Anmol Sidhu, whose film Jaggi was a hard-hitting statement on toxic masculinity, now trains his camera on the lives of orchestra dancers
Beyond Carry on Jatta and Jatt and Juliet, beyond balle balle Punjab, stands Anmol Sidhu’s hard-hitting statement on toxic masculinity, Jaggi. While the young director’s debut film has been picking up laurels ever since it premiered in 2022 at Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, Sidhu would not care to repeat himself. As he is ready with yet another film, as yet untitled, an incisive look at the struggles of orchestra dancers, the film will certainly bear the stamp of realism. It has been born out of an actual incident and based on tales of scores of such women Sidhu interviewed. But the genre, he insists will be totally different from Jaggi.
Indeed, a film on dancers will have a lot of music and dance and he has picked up songs and pop references which are an integral part of Punjabi weddings. But it will not be all naach gaana as we or our cinema understands it. Interestingly, Sidhu’s young actors not only first learnt how to dance, but he even captured them performing at actual marriage functions and not reel ones. He shares, “None of the marriage sets you see in the film have been created but are scenes from real weddings.” Precisely why, it took him a long time to shoot.
The trigger for the film lay in a tragic incident of 2016 when an orchestra dancer was shot dead on a stage in Bathinda. So affected was Sidhu by the unfortunate turn of events that he noted it down in his diary. For the making of his film, the more he interacted with these dancers, the more he realised the challenges they face on stage and in their personal lives. Circling around five women, he can’t say whether the film will be as brutal or intense as Jaggi, but it won’t shirk away from looking at harsh realities of Punjab in the eye. There are many more concerns that bother him and you will soon see him exploring issues like Punjab’s drug problem for sure, but not in the clichéd fashion, in which these are often depicted.
Growing up in Kauloke village in district Bathinda, what made this youngster move against the tide and tread on a path Punjabi cinema rarely does? Well, Sidhu recalls how as a young child he would get epileptic fits and since bright light triggered that, his parents kept him away from television. Thus he missed watching regular Hindi cinema. Once cured, his first introduction to cinema was on a laptop and invariably movies with a cutting edge. If Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur remains his Bible, he also swears by films like Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. In Punjabi cinema he has been inspired by Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot. Of course, his real guru is theatre person Chakresh, from whom he learnt how to immerse oneself fully in the character. The same rules of becoming one with the role, gain and lose weight, not cut hair or shave your beard, are today applied by him on his actors. Like Jaggi, his new film too stars many debutant actors. One day he would love to work with big names like Dev Kharoud, Gurpreet Ghuggi and even Jaswinder Bhalla — all of whom he thinks are phenomenal actors, only typecast. “Comedy’, he insists, “is not an easy genre to master. Only of late, it is getting formulaic.”
If his cinema is candid to the point of being discomfiting, he is equally honest in his assertions. While making Jaggi, he insists, he was only trying to communicate the pain of a man under sexual assault and not trying to take any unwanted cinematic liberties in the name of realism. Certain meanings and words that critics attributed to the film, he was totally oblivious of. Why he didn’t even have any idea that films are reviewed and there are critics to do the job. And when Jaggi landed at film festivals, he was often at a loss for words. Today, of course, even heavy questions like, ‘what is the purpose of cinema’ evoke more than a logical answer. Naysayers may feel cinema can’t change society, he believes, “Movies, especially, those that stay with you, possess the power to transform you even if by a .01 per cent.”
Jaggi may have touched more than a raw nerve and won praise too, but he knows as of now he and his cinema are only a work in progress and he is yet to develop a distinct voice of his own. But, he is certainly in quest of a language, that will not necessarily make him stand out, but certainly those on the margins whose stories he cares to tell.
