Agra film evaluation: Kanu Behl paints a provocative portrait of fractured masculinity in cramped city areas

There is not any shot of Taj Mahal in Kanu Behl’s Agra. There aren’t any sprawling gardens that dot town of monuments. Instead, the fearless chronicler of our society’s hidden fractures and fault strains focuses on the cramped areas, repressed wishes, and the incommodious mindscapes within the mofussil city that town holds beneath its touristy topsoil.

It is the Agra that Sahir Ludhianvi referred to in his critique of the Taj Mahal when he mentioned that the monument symbolised the exploitation of the poor by the elite. Behl is extra matter-of-fact, however there’s a distinctive rhythm to his storytelling. It is just like the motion of a worm below the pores and skin that’s troublesome to disregard or resolve.

The introverted Guru’s (Mohit Agarwal) wishes, bodily and emotional, are trapped in a dilapidated two-storey residence with an actual property worth. Struggling to guide a lifetime of honour as a name centre worker, Guru (Mohit Agarwal) is surrounded by household and family who’re negotiating with one another for house in one another’s lives and materials sources.

Guru shares the bottom ground together with his acerbic, deserted mom (Vibha Chhibber). At the identical time, his domineering father, Daddy Ji (Rahul Roy, the heartthrob of the Aashiqui technology in a task reversal), brazenly lives upstairs together with his second spouse (Sonal Jha).

The three elders bicker, however they’ve realized to stay a lifetime of transactional relationships. The younger Guru, nonetheless, is a piece in progress, therefore brittle. As the home turns into a battleground for territorial management and privateness, Guru is consumed by loneliness and digital erotic fantasies. Infatuated with a colleague, he hallucinates, and his life spirals right into a self-destructive behaviour. The arrival of his dentist sister provides to the chaos and claims for house. Through Guru’s perspective, the movie explores how the shortage of bodily house in city India intertwines with deep-seated sexual repression, patriarchal toxicity, and the quiet violence of on a regular basis household life.

The movie is riven with atmospheric stress and thriller-like dread, however it’s not nearly provocation and confrontation. It is Behl’s empathy for the delicate lives he exposes that elevates Agra as not only a story of non-public distress however a broader indictment of the ethical rot. The express sexual fantasies don’t titillate; they shine a torch on the troubled soul writhing for salvation.

Eschewing simple resolutions, Behl and co-writer Atika Chohan make sure the structure of the home doesn’t stay only a backdrop. It displays how house and dependence on materials wants form the human psyche. The want for a room of 1’s personal, the presence of the daddy’s mistress upstairs, and the son’s want all turn out to be metaphors for management and disgrace, company and aspiration.

The psychological mess may frustrate these searching for clear character arcs, however Kanu is in no temper to fabricate an uplifting expertise. Creating their visceral mirror photos, he’s aiming to maintain the viewers uneasy. He locations the viewers on the cross-section of disparate factors of view of his characters and expects the viewers to seek out their method out of the disturbia all of us inhabit, with out acknowledging it as such.

When the movie threatens to turn out to be an advert for male sexual distress, a limping body of Priya (Priyanka Bose) emerges from the shadows and strikes a bond with Guru. It is a fragile, secret window of tenderness carved out of the movie’s suffocating construction. Like Guru, Priya can be in search of her house below the solar. In and out of relationships of comfort and compromise, Priya runs an Internet cafe. Guru pays for the pc time, and he or she tolerates his lingering stares. Like most relationships in Behl’s movies, it additionally begins as a transactional bond, the place mattress turns into the seat of give and take. Still, the bond between Priya and Guru progressively develops right into a sustained, tender be aware of mutual recognition. Gradually, we uncover that the 2 souls, who’re perceived as broken by society and share the identical gaze on them, full one another.

Behl extracts uncooked, uninhabited work from his ensemble. In a breakout function, Mohit impresses together with his haunted gaze and terrifying rage. Rahul is a revelation because the hypocritical father with a plan. Vibha and Sonal are bitter representatives of a technology of ladies who lament about patriarchy however don’t need have the ethical base to surrender on its perks. The spotlight is Priyanka because the enigmatic Priya. It is difficult to make a manipulative determine look dignified on display screen, however Priyanka strikes a steadiness because the polio-afflicted Priya negotiates the facility dynamics of society and residential.

Agra is presently working in theatres.