In a newly evolving,
gradually urbanizing world, the air is coated with dust.
The dust, flung from the
massive pits into which concrete is poured and steel rods are implanted, is
something that blocks out the glint of the sunlight, to the effect that even as
it is bright and glitzy in this new town, the grey skies bear down on the
denizens of the ground.
In the little, crammed
ghettoes that lie at the periphery of these wannabe skyscrapers, the dust is an
element of the land- like the muddy water flowing from squeaky faucets, the
greasy icing on a birthday cake or the sweat and blood that flows in its
gutters. It coats your face, your clothes and even your conscience.
Kanu Behl’s sobering, stunningly
bleak debut is about a youngster trying to escape the grime, the filth and the
moral decay that surrounds him in the form of his psychotically-messed up
siblings. But while there is enough argument in his favor, as to make us
empathize with his world-weary gaze at a pitch-dark world around him, by the
end of the tough-to-stomach tale, he himself ends up throwing up all the filth
that has accumulated in him for his single-minded dream.
‘Titli’ is indeed a
harrowingly brutal tale of trying to break free in a cruel world whose walls
won’t really cave in but Behl’s nuanced storytelling help to make even the
unpalatable vital, organic and pretty much unmissable.
The eponymous slacker is a
particularly unhappy, listless young man, who has dreams of buying up some
parking floor space in a newly developing mall in Gurgaon. He needs to cough up
a chunk of cash for that and when he steals the same from his elder siblings,
such is his incompetence that he loses it all too.
The elder brothers, a
hair-trigger Vikram (Ranvir Shorey) and the calmer and possibly homosexual
Bawla (Amit Sial) are naturally furious. Together, the three brothers jack
vehicles on lonely highways, with always bloody results and after the said
money goes missing after a job gone wrong, Vikram is most infuriated on knowing
that his younger brother wants to fly the coop.
The family decides to get
Titli married and the girl, a middle-class college girl by the name of Neelu,
is chosen and eventually considered for manipulation by this all-male ensemble.
What begins from here is a twisted tale of man-woman relationships, with Behl
and co-writer Sharat Katariya offering ruthless but often precise insights on
the skewed gender and socio-economic issues at play in this godforsaken
hinterland.
But while the premise might
sound like that of a gritty caper- Titli deals with the reluctant Neelu to let
her meet her married lover, while she herself helps him out with the money-
rest assured, it isn’t. This is hardly what you call a thriller. Rather this is
the kind of intelligent, astute character drama that we have forgotten to make.
Instead of glorifying Titli or merely lambasting his flawed, fearsome yet
believable brothers, this is a film which admirably does not choose sides and
keeps everything real.
Behl, who assisted producer
Dibakar Banerjee for the searing ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’, showcases a cannily
similar flair for both authentic flavoring as well as deliciously clever nuance
crammed in the most unlikely ways. ‘Titli’’s barely furnished mise-en-scene-shot
evocatively with 16mm cameras by Siddharth Diwan-is nevertheless alive and
throbbing with meticulous detail- from dinners of gravies made with ‘sattu’, to
the choice of sub-par cinema playing on the midget TV screens, from the dank
lighting of the bedrooms to the cardboard boxes as improvised furnishings in a
house as bare as bones. It is all fantastically crafted and Behl and Diwan
often craft mesmerizingly earthy sequences- sequences so terrifically soaked in
well-timed silences- Titli gazing at a humming insect inside his lampshade,
Bawla gazing at women shaving men at a roadshow, Vikram momentarily pausing as
a victim’s blood spurts on his face and Neelu crying silent tears on her
dim-lit nuptial night, not so much of grief but rather of hideous fear of the
lithe monster lying beside her.
But all that would have been
a window-dressing if the narrative had not been as nuanced as the visual cues
on display. The dialogue often crackles and naturally so- the profane lines
barked out with raw immediacy, the more spontaneous wisecracks often hilarious
(at one point, Bawla bursts out that women make great salespeople for almost
everything) and the quieter moments (the ones in which Titli and Neelu try to
bond awkwardly) have a solid ironic punch that lends great weight to crucial
scenes. The writing is often a marvel, the characters are all disgustingly
flawed yet all too real and it would be a crime to reveal more of this.
‘Titli’ is not really a
family drama, as much as it is not a crime caper. The pacing is fantastically
unhurried but after a time, and a particularly flawless first hour, there are a
few rough spots in the narrative, more out of Behl’s first-time ambition rather
than any inherent problem. For one thing, the storyline often diverts from the
central thread of Titli’s dysfunctional siblings and shifts its focus to the
two hapless leads. While this warrants some starkly beautiful moments, the
focus is a bit inconsistent. The violence is often bald and grotesque and there
is one moment which will bring down a hail of gasps but the humor is often
fascinatingly crueler. This is a film in which a little daughter repeats her
new guardian’s curse blankly, where a man is infuriated over the difference of
maroon and red, where a test drive turns from smart-mouthed to gruesome, where
a husband breaks his wife’s hand so that the fixed deposit dowry can be settled
and so much more.
Both newcomers, Shashank
Arora as the lean and mean Titli, and Shivani Raghuvanshi as the spunky Neelu,
are quite fabulous. Arora grounds his character’s despair in a blend of
horrific chauvinism and believable weariness, while Raghuvanshi nails that fine
balance of vulnerability and spirited pluck.
But the show often belongs to the
great actors around them- Sial is impressively balanced between rage and
genuine empathy, Lalit Behl, the director’s father, is quite exceptional as the
idle patriarch, content to sink his biscuits into tea even as his sons argue.
And the best of all is Shorey- fiery, hot-blooded, hilariously sentimental and
yet with a wonderfully mushy core in his messed up soul- just check out how he
tries to please Neelu at the breakfast table.
‘Titli’ is not a film
everyone can digest. Behl fashions a bleak, restrained, desaturated world in
which the brightest color might be that of smear of blood. It tells volumes of
the fundamentally screwed-up nature of parenting and family upbringing in the
country’s massive lower classes but not all of it is communicated directly and
there is more to than this sprawling film than meets the eye. It does not quite
answer its arguments to satisfying effect but that is perhaps the part of its
untamable, angry beauty- a film which, like the harsh reality of the brutal
terrain it explores, has an ending far from perfect. Still, both the climax and
the film’s raw power give us hope- for cinema in particular.
My Rating- 4 and a half
stars out of 5
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