How Kanu Behl’s Agra is leading a new wave of Indian cinema

This story is taken from the autumn 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy here.

Indian filmmaker Kanu Behl doesn’t watch his own films after they’ve been cut. Not even at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival, where his latest film, Agra, premiered in May this year. Instead, Behl makes it a habit to wait outside the doors while the film is rolling, staring at his watch – waiting for the first round of squeamish viewers to exit. They do. For Agra, this occurs at the half-hour mark – our antihero, Guru (played by Mohit Agarwal), spends two-and-a-half minutes jerking off on the toilet. The scene is grim: grey tiles featuring dolphins and bubbles, a grubby cistern, cobalt-blue bottle of toilet cleaner, and a phone in one hand, where Guru types his sexual roleplay fantasies to an anonymous chatroom user with the screen name ‘Ilyana29’.  

“There were 60 walkouts – I counted,” says Behl. He shrugs – he’s evidently one of those people who smiles knowingly in all circumstances. “I was happy! I was expecting more; there were about 700 people at that screening.” This isn’t even the most shocking scene in the film, which is replete with appalling, disgusting moments. Agra opens with a glimpse of a dreamlike sequence, as experienced by Guru: a dinner table featuring a dish of skinned Indian palm squirrel, a girlfriend named Mala (whom Guru has hallucinated out of sexual desperation), a sex scene with Mala that morphs into a sex scene with a live, fur-and-tail-on squirrel. “With the first scene, I almost wanted it to be a premonition,” says Behl. “I wanted it to be an exit door for people to say, ‘This is what you’re going to get into – if you can get through this, you can get through a lot of what might come [and] you will be rewarded.”

Agra is one of several Indian films to make its way out of the country into the global film festival circuit recently. Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, a neo-noir which also debuted at Cannes this year, is another. Both films are being talked of in terms of how ‘dark’ and ‘shocking’ they are. What’s more, if streaming platforms are to be believed, this doesn’t just extend to movies, either – Paatal Lok, Ajeeb Daastaans, and the first series of shows like Sacred Games and Delhi Crime each attempt to signpost a change in the Indian cinescape. One where violence is explored unflinchingly, and deeper issues at play within Indian society – often glazed over or ignored in Bollywood films – are forced upon the viewer, in hopes (perhaps) of jostling them awake.

This has perhaps always been the thread in Indian cinema for movies that have worn the ‘shocking’ label: they have been rooted in truth to some degree. Talvar (2015) was loosely based on a much-publicised murder of a teenage girl and her family’s housekeeper. Firaaq (2008) dealt with the aftermath of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim Gujarat riots. And Matrubhoomi (2003) was a dystopian film set in a future where India’s female foeticide rates, driven by the conservative patriarchal preference for boys, result in a sexually desperate male population. All three tackled topics only rarely addressed in the canon of Indian indie cinema, but none felt quite as sensitively handled as Behl’s, despite its fearless approach.

Agra received a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Of the scores of overwhelmingly positive reviews surrounding the film, nearly all draw this point out: Agra is shocking. The BBC went so far as to call it the “most shocking Indian film ever made”. Behl doesn’t pay much attention to all these labels. “The moment we go into the territory of [whether] this is the ‘most shocking’ or not, I think we have a slight possibility of exoticising the film,” he cautions. “Whatever you see Guru and all the other characters in the film grappling with, it’s not for effect. The aim is not to shock anyone – the aim is to just hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is what a young man you judge and think, Oh, he’s fucked up [and] should be put away, is going through. Here’s what you don’t know about him, or about some of the other characters who are, in similar ways, struggling with their own repressed sexuality.’”

“The aim is not to shock anyone – the aim is to just hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is what a young man you judge and think, Oh, he’s fucked up [and] should be put away, is going through’” – Kanu Behl 

As the film unfolds, Guru’s sexual repression comes under a magnifying glass. At first it manifests in the chatrooms he frequents, frantically typing ‘Hi, 25 male, chat?’ under the screen name @BRICKHARD. Later, desperate to marry his hallucinatory girlfriend Mala, he threatens and attempts suicide by ingesting chemical-strength cleaning liquid. Later still, Guru attempts to rape his cousin’s sister. Finally, when Guru meets his love interest, Priti (Priyanka Bose), he stalks her. Ironically, this is a normalised trope in Bollywood films – the ‘persistent’ hero stalks the heroine to win her affections. (Toilet, starring the vastly overrated Akshay Kumar, comes to mind.) In Bollywood, stalking always works. Here, however, the stalking scene is not a prelude to romance – your breath is trapped in your chest until you know, for certain, that Priti is safe. “I’m not asking for sympathy for this guy – he’s a character [who] is functioning on a very thin line, and I do not for a second endorse whatever he does,” says Behl. “We often read about how cases like these end in the newspapers and think, ‘Good – I’m glad that asshole’s locked up.’ But are rapes stopping? Are women safer? Are we able to get any insight on these boys?”

And this, in turn, is what makes Behl’s film so difficult to swallow. Once the initial shock factor wears off, it becomes clear that it’s a film steeped in a nauseating dose of reality. Stripped to its bones, Agra is the story of a deeply troubled young man in a deeply conservative society. One that doesn’t talk about sex, one in which incel culture is thriving both online and off, and one in which traditional values – specifically Hindu ones – aim to bulldoze and box everyone in. As the film decides by its conclusion, the aim for everyone, including someone like Guru, is still to get married and live, as many Indians do, in a (bigger) house with their ‘joint’ families. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Gurus in the Indian male population, concentrated in certain parts of the country owing to spikes in female foeticide during the 80s and 90s. There is a rape crisis, one which disproportionately impacts marginalised women. Guru’s love interest, Priti, is both a widow and a disabled woman with a limp which goes unexplained in the film, but may be something to do with India’s polio crisis in the 70s and 80s. 

What films like Agra do is poke at these gaping holes in Indian society the way Caravaggio’s doubting Thomas prods at Christ’s gaping wound in “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”. While working on the film’s script in Italy at a residency for filmmakers, Behl knew he would have to confront this. “After I’d gathered the courage to say, ‘OK, I’m going to do this, we’ll see how this film gets made or doesn’t get made’,” says Behl, “I had to ask myself another important question: How do I faithfully express [Guru’s sexual repression] in a script?”

The answer, it turns out, is by spending six months in a sex chatroom with all manner of horny Indian people. The experiment proved successful, even if it was all-consuming. “I started feeling this white noise,” says Behl. “After about three or four months [in chatrooms] I realised I wasn’t interested in other things any more.” Describing his research, Behl recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s theory that we each have three personas – public, personal (which we share with loved ones), and secret (which is ours alone). “Curiously, I started realising that the more I delved into this [sexually] repressed side of myself, the more the need for the private persona was disappearing – it was just public and secret.”

This is the balance that many films traversing the complexities of Indian society must strike. It’s a difficult balance to get right, but an enriching experience if done well. In India, we tend to emphasise the public persona and hush away the personal one – there’s no room for it for the majority of people, who, like Guru, share their personal space with family members.

“Agra goes out of its way to be ugly, to show the parts of India that have often been romanticised in film – dusty, congested gullies, small houses, sweaty buses on hot days, oily building contractors and all”

But beyond this, there’s another, more obvious reason why these films don’t get made or reach the mainstream as often as they should: money. “My big fear was, ‘How will you ever get money to make a film like this? Who is going to back this film?’” says Behl. It’s not that people don’t have an appetite for these films, it’s that they’re told they don’t. “[It] is a myth actively propagated by a fast-becoming defunct bunch of older guys who don’t know what else to do.” He’s careful not to name names – these people have absurd power upon which they’ve bred multigenerational film dynasties. “The moment they start doing something else, which changes [the norm] by even five per cent, they lose control over their empires and wouldn’t know what to do – every empire is about succession.”

Agra is a stark change from what most people associate with ‘Indian’ cinema – especially outside of India. Which is really to say: this is not a Bollywood film. For one thing, there is no song and dance. There are no pretty sets or costumes, and the cast is not conventionally attractive by the standards set by Bollywood movies. If anything, Agra goes out of its way to be ugly, to show the parts of India that have often been romanticised in film – dusty, congested gullies, small houses, sweaty buses on hot days, oily building contractors and all.

Recalling an incident from the Zurich Film Festival, where he’d had walkouts during the screening of Titli (a gory neo-noir movie which debuted in Cannes in 2014), Behl blames this jarring expectation Bollywood films set for Indian filmmakers globally. “I don’t remember the lineup exactly, but [Titli] was supposed to be the opening film,” he says. The film, passed for release in India with 12 minutes of cuts, tells the story of a young man navigating a violently dysfunctional family. “When the ceremony started there was a flash mob [who] led people [in a procession] for about half a kilometre through to the opening venue. I was walking with the festival director, and I whispered in [their] ear, ‘Do these guys know what they’re up for?’ and they just sort of smiled.”

Kunjila Mascillamani, a filmmaker from Kerala, agrees that this is possibly why this change in Indian filmmaking seems so stark to most of the world. “Overseas, I do think people get the wrong idea of Indian cinema,” says Mascillamani. “Especially with major foreign film galas awarding films like [SS Rajamouli’s Oscar-winning action-musical] RRR. The reality here is different. There are more and more transgressive voices in filmmaking, especially in the Malayalam and Tamil industries.”

Mascillamani, whose works include Asanghadithar and Nunakkathakal, believes these transgressive films have always been there in the Indian context, but counterintuitively did not always exist in the independent realm. Satyajit Ray, Guru Dutt, Shyam Benegal, P Padmarajan, KG George and Ritwik Ghatak were all transgressive in differing ways, enjoying box-office success in films that dealt with social issues in a way the Indian public related to, even if they were controversial in their day. “Eventually, transgressive [movies] took a setback in the filmmaking scene,” she says. “I don’t know what caused this, or what caused crappy Bollywood films to establish their dominance.”

But as exciting as this newer generation of transgressive filmmakers is to her, she worries transgressive films “never [go] back to the kind of stories we once had. I don’t know how much [these films] are for the theatre-going public.” Films like Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), she notes, were successful because they bridged the gap between voices that pushed back against dominant narratives and what the public was ready to consume. “It was a landmark [film] for Bollywood… catchy, contemporary and apt [for the Indian public].”

Filmmaker and poet Leena Manimekalai believes Indian cinema has a long way to go before the transgressive movement is by any means significant. “Mainstream cinema only uses transgression as a chocolate [wrapper] while sticking to hero-vehicle, hypermasculine narratives,” she explains. While Manimekalai agrees that independent cinema is now the “true home for transgression”, she cautions against any premature celebration of somewhat isolated moments of transgression in the mainstream. “[The] rise of [streaming] platforms may give us [the] illusion that some revolution is cooking, but sadly that is not true.” The “superheroes”, she says – played by actors with significant standing within the industry – are still “portrayed as saviours of societal problems” while pocketing significant profits. “[Now], for a change, they are annihilating caste with their guns and swords,” she observes, pointing to a recent trend in mainstream cinema to address caste in a superficial manner. (The caste system is a centuries-old hierarchical system of oppression.) “Transgressive cinema is not possible when you retain the formula but just change the representations – India was represented by RRR at the festival circuits last year; the only ‘transgression’ was some white bodies dancing to ‘Naatu Naatu’.”

“If there is something transgressive that’s happening in Indian cinema, it’s in Tamil cinema. They’ve all made anti-caste films over the last seven or eight years – and taking on caste? That’s genuinely transgressive” – Tanul Thakur

Film journalist Tanul Thakur says he’s inclined to agree – much to his disappointment, as someone who has “been tailing this very elusive transgressive Hindi cinema [moment] for the last 15 years”. “It’s sort of like Waiting for Godot – that shit never comes!” he says. Thakur believes there needs to be a “constant churn” of these movies for them to have any meaningful impact. “If there is something transgressive that’s happening in Indian cinema, it’s not in the Hindi realm at all – it’s in Tamil cinema, where there’s a good coterie of filmmakers like Mari Selvaraj, Vetrimaaran, Pa Ranjith. They’ve all made anti-caste films over the last seven or eight years – and taking on caste? That’s genuinely transgressive.”

Yet, for the most part, little has changed in terms of who tells these stories and why. Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of Indian writer Munshi Premchand’s Sadgati (1981) is an oft-cited example of a film that explores caste-based oppression from a dominant, oppressor-caste gaze. Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), a biopic about an Indian Robin Hood figure who later became an MP, was praised by Roger Ebert for its “unflinching realism, and the occasional touch of sad poetry”. Among the film’s most shocking moments is the gruesome rape of its protagonist, Phoolan Devi. But the film was directed by a dominant-caste man who chose to ignore any input from the oppressed-caste woman whose life it was based upon. Many critics have been apt to wonder: who gains the most here?

Agra doesn’t overtly engage with caste, but the “unflinching realism” that unfolds within its storyline comes from a place of nuance, one that is internal rather than external. Which is perhaps why the film is such a breath of fresh air. While it is difficult to comment on the gaze through which Agra was perceived, viewers are given an intimate peek into Guru’s mind without expectations of sympathy, through heroism or victimhood. And it’s perhaps this quality that makes viewers squeamish – it’s too real, there is no ‘good guy’ and, should the film ever make it to Indian screens in the future, the notion that we’re surrounded by potential Gurus is a difficult one to reckon with.

This story is taken from the autumn 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy here.

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