmaker was in the fray with Climax. “It is hard to believe that my film won. The feeling will take a while to sink in,” he says.
Indeed, Vasan Bala is the first-ever Indian filmmaker to break into TIFF’s Midnight Madness, a section devoted to films that are out to shock and startle, to films that follow no established rules or rhythms. Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota thrives on defying expectations. The film’s narrative whimsicalities impart a staccato, delirious rhythm to the plot.
“All these years I’ve been fighting…this whole want of a plot,” says the director. “For me, the story starts from scene one. But the plot kicks in whenever it has to.”
It isn’t only the absurd quality of the narrative that sets the film apart; the background score — delightfully varied in terms of sound — enhances its inherent wackiness. The director admits to the influence of Shankar Jaikishan’s orchestration on the sounds that the film employs.
The male protagonist of Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, a young man who is congenitally insensitive to physical pain, is played by first-timer Abhimanyu Dassani. The cherubic, middle-class ‘superhero’ is on a mission that borders on the ridiculous. Yet, he is still a believable guy that the audience can whole-heartedly root for. Like the film itself, he has come in from the cold and does many a thing that you least expect him to.
The hero goes about his job in the company of a girl from his past (debutante Radhika Madan), an adventurous, unstoppable grandfather (Mahesh Manjrekar), and a one-legged karate master who inspires him to pull off ‘great’ deeds (Gulshan Devaiah).
Although Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota is a full-on tribute to B-movies of all kinds, the filmmaker grew up on a variety of cinematic influences. “The first film that my father took me to see,” he says, “was Franco Nero’s Django (a spaghetti western made in the mid-1960s). “Later on, Doordarshan used to curate such an interesting variety of films without the help of algorithms — Ozu and Bergman, Bollywood and MGR films. It was a great time.”
Vasan Bala points to the critical bias towards B-movies. “Rambo: First Blood, Taxi Driver and Born on the Fourth of July are all about Vietnam vets, but Rambo will never earn the status of a great film although it does not fall short in emotion, expression and craft,” he says.
How did he come with something as quirky as Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota? Vasan Bala replies: “When you are writing your film, you are so into that world that you are completely convinced about it. It is with that passion and zeal that you convince the producer. It was with the same passion and zeal that you make the film. You think it’s quirky or offbeat only when the film is out and people tell you so.”
Vasan Bala agrees that it is a tad surprising that Bollywood has never had a film in TIFF’s Midnight Madness before. “Bollywood is Midnight Madness 365 days of the year. We have a great B-movie culture, a great film noir culture. Making these films come naturally to us,” he says. The Toronto win for a Bollywood movie on its very first TIFF Midnight Madness outing is a result of the method in the film’s manic madness.
