Why do human beings have sex? Is it to reproduce offspring? Yes. Is it to create, indelible bonds of attachment in relationships? Yes. It is to satiate physical needs, urges and desires? Yes. These queries can snowball into a Sigmund Freud vs Carl Jung match, in a hurry. But even then, it won’t really answer the question in entirety. Why do human beings have sex? Part of the carnal act belongs to an often unspoken truth. Social hierarchy. Unlike in nature and with other animals, human beings don’t establish dominance in a food-chain based system of hierarchy. We’re more civilized than that after all. So we stamp ultimate, irrefutable authority by domineering the act of sex. The act of fornication establishes the authority of genders. Men enforce masculinity and patriarchy with the act of making love. Women establish the force of nurturing and comforting in the act of making love. It’s a layered, complex dynamic that can be peeled to reveal many levels of emotional subtext. And in director Kanu Behl’s Agra, sex becomes the device with which, a young boy overcomes his tormented upbringing to discover confidence and form. An errant boy becomes an acceptable man through a toxic saga of sex-charged misgivings. But is this movie, the equivalent of A Clockwork Orange manifested on a canvas akin to Khosla Ka Ghosla? Hell yeah!
That’s the easiest way of filtering the important question of whether you need to watch Agra or not. Is a goulash of Stanley Kubrick depravement and Dibakar Banerjee family drama your cup of tea? If yes, then the dystopian, ‘van Gogh’ visual motifs of Agra will stoke the right brain cells. For everyone else, this ‘hard core’ drama will feel like an uncomfortable watch. With that argument out of the way, we can jump into the world of Guru (Mohit Agarwal), the protagonist of Agra. He’s all of 24 and he’s sexually frustrated to the extent that, mere text messages on a dating app give him the stimulation required to start masturbating. Stop and think about, how starkly sad that is for any person. Guru’s sexual frustration peaks, when in a trance of disappointment and rejection, he starts molesting his cousin Chhavi (Aanchal Goswami). Before that, we see Guru make love to Mala (Ruhani Sharma) on multiple occasions, none of which are pleasant and/or aesthetic. Heck, Guru is so depraved in his head that he dreams of eating tandoori squirrels and humping them, too. A lot of visual imagery in Agra is designed to make the viewer uncomfortable. Guru’s mother (Vibha Chibber) gets her night gown torn off to reveal her bra, in an altercation with her son. That’s almost a reverse engineering of the Oedipus Complex, and we’re seeing this in a film. The idea that Kanu Behl and his co-writer Atika Chohan are presenting is that no woman in Guru’s life escapes his repressed, sexual frustration. An absolute mirror to how toxic masculinity and misogyny festers in the male psyche.
That’s how Guru is pushed to the limit. The limit where his depraved, lust-infested gaze falls on a physically challenged woman Priti (Priyanka Bose). At this point, as Guru purposefully stalks and follows Priti on the streets of Agra’s busy market lanes, it feels like the boy is on the verge of becoming a rapist. Is his sanity so far infected by his depravement that he will assault a handicapped person? Kanu Behl doesn’t give the viewer’s imagination any mercy whatsoever. With every subplot, Agra compels the viewers’ mind to flirt with darkness. But just then, the tide changes. In his darkest hour, Guru meets his match with Priti and her refusal to be prey. She challenges his motivations and forces Guru to be more civil. He does eventually pounce on her, but she teaches him a sublime lesson about consent and chivalry.
There’s a whole other angle of Guru’s compact home and a lack of privacy and space that works within the narrative of Agra. While this is one of the most relevant aspects of Agra’s theme, it is also, the film’s Achilles Heel. Guru is supposed to be a mirror of most lower-middle-class Indian males. The kind who’ve had traumatic upbringing stories infecting their moral compass. That’s why these men can’t be chivalrous and instead behave with women as if they’re objects of relieving sexual tension. That’s a remarkably powerful theme. But in its final act, Agra diffuses this tense build-up by conveniently allowing Guru to grow up all of a sudden. And when he does, he doesn’t have to atone for any sins. He simply plays the Khosla Ka Ghosla game with local builder Ashoke (Babla Kochar) and comes out on top, securing a future for his dysfunctional family. It’s a bit of cop out to be honest. The first two acts of the movie cater to a very deeply disturbing treatment, which doesn’t quite gel all that well with the ‘happy family’ anti-climax.
Of course, Kanu Behl is smarter than the average director. He serves up a Shutter Island-esque throw off in an open-ended climax scene, which does no favours to assuage the mind of the average movie buff. But it’s a nice touch. A gentle reminder that nothing ever changes and that most, lecherous, lewd, cat-calling men on the streets, will not have a change of heart anytime soon.
Nevertheless, Agra’s cast deserves a standing ovation. Mohit Agarwal and Rahul Roy (playing his ‘player’ of a father) are the standout performers. The ladies, headed by Priyanka Bose and ably supported by Vibha, Aanchal, Ruhani and Sonal Jha (playing Guru’s father’s mistress) are all in top form. The ensemble cast really adds meaning to Behl and Chohan’s abstract musings. Special mention must also be made of the Production Design by Parul Sondh, Cinematography by Saurabh Monga, Editing by Samarth Dixit and Nitin Bhatia. The technical finesse in Agra is par excellence.
In the end, watching Agra is like coming to terms with your own, inner demons. It takes fortitude and focus to make sense of it and its not for the faint hearted. But those who can endure will find true depth and meaning, albeit with a bittersweet, genre-mixing ending.
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