Great Indian male gaze

The unsettling gaze of the Indian male towards women in the post-2000 cinema has been very one-dimensional. Apart from Selvaraghavan, who has an original albeit borderline misogynistic look writ large on his protagonists' faces, almost no other film maker has gone beyond the nexus of lasciviousness and desperation.

However, two recent releases, Qaushiq Mukherjee's Brahman Naman and Anurag Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0, suggest that Indian cinema is finally evolving. I took an intense liking especially to the former. Set in the 1980s Bengaluru, the movie's eponymous protagonist (a mysteriously alluring performance by Shashank Arora) is a quiz enthusiast in his late teens who forms a formidable team with his two equally nerdy Brahmin friends (Tanmay Dhanania as Ajay and Chaitanya Varad as Ramu).

The movie, exclusively available on Netflix, harks back to the days of Bengaluru when Malleswaram and Jayanagar were hubs of activity, unlike the newfangled areas like Koramangala and Whitefield these days. With the razor sharp biro of Naman Ramachandran (his reviews on South Indian cinema for Sight and Sound magazine are quite a read), Mukherjee imbues the movie with an underlining subtext of sexism that never gets overbearing.

In one of the movie's many poignant scenes, when Sid Mallya's irritating character of Ronnie gallivants around with his fetchy girlfriend, Ramu laments that "we get the brains..." to which Ajay chimes in with "...and they get the girls". A few scenes later when they skedaddle from a prostitution area, Naman tells Ajay that all they have is 'trivia'. Beneath that veneer of learnedness, Naman is just another testosterone-fuelled teenager who would rather be dead than be the beloved of a girl who has pimples on her forehead. This is one of those characters that Noah Baumbach would love to create, or someone who read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P or Leaving the Atocha Station will relate to.

The American Pie-esque scenes of masturbation evoke the vibe of a banana peel comedy, but thankfully they get obliterated by the movie's otherwise charming sense of humour: a book store is called 'Iambic', a cinema showing soft porn movies is called 'Magnum Opus', the 'what ra' strain of spoken English is milked to maximum hilarity. But the movie's biggest highlight is Arora's acting. With an accent that sounds straight out of Eton, he creates a forcefield around himself in every scene that he appears. Each cultural reference of the 1980s and medieval era that he spouts doesn't look out of place in an Indian movie, for once.

Oscar Wilde once quipped that, "Everything in the world is about sex except sex." Mukherjee's movie is a lovely testament to that observation. He'll finally be known for something far more interesting than Gandu, which had as much to do with cinema as Godzilla with biology.

Kashyap's latest is a beguiling curio. After the Bombay Velvet debacle, he's back to familiar territory of the grime and filth of Mumbai, which he showed quite adroitly in Ugly. Raman Raghav 2.0 is about Nawazuddin Siddiqui's character Raman who kills people because he can get away with it, and Vicky Kaushal's character Raghav, a cocaine-snorting reckless police officer. How the latter catches hold of the former is the crux of this mostly engaging movie.

Told in terms of chapters, Kashyap creates quite possibly his darkest characters since Paanch. While Siddiqui draws his menace from his purported innocuousness, Kaushal's insouciance is a consequence of chemicals eating into his brain cells. Sobhita Dhulipala as Kaushal's girlfriend delivered what has to be one of the most terrific Hindi debuts in the recent past.

A scene where they both discuss the topic of kids is both powerful and insightful considering how two dysfunctional humans interact in the modern age. Kaushal's gaze on the opposite sex throughout the movie reeks of entitlement. He doesn't even throw a pick up line. His cocaine-addled Medusa-like stare could be easily mistaken as that of both a tortured soul and a stallion in the boudoir.

It's when we come to the climax that we realise both the characters have a gaze that is just a blank.

PS: Do check out Steve McQueen's Shame for the lessons that Michael Fassbender's character dispenses on the subject matter of this column.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in