The unconventional gaze

The wave of young indie Hindi filmmakers has a new player in Kanu Behl, whose debut Titli has found the approval of international critics

“Planeloads of people from Mumbai visit Cannes every year, I wonder what they do there,” observed master filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. He was commenting on the embarrassing tradition of droves of A and B list stars descending on the red carpet—where none of our movies were to be seen. In the three years since, the conversation about the Indian contingent at Cannes has begun to shift from gowns and coiffeurs to actual movies. After Miss Lovely in 2012 and The Lunchbox in 2013, this year Titli (which showed in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section for emerging directors), produced by Dibakar Banerjee and Yash Raj Films and directed by debutant Kanu Behl, has become the most raved about film from India.

“Indian indie Titli was the most exciting film I saw in Cannes, a breath of steamy air from the slums of Delhi,” wrote Jason Solomons, film critic, in BBC News. The story of a family of petty criminals and their youngest son who wants out, the film is a remarkable debut teeming with raw energy, passion and amazingly confident storytelling. Watching it was like seeing Mean Streets or City of God for the very first time—you really feel this could be the start of something big, just the kind of new voice and style of Indian cinema we’ve been waiting for.” Variety recognised “the rising profile of Indian indies on the international scene” in “Kanu Behl’s grittily impressive noir debut”.

Kanu Behl, 33, is a bespectacled, bearded, earnest-looking man, with modest manners and an air of quietude that contradicts his age. He bides his time between Mumbai, his place of work, and Delhi, his home city and muse. We meet at his parents’ flat in IP (Indraprastha) Extension in East Delhi. The narrow and poky contours of the house were an inspiration for the setting of Titli, he later reveals.

No release date has been set for the film as yet; the filmmakers are keen to get maximum mileage and word of mouth from the international festival route, before releasing it to a primed audience in India. This method worked for The Lunchbox last year. But, comparing the two is probably redundant. Titli, documentary in style and gritty in subject, is far from the sunshiny, audience-pleasing world of The Lunchbox. It is the world of Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and a far cry from Yash Raj Films’ mega Bollywood productions.

The film, portions of which he shows us on his laptop, explores the life of the eponymous character Titli—his two older brothers, played by Ranvir Shorey and Amit Sanyal— and his father, played by Kanu Behl’s father, actor Lalit Behl: an all-male household of carjackers in Delhi, prone to extreme violence. When Titli tries to escape the oppression of his daily life and his ‘family business’, such as it is, he is hemmed in, not just by members of his family, but also by the patriarchal structure of our society and the extremities of life in our cities.

Films set in Delhi tend to be caged by the Punjabi-inspired, big-fat-happy- wedding stereotype. The last big Delhi film, Queen, though endearing and fresh in spirit, pandered to the above. Not Titli. If you are from Delhi, the film comes as a rude shock, a punch to the gut. Accustomed as we are to a candied form of cinema, it shocks us out of our complacency. Behl does not shy away from telling it like it is. Titli’s older brother Vikram (played by Shorey) works as a security guard in a typical glitzy mall, the sort of ubiquitous place that dots the landscape of the city. His own life is lived in deep urban squalor, in the slums on the outskirts of Delhi. It asks: do we really have a choice when our life is lived between two such different worlds, between aspiration and deprivation, power and powerlessness?

“He works in a shiny world and comes back to an almost-forgotten world, a place that is stuck in a time warp. What else can he feel apart from anger, violence and frustration?” asks Behl.

Behl’s handling of his characters is so sure and sympathetic that a grotesque scene where Shorey ends up beating out the brains of a car salesman with a hammer leaves the viewer both on the edge of their seat and firmly on the side of Shorey, the wrongdoer. A brilliant actor whose career betrays the tragedy of Hindi cinema, where great actors are more often left out in the cold, Shorey says good scripts like this one are difficult to score.

Titli ends up challenging every stereotype we know. Behl’s biggest risk is in taking on what he calls the holy cow of Indian cinema: the family. The film shows us the circularities and the claustrophobia within families. When Titli (played by first time actor Shashank Sharma) looks to escape his brother’s oppression, he finds his brother is himself a victim, oppressed by his father, who in turn was oppressed by his grandfather. Behl drew on his own experiences of growing up in a patriarchal North-Indian family. He went through several drafts of writing, before arriving at the formulation, which is the basis of his script, that, we all end up mirroring our family and that oppression runs in circles. Behl read psychoanalyst RD Laing’s The Politics of the Family to deepen his understanding. “Growing up, my relationship with my father was not easy. It’s the template for families, especially in north India, where someone older ends up stamping his authority and presuming to run your life for you.”

In a way, filmmaking is his inheritance. His father, Lalit Behl, is an actor and directed some well-received telefilms on Doordarshan in the late eighties and nineties. His mother, Navnindra Behl, is a writer, director and stage actor who most recently appeared in Queen in a minor role. Behl senior was keen his son take up acting; the young man caved in and joined Barry John’s theatre group for a few years, but he was “atrocious”, he says. After earning an undergraduate business degree in Delhi, he went to study at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata. “I went to film school to understand the history of cinema. Once I discovered world cinema, I had something to aspire to. I wanted to spend some years forming myself correctly. It’s where I learnt that I’d rather fail and tread on new ground,” he says.

In film school and for a few years after, he made a string of hard-hitting political documentaries that would shape his voice as a feature filmmaker. He ended up in Bollywood purely by serendipity; while delivering a package for a friend to Dibakar Banerjee, they got talking and decided to work together in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Love, Sex aur Dhoka.

When he pitched his first idea to Banerjee, something of a mentor, he was advised to go back to the drawing board. “With my first script, I was trying to play director. I didn’t know any of the characters. I had to ask myself why I wanted to be a filmmaker. It is: to tell stories that are true to me, that have come out of my own experience.” Titli is a result of nearly two years of writing.

Behl has developed a vocabulary all his own. It is very different from that of his adopted home, Bollywood. “The state of Indian cinema is very reductive. And, there is a kind of anger within me in terms of the films I want to see made. There are filmmakers who want to find a voice for a cinema that is Indian and not Bollywood. The way countries like Korea and Iran have achieved it.” No wonder one international reviewer found the film “gives a strange look into India… the land of Shah Rukh Khan”.

Behl mentions the wave of young, independent filmmakers on the cusp: Ashim Ahluwalia (Miss Lovely), Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus), Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), Umesh Kulkarni (Deeol), Nagraj Manjule (Fandry).

“Titli is a very difficult first film. It shocks and shakes you. I find it liberating and exhilarating that the film does not hold back, it’s uncompromising,” says producer Dibakar Banerjee.

The editor of the film, Namrata Rao (Behl’s ex-wife), whose work has been lauded for bringing out the tautness of the script, echoes Banerjee. “It is about family and relationships and how people relate with each other, there is a universality in that.” Rao, who grew up in Delhi and understands a thing or two about patriarchy, crushing violence and the status of women in our society, says she did not need any persuasion to come on board.

The film may have created the strongest buzz recently enjoyed by an indie, but Behl fears the hype. “It often happens with me as a late viewer, where I feel, ‘Oh, the film is not as great as it was made out to be’, I just want people to see it without knowing anything.” Such is the state of Hindi cinema, it rarely gives us a chance to celebrate brilliance, when it does, it is difficult to miss it. Behl will have to live with the burden of expectation.

About The Author

Sunaina Kumar