THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Some films have the effect of a spray of paint refreshing the eye, abandoning codes to reinvent their own rules. The Jackson Pollock of Indian cinema is called Kanu Behl: he was born in 1980, in Kapurthala, in the state of Punjab, to two actor parents working for Indian television, and studied cinema at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, in Calcutta.
His second feature film, Agra. An Indian family, selected for the Cinematographers’ Fortnight in Cannes, in May 2023, opens with a few sinuous and psychedelic flows of gouache filling the screen. Which we quickly imagine represent the mental magma of the hero, Guru (Mohit Agarwal), a hallucinated and sexually frustrated young man, stuck in the narrow family home where he enjoys no privacy.
The space and the number of habitable square meters are the matrix of the setting: Guru lives on the ground floor of the home with his mother (Vibha Chibber), while his father (Rahul Roy, former Bollywood star) occupies the first floor with his second wife. This positioning acts as a metaphor for the glass ceiling that the ex-partner and the son endure on a daily basis: the first suffers permanent humiliation; as for Guru, confronted with this virilistic man, he feels all the more prevented from satisfying his own desires, to the point of losing his reason.
A madhouse
La Cocotte-Minute is on the verge of explosion. Guru, employed in a call center, has his only valves are his sex apps and also this false fiancée that he has created for himself, in the person of a work colleague. Intra-family conflicts escalate when a cousin arrives, a young dentist who wants to open her practice. Where are we going to put it, and who is still going to get caught up in the incessant negotiations to rearrange the size of the rooms?
The title of the film refers to this city in northern India, Agra, renowned for its jewel of Indo-Islamic architecture that is the Taj Mahal, but which is also home to one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the country. In other words, the filmmaker films a madhouse, a metaphor for an Indian society asphyxiated by lack of space: India is now the most populous country on the planet, with 1.417 billion inhabitants (narrowly ahead of China), on a territory barely six times the size of France.
Kanu Behl creates a playful, cartoonish form to make his film take off like a rocket, pushing the lights to the maximum. The first scene shows Guru eating, chatting with an imaginary woman, whom he suddenly picks up from the table. When he finally opens his eyes, another image emerges, creating fear in his hallucinated gaze.
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