Film: B.A.Pass
Starring: Shilpa Shukla, Rajesh Sharma,Geeta Agarwal
Director: Ajay Bahl
Producer: Ajay Bahl
Banner: Tonga Talkies
Music: Alokananda Dasgupta
A little later, Shadab Kamal sobs in the bathroom, blood dripping to his feet in a trail of tell-tale brutality.
The intense implicit violence that
underlines this sequence reminded me of a similar process of sexual
debasement undertaken by Mark Wahlberg in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie
Nights".
That was a film about the porn industry in the 1970s.
"B.A. Pass" is set in present day Delhi
-- Paharganj, to be more precise. Bustling with sights, sounds and
smells of doom and despair, it is a gripping story of a young
financially-challenged man's journey into a world of prostitution.
We could say, we have never seen this before. And we would be as close to the truth as this film tries to get.
The taut screenplay by Ritesh Shah never
allows room for superfluous moments. We follow Mukesh's descent into a
life of compromised morality with an absence of condemnation and
censure. Mukesh's environment and his circumstances as a displaced
orphan are not exploited to generate pathos.
No one in this film allows us to feel
sorry for the derelict lives. The characters fit into the film's
wretched karma with disturbing inevitability, as though everyone we see
in this motion picture was pre-ordained to suffer and fade away.
By the time we arrive at the finishing
line, we know the protagonist has exhausted all his options. It is the
end of the road for the film's achingly young gigolo-protagonist. Hard
choices have to be made at this pen-ultimate juncture.
As we watch the talented Shadab Kamal
lay bare his character's soul, we are suddenly reminded of how far we
have come in his 95-minute journey from innocence and anxiety to despair
and doom.
Debutant director Ajay Bahl puts forward
a little gem of story which radiates the colours of life's most grim
and harsh reality. There are so many young dreams dying every day in the
metropolises. As one struggler in Bollywood once told me, "I came to
Mumbai to kick ass. Instead I ended licking ass".
To envision the withering away of
innocent aspirations in the merciless light of reality without a shred
of self-pitying melodrama is not an easy task. Bahl does it with great
confidence and sensitivity.
That he has personally done the film's
cinematography is such a beautiful circumstance for the film. I doubt
another cameraman could capture those places in these troubled
characters' lives that Bahl captures with such force and vitality.
Moving fluently from the tender to the
brutal, Bahl portrays the underbelly of Delhi with telling truthfulness.
There are no false notes in this tale of seduction and debasement. What
gripped me right away were the passages of screaming silence.
"B.A. Pass" italicizes the character's
askew lived by bathing them in silence. The soundtrack (composed by
Alokananda Dasgupta, daughter of filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta) is aptly
minimal austere and unsparing.
The sex is suitably cold and detached.
When the young virgin-boy hero arrives in the bored housewife's home for
the first time, she wastes no time in getting him to lie down on the
sofa clambering over him briskly and unbuckling his trousers.
The seduction is swift and businesslike; the sex, sometimes ugly, never satisfying.
When a woman is caught with a gigolo,
her husband rapes her doggie-style in front of the toy-boy to let the
wife and her lover know who wears the pants in the house even when its
down to his ankles.
The film is mostly populated by
unlikeable, loathsome people. And yet in their selfish manoeuvres they
willy nilly end up being part of a plot that keeps the audience involved
till the very end.
A part of the film's riveting charm
originates from the authentic faces that populate Bahl's nation of
damnation. These are real people living out of authentic homes that
exist beyond the director's domain of 'action' and 'cut'.
While the supporting cast of unknown
faces (barring Deepti Naval who shows up in a sad moment) extends a hand
of sturdy believability, it is the dynamics shared between Shilpa
Shukla as the housewife espousing a secret life of sexual indulgence,
and newcomer Shadab as a casualty of rampant promiscuousness, who
provide a centre to this melancholic ode to a life of fringe fatal
benefits.
Shilpa, seen in a strong performance
earlier in "Chak De India", doesn't let us come near her character's
insecurities. She plays the fornicating housewife with stoic candour.
Shadab's character is gauche and
flummoxed to begin with but quickly begins to grasp the importance of
being sexually empowered. Shadab is a discovery.
And Dibyendu Bhattacharya as the chess-playing vagabond raises some 'grave' issues. The cemetery never seemed less asymmetrical.
"B.A. Pass" is a stark and brutal saga
of seduction and betrayal. It is that unusual work of cinema which
explores the darkest depths of the human consciousness without losing
sight of the light that underscores life.
It would be erroneous to treat this film
as only a serious noire effort. It is that, yes. But it's also a film
that makes an impact in unexpectedly blithe ways, creeping up into our
conscience when we least expect an intrusion and lodging itself cosily
in a corner.