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Looking grit in the eye
A film of stark realism tells the harrowing tale of Delhi’s dark underbelly while making for compulsive viewing

Some films simply seem to jump out of the screen and hit you straight in the gut. The rather innocuously titled Titli directed by Kanu Behl is one such. Each frame is something of a shocker deluging the viewer with a delicious noxiousness. And yet, even as one is tempted to shut the eyelids tight (and ears in some scenes that are audibly unpardonable) one cannot help but watch, often in glued horror.

Titli deals with the underbelly of Delhi. We have all seen the dodgy characters studding it; we have brushed past them and blissfully ignored them, almost wishing them away. They have sold soft drinks to us across petty shop counters; they have repaired out car tyres, or simply bumped into us in an unpleasantly fleeting way. They inhabit a world that is dark and repellent and well outside the periphery of shining malls and multiplexes.

The guttural Jat-like lingo spiced with Delhi’s lower class slang and the camera weaving its way into the unrewarding, narrow lanes fill your mouth with grit. Titli (played magnificently eponymously by debut actor Shashank Arora) could belong to any of the capital’s least desirable suburbs – Mongolpuri, Najafgarh, or Trilokpuri – where survival is at a premium under an asbestos sheet with a gutter gushing by one side. The uncouth sounds and bullying vociferations are uncomfortably real. The three principal characters Vikram (Ranvir Shorey), Pradeep (Amital Sial), and their father (Lalit Behl, also the  director’s father in real life) are hard as the bluntest of nails and darker than an eel’s hide. Yet, like Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly, one simply cannot look away.

The sense of suffocation on the part of the protagonist and his female counterpart, played ably by Shivani Raghuvanshi, carries a deathly sting on its crest. We identify, all too readily, with Titli who, fluttering inside his cage, is longing to soar high above his present life of crime. As with his newly-wedded wife who dreams of bliss and happily forever afters with the much “married” Prince (played to sleazy perfection by Prashant Singh). It is a saga of waiting and its attendant frustrations. Siddarth Dewan’s camera rotates around the couple’s single bedroom with a steel cupboard in a Varda reminiscent motion highlighting its inhabitants’ desolation and desperation. The claustrophobic interior contrasts strongly with the expansiveness outside. And yet, in this unapologetic male universe the female lead is no helpless victim. The new wife, for instance, openly tells her new husband about her desire to live with ‘Prince’.

This is a film that looks you straight in the eye and grabs your collar. Then, like a python, it slowly weaves itself around your being till the tightness becomes far too gripping. The violence is visceral and in your face. But it is not without hope. For, even though Titli doesn’t quite escape his pit he still finds a way around it, both for himself and his wife. The disgust associated with the city’s underbelly does have its moments, even if they appear hard to digest.

A must see for lovers of serious, committed, and meaningful cinema. That it has won a string of awards including the Critics’ Prize t FIFIB, Bordeaux, Best Film at the Seattle South Asian Film Festival, and the Audience Award at the Festival du Film d’Asie du Sud Transgressif (FFAST), Paris merits no surprise.

By: Nazar Dehalvi Email: nazardehalvi@yahoo.com