From New Delhi to Mumbai via Agra!

A still from the drama Agra

There's a popular textbook term in collegiate economics called the Pareto point. Roughly speaking, it's the point on the said Pareto curve (on an X-Y axis), where the quantity allocated by the buyer and seller (of resources) optimally meet. There is zero wastage.

In the sense that you go any further north or south of this point, it would be a win-lose, or lose-win for either party.

If I had to explain this through visuals, it would have to be the incredible negotiation sequence in Kanu Behl's film Agra.

Wherein there's a guy, with a house to sell to a developer, who can then take over the property, keep a floor, or two/few, along with cash, and construct them a five-storey building in return.

This brilliant give-and-take ‘bakchodi' with multiple cash + floor permutation, combination lasts for over 14 minutes for what's a two-hour long film! Is Behl's Agra about a property deal? No.

And, yes, for how most conflicts can, after all, be reduced to the elemental level of jar (wealth), joru (women), zameen (land/property) - or, sex and money, if you may.

Filmmaker and screenwriter Kanu Behl. PIC/GETTY IMAGES

During teenage, when I had the latter moment of epiphany about the world, I'd regularly pull out the morning newspaper - at the time, when they were consumed universally enough to be called a daily - and manage to slot all local/national headlines, within a degree or two of separation, as either the ‘sex problem', or the ‘money problem'!

With his latest film - that premiered at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight section (2023), set to open in Indian theatres, November 14 - writer-director Behl, of course, takes a more angular look at life, as is, in a small town, within a fractured family - centred on a lonely, introverted, wholly horned-out bloke named Guru (magnificent Mohit Agarwal), perennially on sex-chat/porn, when he isn't grappling with mom, dad, cousin, dad's mistress….

Guru's ‘ASL'? Age: 24. Sex: Male. Location: Agra.

As against that patiently unravelling negotiation sequence, Behl starts his film off with startling the audience, foremost.

The screen opens to what seemed to me a painting like Dali's The Persistence of Memory, melting further still, with a cacophony in gibberish for background sound.

"It's a peek inside the mind of Guru, where his secret life has wholly subsumed his private life," Behl tells me, for that screensaver type image, which becomes the dissolve between several scenes, so you also get some sorta breather, as an audience, throughout the film.

The first time on, it leads to mad sex on a dining table, with a roasted gilehri/squirrel, gently budging on a plate. Within a few minutes, you've witnessed two suicide attempts, with phenyl and kerosene gas, and a doctor's face crushed with a squirrel's cage!

It's what Behl calls the "invocation", or "Jai Mata Di moment," so you start the proceedings, forewarning viewers enough for what's to follow, throwing them into the deepest end first. The movie does get mellower, once it settles into a robust rhythm.

As an audience, you're totally in sync with it, even when the madness, sometimes, seeps through your skin.

At exactly the 59th minute (mid-point), the film's female lead (naturally captivating Priyanka Bose) limps her way into the screen. It'd appear the male protagonist has found his nest, if not an outlet.

Both, at it in bed, look more like rabbits in heat, rather than choreographed leads in a sensuously filmic scene. Bose tells me, "With an older woman, and a younger man, also, the gaze feels reversed."

Having announced his independence as an artiste with each film, Agra is Behl's third feature. His debut, Titli (2014), about car-jackers in Delhi, evidently emanated from a newspaper report. Likewise, Despatch (2024) was based on the murder of Mumbai crime journalist J Dey.

Equally engaging and disturbing, Agra, as it turns out, came from a thought before its tough expression in words/screen.

That idea, Behl confesses, being sexual repression/frustration. Hence, you sense sex at the front, back and centre of his film. Even in songs that play from speakers as ambient sound.

They're melancholic, very '90s type dard-bhare Bollywood numbers.

For, in those tracks, even in ghazals, for that matter, what's this longing for the beloved (someone, perhaps, you haven't even met) - if not, quite possibly, articulation of incel infatuation. No? Aashiqui's Rahul Roy plays the dad in Agra.

Behl graduated in filmmaking from Kolkata's SRFTII. What does a film mean to him? I'm keen to know. He says, "It's when you go beyond consuming story and characters, and become one with yourself (before
the screen)."

Wondering about who his strongest influences could be, as a filmmaker - while I was thinking along the lines of, say, Mike Leigh; at that moment, he had Paul Thomas Anderson in mind, citing The Master, Licorice Pizza.

In Agra, you navigate claustrophobic spaces that open into a city that could well be Banaras, without a view of the ghats, or Madurai, without its temples.

Just as Agra, the film, is firstly shorn of the Taj Mahal - making it a story, chiefly, about anybody, in any Indian town.

Why call it Agra then? "Paagal khana (mental asylum)," Behl quips. Aha! Also, one that you aren't looking into; but feel like you're viscerally inside it, actually. Bravo.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.