When I started to review the film Agra, selected for Director’s Fortnight, premiered at Cannes-2023, a Yoodle film, released in France in April 2024, available on Dailymotion.com/in, I was stuck with a the term I borrow from Naomi Wolfe, from her famous book Vagina, which can most aptly be used for Indian people, who are around 143 Crore now, as ‘porn saturated’ and yet sexually starved. The film revolves around a common lower-middle class family and all the social, financial, medical, sexual faultlines involved. The obvious hallmarks of our society, albeit what may be ‘outrageous’ for the Western world to see. Agra is directed by Kanu Behl and Atika Chauhan.
The boy, around 25 years, typically called ‘Guru’, which means a teacher, played by Mohit Agarwal, is seen having a dinner, his mother fast asleep, and suddenly he starts to talk to his infatuation Mala (Ruhani Sharma), his colleague at a call-center, in emptiness. He starts to hallucinate her, which he does quite often, and lays her on dining table, starts to have sex, makes strokes while she taunts him, that today also is not possible. Impliedly meaning, she was unavailable and he too won’t ejaculate. Both things happen.
He then sees a squirrel in Mala’s place and shatters down. The mother-Mummy Ji, by Vibha Chhibber, oversees the act, leaves. She does not scold or stops, which shows how deep rooted the issue had crept into the house. He continues to vent his pent-up imaginative sex with Mala in nothingness, probably everywhere. He carries Debonair magazine to titillate, but must have been carrying an older issue?
The next morning mother asked for tea, he refused. In a scuffle with her, her nightie gets torn, her bra exposed. He does not lower his gaze. Gone insane! Daddy (Rahul Roy), stays on the first-floor of the two-storey dilapidated house with Aunty Ji (Sonal Jha), his companion, and thereafter starts the conundrum between all, over the open terrace, where Guru wants to make a room to live with his illusional Mala, his mother wanted Guru’s cousin sister Chavi (Aanchal Goswami) to start a clinic and Aunty an open garden. Guru gets more delusional for Mala, attempts suicide, attacks his own doctor, his cousin sister once tries to console him, instead, gets sexually assaulted. She barely saved herself or would have ended-up raped. Her experience at the hands of her paranoid cousin brother brought reflections to experiences narrated by eminent physician Nawal El Saadawi in her book The Hidden Face of Eve.
Everything is surreal; Guru’s father started to for the third one. The second one goes to inform the first about the affair. The first one, takes a pleasure over the same jealousy she had felt, remained contended most bluntly retorted, that relations based on penis ( she used the term l*nd) go the same way. For a few days sex will go then change for the next! How women, who too are victims of the overall viciousness, succumb to financial insecurities, is very aptly put. It is, then, how patriarchy reigns all across the board. The two together with Guru and Chavi, as the new entrant was to bring everything crashing down to the already crumbling structure of the house, go on to counsel the third. The marriage did not take place. Guru’s father argued the third would have stayed the same way previous did! There was to be no room for women. It again reminded me of a book Women who stay with men who stray by Debbie Then.
Until halfway the film, Guru can be seen trying to jerk-off on online sex-chats, on any girl he would happen to lay his eyes, in a bus or at restaurant etc. He finally finds a much older, widow, who previously had two husbands, Priti (Priyanka Bose). Guru who had by then become an almost embodiment of the proverb ‘tommy wants a bloody hole’, just wanted sex, perhaps as badly as the polio-stricken Priya wanted too. Both landed in bed. Priya too starved for sex. She brought all Guru’s imagination into reality. Unlike the missionary sex-position, she was voluptuous, which shows women, despite being old, handicapped or having lost husbands, can put the fire to bed. The film shows explicit sex, which is nonetheless useless, as millions of such videos are freely available on internet. Slowly then the film moves towards the end.
They are all real-life characters, a daily story of our lives. The director makes a good effort to delve on the internal theatre of our lives, where the underlying element of sex comes out as the most unwavering response. Women are now equally available in public/private spaces, how about making a film juxtaposing Mala in vacuity, getting hysteric for her imaginative sex with Guru? Can we expect from Kanu Behl an Indian version of the Hite Report on Female Sexuality ? Someone once said in Urdu, ‘Seene mein ghut raheen is tarha.n se hasratei.n/Jaise ki makaan mein bebas kuwariyaan’ (Desires are getting crushed, the way unmarried damsels, locked in a house). The message of the film Agra, totally oblivious to the fact that it has Taj Mahal, the evergreen emblematic symbol of love, is that nothing is of any consequence, only one’s life matters, with hundreds of ambiguities involved.
Perhaps, here a book exclusively centered on Exploring Indian Sexuality by eminent psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar stands out for its outstanding effort into it. The writer has discussed threadbare the complexities of sex which governs the Indian sex life, which comes from the ethos of the Ajanta and Ellora scriptures.
The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner and a film reviewer.
