Breaking traditions, bending myths

“Cinema has its own language…” and how beauteously Nidhi Saxena’s film Secret of a Mountain Serpent brings it alive. Each scene is like a painting, every frame poetic and metaphors tell their own stories. As the film opened at the recently held Venice Film Festival, rave reviews followed.

In an exclusive zoom interview, the talented director talks about why less is more, how sounds, more than verbose dialogues can accentuate a film’s beauty. Her artistic film blends myth with woman’s sexual desires that rarely find an expression. She says, “Women’s desires are always suppressed. They don’t allow themselves to fall in love and even after marriage find it difficult to form a romantic relationship.”

Secret… celebrates women’s sexuality out of confines of tradition. The narrative set in the backdrop of Kargil conflict is very much an anti-war film. Nidhi observes, “We see anti-war films from the point of view of men, guns and borders, but back home for women its gloomy sadness.”

As sounds are integral to her cinematic lexicon, she lends an ominous ring to the telephone ringing, movement of vehicles carrying soldiers. Symbols, apples in particular form a persistent thread, so much so she laughs, “Often I would say jokingly; my film is about eating apples” The significance of the forbidden fruit and serpent rooted in Biblical references are obvious, but what isn’t is how she deconstructs the allegories to arrive at the crux. Genesis of her film came from time spent in Almora where she realised, “Society often idealises soldiers’ wives, without acknowledging them as women who endure long separations and the emotional strain of waiting.”

On choosing gifted actor Adil Hussain in the part of mythical serpent, she is effusive, “A snake can’t be a young person. It is an ancient thing, besides Adil is born to play romantic roles. On the sets he was all there, knew so much about snakes, about their emotional memory. In the 14-minute-long take where he transforms into a crying snake, both me and my cinematographer Vikas Urs had goose-bumps. I even forgot to say—cut.”

Directing an actor of his stature, she feels, was the easiest thing on the earth. Of course, life for indie makers like her, who don’t belong to the Bollywood school of filmmaking, is never easy. Such an experimental, experiential film was only possible through Venice Biennale Fund. Interestingly, her first film, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, was financed by the Korean government. Irony that none of her critically appreciated films have found any money from the Indian government is not lost on her. She says, “Makers in the West too marvel why the Indian film industry, which is so huge, does not support independent voices.”

As for her voice, how come both her films deal with loneliness? Her reply is introspective, “Don’t we women, who try to do things differently, feel lonely?” But, make no mistake she connects with the world with her vision of what true cinema is. In her next, we will see her exploring the life of female prisoners and there is another one brewing in her mind about a nomad. Is that the free spirit in her?  She answers, “I am in all my films.”

The kind of cinema she would like to be associated with is one which has its own language, is emotional, spiritual and liberating too. Coming from the land of Buddha, ‘stare at a flower for long and it will reveal itself’, she too is on the path of revelation and illumination. Of course, one which led to Venice was not easy, “It took me 10 years to get there.”

So to all those, especially makers from her alma mater Film Training Institute of India, Pune, who are DM’ing her for help and suggestions, she advises, “Don’t wait for anything. Just keep making films.” As she intends to; funds or no funds, lights, camera, action will be her forever mantra, drawing viewers into a cinematic trance where the line between reality and story quietly dissolves.