May 24, 2024

Showcase: It’s All in Your Head (Dhruv Solanki, 2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

“What if the Kardashians were born in a rural Rajasthani family and lived in Baroda on a budget?” So goes the logline for Dhruv Solanki’s beguiling debut feature It’s All in Your Head (2023), now available for rent on Gudsho in India and on NoBudge in the US.

A family movie, it is, but perhaps unlike any other. At the centre of this carefree comedy are two sets of real-life siblings from the Rajpurohit clan: freelance photographer Jyotsana, the largely absent Deepshikha and aspiring model Bonita who are cousins to office worker Bhagyashree, model Manshree and wannabe dancer Bhuvnesh. They live in two different flats in suburban Baroda, Gujarat, but they seem more at home on Instagram, where they run a thrift store. The film, which opens with an Insta live session, will follow the six characters over the course of a day, charting their individual hopes and frustrations in both the professional and domestic spheres: applications, rejections, flirtations, confrontations, breakups and reconciliation, the whole deal. Any two of the six siblings would periodically appear together, but the whole gang is never to be seen under a single roof.

A self-taught filmmaker, Solanki grew up in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, and trained as an engineer before teaching chemistry. When he moved to Baroda, he was working on a script about young male hopefuls, but that changed when he came in contact with the Rajpurohits through a common friend. As someone with little interest in social media, Solanki found the sisters’ lives as far removed from his own as possible. “But, ultimately, I realized we were the same,” he remarks, pointing to the common struggles with money and family approval that he was also experiencing at the time.

Some of the names involved in the film aren’t new to this blog. Bonita Rajpurohit is one of the actors in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 (2024). Dhruv Solanki and Jyotsana Rajpurohit play the leads in Petals in the Wind (2024) by Abdul Aziz, who is credited for the subtitles in It’s All in Your Head. Solanki’s film bears certain similarities to Aziz’s work. Shot on a smart phone with non-actors in real locations and sync sound, it weaves a loose fiction over a bedrock of documentary details, stripped off the kind of stylization we see in even the most realist of mainstream cinema.

But where Aziz chooses a hyper-naturalist mode predicated on uninterrupted chunks of real-time (in)action, Solanki’s film takes the opposite route in terms of technique and tone. Avoiding long takes or complex camera movements, it instead progresses in a series of static or nearly static shots. Sequences sometimes unfold in master shots, but are generally broken down into close ups and mid-shots with odd eyelines. The most pronounced element is the music, composed of an assortment of genres — Hong Sang-soo-esque classical pieces, jazz, Latino, soft rock numbers — at times suggesting hidden emotional undercurrents, but mostly lending a frivolous, sitcom-like texture to the film.

All this nudges the film into Mumblecore territory that seems to be experiencing a new surge in Indian independent filmmaking of late: low-budget productions about the sexual hangups and romantic foibles of young urban professionals. It’s All in Your Head, however, doesn’t have the psychological penetration and fine-grained performances that characterized Mumblecore cinema. Notwithstanding the emotionally resonant final stretch, the actors themselves seem to barely believe in the story they are participating in.

What it lacks in acting prowess, It’s All in Your Head makes up for in the exciting discrepancy it sets up between reality and fiction. Solanki’s film takes a particular familial reality, wraps it in a loose swathe of fiction only in order to get back to a deeper reality. Like Aziz’s films, it presents the lifeworld of a certain class of suburban Indian youth — one firmly embedded in an image economy — with an endearing candour, featuring dialogue, locations and body types that we seldom see on screen. “What I felt responsible towards was the energy and essence of each person,” says Solanki, adding that he wanted to capture the way each sibling negotiated different environments. To this end, he shot dozens of exercises, following the sisters in their routine, making them play out pre-written roles or filming them in real-life situations and gatherings.

Solanki’s film stands out in how it thrusts viewers into a microcosm with its own laws, not offering outsider perspectives from which to judge its inhabitants. It challenges us to place these characters socially — there’s little sense here of the normative world of parents or neighbours — and derives much of its appeal out of the incongruence between their aspirational lifestyles and the mundane reality of the world around them: Bonita lounging in a nightgown in a cramped flat, the punk-like Jyotsana walking up the stairs of a certain Sai Vihar apartments, Manshree and her sister eating by a roadside chat joint, or any of them making rotis in the kitchen. Bonita’s transness is taken for granted, as is the social bubble they all seem to move around in. Solanki confesses that he isn’t as interested in the conflict between the characters and their world as in the one they have with and within themselves. It’s all in their head.

Marching to a private beat, the siblings seem to have carved out their own Malibu in mofussil Gujarat. Are we in a utopia, a Baroda that isn’t, but could be? Is the film defiance or wish-fulfilment? It’s All in Your Head offers an unusual, idiosyncratic vision of small-town India: not rotting in backward biases, but scrappy, hungry and punching above its weight.

 

Bio

Dhruv Solanki is a writer-director based in Vadodara, Gujarat. He has co-written and directed Blah Blah Blah, an independent comedy currently in post-production. He developed The Rebels of Shakambhari, a period action feature, as a fellow of the Writers Ink Screenwriting Lab. It was an official selection at the Cinephilia Film & TV development workroom and was also invited to participate in Rewrite, a screenwriting residency lab. It’s All in Your Head is his debut feature as a writer and director.

Contact

dhruvsolanki.1719@gmail.com | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Filmography

  • Hashim Khan (2018), 26 min., digital
  • Parichay (2019), 2 min., digital
  • Love (2021), 1 min., smartphone
  • Scenes from a Room (2021), 5 min., smartphone
  • Drink (2022), 10 min., smartphone
  • My India (2022), 3 min., smartphone
  • It’s All in Your Head (2023), 84 min., smartphone
  • Blah! Blah! Blah! (work-in-progress, co-dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), smartphone
  • Writer, The Rebels of Shakambhari (unproduced)
  • Writer, Home (unproduced)
  • Co-writer, Qualia (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2021
  • Actor, What a Difference a Day Made (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2022
  • Actor/co-writer, Pankhudiyaan (Petals in the Wind, dir: Abdul Aziz), 2024
  • Producer, If You Know You Know (dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), 2024

Showcase

Trailer for It’s All in Your Head (2023)

Love (2021)

Scenes from a Room (2021)

 

April 28, 2024

Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Bollywood, Review | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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Whether one admires it or not, it is hard to deny that Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 is unlike anything being made in Mumbai right now. The array of trailers that preceded my screening of the film offers a good sample of where Bollywood is otherwise right now: Bhaiyya Ji (a Southern-inspired actioner), Srikanth (an underdog biopic) and The Sabarmati Report (a rabblerousing right-wing political drama), the latter produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, the same company that has issued Banerjee’s film. Like its 2010 predecessor, LSD 2 positions itself consciously at the margin of the industry, drawing its energies from both new media environments and independent filmmaking while at the same time profiting from the mechanisms of professional production and distribution.

The original LSD was a three-part morality play that probed the unsavoury intersection of salacious sex, burgeoning media and cheap digital image-making. The new film retains the structure and the stridency of the original, but goes further by removing the last remaining guardrails that assured us that there may be a way to steer clear of this impending dystopia. Expanding the earlier film’s scope to newer forms of mediation, LSD 2 informs us that we are now fully living in a technocratic nightmare and the only way out is further inside; that delulu is the only solulu.

The opening part of LSD 2 is set entirely inside a Big-Brother-like online reality TV show titled Truth Ya Naach (Truth or Dance), where viewers with smartphones can tune into the camera of any of the participants as well as bet on them in each episode. Participants, in turn, can choose to turn off their cameras at the risk of audience disengagement. At the end of each episode, one participant is eliminated by the panel of judges, played by Anu Malik, Sophie Choudry and Tusshar Kapoor. Banerjee amplifies the self-cannibalizing nature of this ecosystem by mixing show footage with viewer reactions to each episode in the form of vlogs, podcasts and memes.

The nominal protagonist of the section is Noor (Paritosh Tiwari), a transwoman participant whose ratings skyrocket once her estranged mother (Swaroopa Ghosh) is invited on to the show. However, a change in sponsors of Truth Ya Naach has meant that the show has to pivot to family friendly audiences, forcing the showrunners to evict Noor within the logic of the show. The show’s progressive veneer of inclusion makes way for mother sentiment, both thrown out once they are milked to their limits. Within this totalizing simulacrum, the mother’s sceptical outsider perspective is first presented as a point of identification for us, the viewers of the film who are invited to look at everything on display with contempt, but it is jettisoned when mother herself internalizes the rules of the game.

This kind of narrative rug pulling continues in the second (and possibly the weakest) segment of the film, albeit on a less ironic and more realistic register. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit), a transgirl working as a janitor at the metro station, is assaulted in a park. Kullu’s boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) helps her file a case, but when compromising details emerge from the police investigation, she finds a PR disaster on her hands. No more a perfect victim, Kullu is a timebomb for the company whether she withdraws the case or pursues it, and Lovina, like the showrunners of Truth Ya Naach, is forced to orchestrate Kullu’s exit by other means. Unfolding through video calls and Zoom conferences, this segment immerses us into the disintegrating mind of Lovina, a single mother whose motives are obscured by her constant frustrations. Things are further complicated with the introduction of other plot elements, such as a housing crisis and an extra-marital affair.

But the film really piles it on in the third segment. An influencer named Game Paapi (Abhinav Singh) is on the verge of internet legend when doctored sex pictures of him are leaked during a live stream by a bad actor. As a reputation management firm tries to put a positive spin on this, Game Paapi himself takes flight in shame and denial, rejecting the iniquities of the real world to establish a cult in the metaverse. Or something. A ChatGPT-level rehash of half-informed boomer techno-prophesies, this section throws in everything you’ve heard about the dangers of artificial intelligence and cyberbullying and then some. Things veer further into incomprehensibility thanks to some aggressive mumbling by the actors, esoteric internet speak and a good dose of enthusiastic censorship.

Each segment of the film is inspired by a specific video medium — live television, video conference and webcasting respectively — and the colours, editing, camera movement, the choice of lenses and the production design are all determined in accordance with these devices. Banerjee’s impressive attention to the specific visual texture and syntax of each medium is superseded only by his incredible ear for language and speech patterns. The third section performs an accelerationist sensory assault, employing a bone-rattling synthesis of webcam footage, recreated memes, AI-generated poop, cable news blight and some queasy-making animation. The film’s sound, on the other hand, is uniformly dull, dousing all the amateur visual spice in a professionally mixed sonic soup.

Throughout, Banerjee takes pains to remind us that everything we are seeing is mediated by a camera with a vested interest. To this end, he even uses points-of-view shots in sequences where a diegetic camera is absent — a blunt tactic normalized half way into the film. LSD 2 foregrounds the inescapability of these media environments, moving from traditional television’s self-rejuvenating search for total reality to Web 3.0’s rejection of reality in favour of an alternate, synthetic universe. This absolute, conspiratorial conception is offset by characteristically dry humour, such as the sight of Game Paapi’s mother bringing lunch to the desk of her YouTuber son, or Noor’s mother on Truth Ya Naach belting out a number titled “Gandi Taal” (Dirty Beat) with the decorum of a ghazal singer.

One of the most striking things about LSD 2 is how unprovocative it is despite handling sensational material and hot-button issues. (As an aside, this film is a good example of how to cinematically engage with bigotry and discrimination without recreating it in the name of realism.) Banerjee is not a provocateur, but a moralist at heart, and for all its bleak cynicism and psychological murkiness, the film is remarkably single-minded in its critique. LSD 2 puts its finger on a historical moment when public-facing corporate capitalism, social movements around marginalized sexual identities and a rapidly changing media landscape run up against two-faced middle-class values. Each of these forces is now an ally, now an enemy to the other, each one interacting with the other with a view to self-perpetuate. It is pertinent that the film ends with an interview between a traditional television anchor and a multiverse personality, both connected to pliant viewers on one end and corporate sponsors on the other. In LSD 2, you can check out of late capitalism any time you like, but you can never leave.