"The tutor read a draft and asked me why I was making the film, and I said because I want to deal with sexual repression and physical spaces in India. While attending the Three Rivers residency for filmmakers, it was pointed out to him that he had to visualise the ugly and darker side of the story for the audience to comprehend the extent that his repression had warped his physical desires. His first draft of the story didn't show explicit sexual scenes. The whole issue of sexual mores and sexual violence in India was a subject that was tricky for Behl to face. "I didn't set out to break any taboos, but the subject forced me to do so," he says. In reflecting on this dark subject matter through the story of one disturbed man, Bhel has made a film that has broken many taboos, even if that wasn't the director's intention. Rape reports have risen, and many more are scared to come forward. In the aftermath of the incident, the Indian parliament introduced stiffer penalties for sexual crimes, but it seems to have made little difference to the crime rates. In 2012, a brutal gang rape and murder of a student on a bus in Delhi ensured India's high sexual violence rates were brought to the world's attention.
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Although the film doesn't try to look at the broader picture of sexual violence in India, the subtext is that men's sexual immaturity is one of the drivers making India "one of the most dangerous places to be a woman", as a 2021 Guardian report suggested. "There was this sexual repression that I had felt growing up as a boy in northern India, and not just me, I had seen so many people struggling with the delayed sexual maturity," Behl adds.īehl's film examines the problem of sexual repression, and suggests that it is connected to India's especially high sexual violence rates. "The film looks at certain secret spaces in everybody's lives, which no one wants to talk about," says the 42-year-old director.
It's shocking and, at times, unbearable to watch as the Indian director tries to take the spectator inside the dangerous mind of a very sick man fantasising about overpowering women and asserting his masculinity. While this scene has an air of the absurd, Behl doesn't shy away from showing some of Guru's more angry and violent fantasies.
It's a bold film where the first sex scene ends with a woman turning into a giant rodent, and we begin to realise that Guru is a fantasist. There is a touch of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman in how Guru's obsessions and delusions blur fact and fiction.
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Wildly frustrated, Guru spends his days addicted to dating apps and acts out a series of violent sexual fantasies, though Behl never makes clear whether these are real events, or figments of Guru's imagination. There is no space for him to have a partner or a sex life without everyone in his cramped household knowing and commenting, so he wants to have an extension built. There is the much more popular Bollywood version of Indian cinema, which a lot more people know about, and there is also the parallel independent film world where a lot of interesting work has happened, not just now or in the past 5 or 10 years, but over decades.Īgra tells the story of a repressed call centre employee named Guru, who lives in a small house with his parents and married siblings. As Behl himself says: "There are so many films made in India, and there is a split personality, almost like two different ideas of Indian cinema that are there. It is also the latest addition to a lineage of transgressive, alternative Indian cinema that barely gets talked about. Director Kanu Behl's Agra, which played last Thursday in the Director's Fortnight sidebar section, is a shocking and forthright look at sexually repressed men in India that is replete with nudity and explicit sex scenes. – Cannes review: The Zone of Interest is 'a masterpiece'īut anyone who imagines that all Indian cinema is so innocent was in for a big surprise at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
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– The power of Cannes hit How to Have Sex
Indeed, Bollywood directors over the last century have had to find ways to depict sexiness in understated, suggestive ways that get past the disapproving glare of the controlling censors – like a big number featuring a demure actress in a white sari running through a fountain, for example. One of the things Indian cinema is known for all around the world, as well as song-and-dance numbers, is its chasteness, as a result of popular Bollywood productions, which historically didn't even allow for kissing on screen, let alone sex scenes.
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