Masaan, Anurag Kashyap protege Neeraj Ghaywan's first film which was released last month, is set in a Benares that is both very old and entirely new. Sundry computer centres operate inside cloistered alleys where youngsters create Facebook accounts even as their parents continue to be associated, in some form or the other, with the Ganga. The river flows interminably, carrying offerings and dead bodies, even as the city around it changes, slowly but surely.
At heart, Masaan is about young love, chronicling two stories both of which, perhaps appropriately for a film that spends much of its time on the ghats in the midst of burning cadavers, end in tragedy. But the romantic fissures here are foreshadowed by the pall of social shame that hangs over the stories and which allows Masaan to expertly excoriate our collective social hypocrisies.
Devi (Richa Chadda) is a young woman who trains at a non-descript computer coaching institute when she falls in love with a student, Piyush, who attends classes there. In the very first scene of the film, they are shown renting a hotel room to spend time together. Devi dresses as a married woman with sindoor and mangal sutra so that the hotel would let her and her lover take the room.
Mr Ghaywan gets the sordid ethos of small-town Indian right. Just as the couple gets going, the police, led by one Inspector Mishra, raid the room. He makes a video of Devi - not the boy's because when you are caught having sex, your gender determines the magnitude of your shame, remember - and threatens the boy with sharing the information with his father. The poor boy shuts himself inside the bathroom and promptly cuts himself, bleeding to death.
For a movie that begins so heavily, Masaan is a remarkably quiet film. Its other strand is helmed by two delightful newcomers, Vicky Kaushal who plays Deepak, a Dom - the community that burns pyres on Benares ghats - and Shweta Tripathi, who plays Shaalu, an upper-caste girl. They fall in love even as one of them hides their status from the other, but when things do come out, each makes somber promises to the other about seeing it to the end.
Masaan then is about the new India that is willing to let go of old certainties around caste and premarital sex, if only it were allowed to do so. Through Devi's story, the movie becomes a scathing critique of how fraught with risk even the simple act of seeking physical intimacy is. When things go wrong, assorted vultures descend to extract their pound of flesh. The real villain is the oppressive social conditions that force a woman and her poor Sanskrit professor father - an as-usual excellent Sanjay Mishra - to go to great lengths to live down their shame. Inspector Mishra demands Rs 3 lakh if the case is to be hushed - and the film capably showcases the exploitative nature of this relationship.
On the other hand, there is the fresh-faced relationship between Deepak and Shaalu whose love grows organically, as we are treated to halting glances and clipped laughter until the briefest kiss seals their romance. The central issue of their relationship - their different caste statuses - hovers in the air like a malign presence but it no way affects the force of their feelings. Mr Ghaywan thus contrasts the explicit (as with Devi) versus the merely-hinted-at (as with Deepak and Shaalu) ramifications of taboo love.
But of course there is no poetic justice. Inspector Mishra does get his monies while it is Devi who must continue to deal with a system that will not let her grieve in peace now that she is the fallen woman, who must deflect repeated insinuations from strangers that she make herself available to them.
Tragedy strikes the golden duo too, opening a painful rift in the narrative which remains unhealed until the film connects its two disparate arcs in a satisfying coda. This being a Phantom film - Phantom is Anurag Kashyap's production house - the protagonists ultimately take charge of their lives and, in so doing, cock a snook at social strictures. And yet, the justice in Masaan is not savage. The survivors of its tragedies find peace in the end, and this peace is the more muscular for having emerged after a trial by fire.
Postscript: The real charm of a movie like Masaan, one that may have something to do with the fact that its director assisted Mr Kashyap on Gangs of Wasseypur, is the veracity of the setting. These are filmmakers who know these places intimately, and are able to capture not merely details like the lazy, drawn-out way in which the protagonists speak - something that you would notice if you were in Uttar Pradesh - but even more complex idiosyncrasies. When Devi's father goes to a jeweler to sell a ring he has found serendipitously, the jeweler does not quote the price out loud but types it into a calculator and shows it to him. This is a common practice among jewellers in the north for fear that someone's overhearing the price might trigger misfortune for either them or the customer.
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