A Death In The Gunj (2016): It’s hard to define the mood of unrehearsed foreboding and a vague sense of doom that is built into Konkona Sen Sharma’s fragile yet ferocious family-on-a-disastrous-hillstation-holiday film.If one didn’t know better, one would classify A Death In The Gunj as a whodunit. An Agatha Christie novel condensed into two hours of layered crisp crunchy but seemingly pointless conversations where families on a lazy vacation talk nonsense, play silly games evoking dead spirits(please!) while kids and pets run around in the large crumbling family home as the house-help grumbles about the sudden surge in domestic responsibilities.
It’s a familiar scenario for a tense exploration of fissures and fractures in the joint-family system. Satyajit Ray’s Aranyar Din Ratri , more recently Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do and Konkana’s mom’s Picnic have walked that talk with swimming success. Ms Sen Sharma doesn’t miss a beat as her keen eye for detail fills the frames with the kind of domestic familiarity and comfort that are known only to those who have spent large hours vacationing in lazy spots with their extended family.
Meet the Bakshis as they assemble in the family home in McCluskieganj. Nandu(Gulshan Deviah) ,wife Bonnie(Tillotama Shome) and their little daughter Tani(Arya Sharma) accompanied by two friends Mimi(Kalki Koechlin) and Brian (Jim Serbh) and above all, Nandu’s cousin Shuti(Vikrant Massey)-dear desperate bullied yet beloved Shutu the gentle lanb of the family have come to spend time with Nandu’s parents(Om Puri and Tanuja).
It is imperative to lay out the blueprint for Konkona’s family tree so we can make sense of the subtle unfathomable drama that unfolds leading up to an inexplicably tragic finale.
A Death In Gunj is a film replete with resonances and echoes from the past that can never fade or grow redundant. This is a universe we have all occupied at one time or another.And there is a ‘Shutu’ in all of us…unsure, uncertain of the future, lacking in selfconfidence and fearful of failure in life… It takes an actor of infinite skills to play everyman with individualistic skills. Vikrant Massey sets a new benchmark in performing the inconspicuous common man’s extraordinary struggles to remain visible to a world that takes his presence for granted.
Vikrant has two remarkable breakdown sequences and an outstanding seduction sequence on an antique chair with the perky Kalki. It’s rare to see a director in India shoot a lovemaking scene so innovatively.As Kalki takes charge over the besotted virgin-boy’s pants and groans, we are transported into a rare firmament of furtive pleasures that leave a lasting impression.
Not that the other actors lag behind Massey. Every actor blends with virile vehemence into the multilayered fold of the plot bringing to the family tragedy a kind of heft and immediacy that we haven’t seen in a Hindi film for a long time.
Ranveer Shorey stands out from the gallery of performers. His arrogant libidinousness is celebrated in a striking dinner get-together where his wife , a simple homely woman, is treated shabbily without her being aware of it.
The year is 1979 and remarkably, the debutant director doesn’t resort to positioning popular film songs from that era to project periodicity. Her period palate is far more ambitious. Konkana Sen Sharma uses colours, fabrics, mores and mannerisms from those times without seeming to put undue stress on manner and dress.
Sirsha Ray’s camera tiptoes over these ordinary lives, seeking the romance of the routine, offering glimpses of the gorgeous in the non-descript. A Death In The Gunj tells its leisurely story with befitting skill and deftness. The upheavals on the placid surface erupt suddenly . But we are not unwarned. Kalki’s wanton sexuality and her sudden shocking behaviour in a graveyard sequence , a wife suddenly performing fellatio on her husband, and of course the unscheduled love-making on the creaky uneven chair…they all indicate imbalances of Nature that middleclass families secrete in their lives.
In that sense Shutu is not real. He is a thought too ordinary to be a metaphor, at the same time too extraordinary to be just another Everyman.
“You are beautiful, almost like a girl,” Kalki’s mercurial Mimu tells Shutu as blushes with pride.Some sych oxymoronic compliment would be apt for this film. It’s beautiful yet rugged.Masculine in subject yet feminine in its delicately drawn scenes and moments.How do we put this? Just go watch.
G Kutta Se(2016): “ There are some films that seduce us with starkness. G Kutta Se in Haryanvi and Hindi is not one of them. This extraordinary film derives its unhampered persuasive powers not from posturing but from ripping apart all our perceptions of what cinema is and should be , by entering the nervous system of a patriarchal community where women are still not given the right to choose their partners.
And even if they are, this is a right men can snatch away at will.
Sex, says debutant writer-director Rahul Dahiya is used in gender-challenged societies to negotiate the spaces that divide men from women and to bring the women to heel, preferably spiked. On more than one occasion a man is seen forcing himself on a woman arguing she has nothing to lose if she has s*x with him.
The women’s will is not just secondary , it is often non-existent. This stunning piece of cinematic invention opens with a man groping a sleeping woman and masturbating…Save your shocked responses for later. As we move ahead through Rahul Dahiya’s crime-infested morally degenerate badlands at the Delhi border ,the narrative is unsparing in its brutality.
The harsh merciless hinterland generates the worst kind of patriarchal prejudice and violence, as one young borderline-antisocial man Virender(Rajveer Singh) grapples with turbulent innerworld of bias mixed with a dash of modern liberalism.
Eventually, though, Virender becomes that bigoted radical automaton we see all around us, slaughtering human beings and their morale for suspected disrespecting of cows, heckling young couples in the park, appointing themselves as judge and executioners of our social order….
There is an ongoing rush of urgent subtexts coursing through the veins of this virile film. But there is so much happening on the surface, we can get to what lies underneath only after we stop gawking in stunned silence at the visuals that director Dahiya has accumulated in an onrush of barbaric brilliance.
Be warned. G Kutta Se is not an easy film to watch .The camera(Sachin Singh) moves like a seething predator through the rugged landscape combing hearts and loins for signs of fugitive compassion. This fuming film stomps resolutely on all our cinematic perceptions to give us a fresh imminent and extremely disconcerting view of reality at the grassroot level.
A young girl Diksha(Vibha Tyagi) who is a hapless victim of an MMS scandal is brutally murdered by her parents.A girl Kiran(Neha Chauhan) who dares to fall in love with a man of her choice(Nitin Pandit, brilliant) is dragged out of a hotel room while eloping and brutally humiliated on the street by the cops, a married woman who has run away with her lover is almost gangraped in a moving car…
The inevitability with which one catastrophic illustration of societal psychosis is heaped on another could have made this an unbearably topheavy film. Rahul Dahiya succeeds in making every episode seem so real and palpable, you will get the feeling of being there, though you’d often wish you weren’t.
G Kutta Se is an acutely disturbing exposition on radical witch-hunting. The film resorts to a tone of narration that brooks no inflexions. Its unflinching unblinking long and hard stare at tradition-sanctioned violence against women makes it one of the darkest films in living memory. The narrative moves restlessly through a series of events that seem unrelated initially, but come together finally in a damning indictment of a social order that sanctions a negotiable space for a woman’s sexuality but does not allow her to be an equal participant with the male in the process of negotiation.
Dahia’s writing is savagely humorous at times.A horny lover-boy sneaks his girlfriend into an empty ramshackle grocery store for some coitus. When she won’t go all the way he’s left to his own (handheld) devices….A runway woman(Rashmi Somvanshi) trapped in a car with a group of physically aggressive men snatches a drink and gulps it down.
We heard a lot about how a woman’s ‘no’ means a no. G Kutta Se tells us how and why a woman’s ‘no’ can mean a ‘yes’ , and if not then how it can be construed as a ‘yes’ .
This is not a film with easy solutions to age-old problems of gender discrimination. Nor does it offer us the comfort of neat cinematic solutions. Its physical frankness and an unrelenting view of the residual violence of ‘real India’ make us wince and squirm and often wish we were some place else.
If only there was a better place to run off to.