News & Gossip: FESTIVAL DI CANNES 2023

20 aprile 2023

FESTIVAL DI CANNES 2023

La 76esima edizione del Festival di Cannes si svolgerà dal 16 al 27 maggio 2023. Kennedy, di Anurag Kashyap, con Rahul Bhat e Sunny Leone, sarà proiettato fuori concorso nella sezione Séance de minuit (trailer). Agra, di Kanu Behl, è in concorso alla Quinzaine des Cinéastes, evento collaterale al festival.

Come ogni anno, oltre ad Aishwarya Rai, sono numerose le celebrità indiane attese alla manifestazione, fra cui Anushka Sharma, Sara Ali Khan, Aditi Rao Hydari, Vikramaditya Motwane e Madhur Bhandarkar.

Vedi anche Aishwarya Rai al Festival di Cannes 2023, 20 maggio 2023

RASSEGNA STAMPA/VIDEO (aggiornata al 26 maggio 2023)

- Video Film Companion: intervista concessa da Anurag Kashyap

- Video: proiezione Kennedy

- Video: proiezione Agra

- Video: il cast di Agra a Cannes

- Living on a thin line: Kanu Behl on Agra, Uday Bhatia, Mint, 16 maggio 2023:

'You’ve been working on ‘Agra’ for a while. Was it the kind of project that demanded time, or was getting it made particularly challenging?

There were two major difficulties. One I knew the moment I started: where will you get funding for a film like this in India? The other, more interesting roadblock is an unconscious one I woke up to in the middle of writing, to deal with the fear of making a film like this myself. After Titli released in India in 2015, I truly got into Agra. I had the germ of the idea. I wrote a couple of drafts where I was a little scared - I was probably not writing what I really wanted to. After about a year of writing, and two or three drastically different drafts, I was at the Three Rivers residency in Italy. My mentor was Molly Stensgaard, who edits for Lars von Trier. On the fourth or fifth day, she asked me, why are you making this film? I was a little taken aback, and said I want to do a piece about repression and sexuality in India. She asked, then why are you not doing it? That really made me take a step back, ask myself what I was truly feeling and what was the impulse for not making the film. That proved to be a key breakthrough. Around October-November 2016 is when the film really started taking shape and I started writing something closer to what the film is now. By early 2017, we had the first draft. We got Cinémas du monde (a French grant for foreign feature films) just after that, so 40% of the funding was in place. I always knew the other 60% would be the problem. I went around town but no one wanted to look at it. Two years went by like this. It was in 2019 that I finally found collaborators who were on the same page. I shot the film in June-July 2019. Then everything shut down because of the pandemic. And we took some time with post [production], because it's a difficult film with a difficult character operating on a very thin line. I wanted to take time to edit the film.

What was the germ of the idea?

I would say it was more a very strong feeling within me that I'd carried for a few years - growing up, in my adolescent years, going to college in Delhi, and some of the early years in Kolkata. I was wondering why people don’t choose to address sexuality, why there isn’t more conversation in our cinema about that. That combined with my own feeling about sexuality and how I had been able or unable to express it in those years. A lot of what you see in the film is real-life stories I've seen happen around me.

‘Agra’ is definitely recognisable as a Kanu Behl film, but where ‘Titli’ was a slow burn, this one goes straight to 11.

For me it’s about being able to serve the film you're doing as truthfully as possible. Titli was a coming-of-age story. This is almost the opposite of that. When I was writing Agra, I was wary of doing something that othered the character. I wanted to do this piece about sexual repression but I had not experienced the intensity and chaos of the life of a boy who desperately wants some physical connection. He doesn’t know how to express himself but he’s looking for a moment of truth. I decided I'd have to create that experience for myself. And that comes with the problem of staying safe, for yourself and the people around you. I went into a lot of sex chat rooms, sometimes posing as women, sometimes as men, to see how people were expressing their secret lives. The more time I spent in these rooms, I noticed that the complete white noise you start to feel if you're desiring that sort of connection and not getting it for a very long time, it’s amped up to 11. The more I started breathing in that noise, the film started emerging from there. So the amping up is my attempt to take you to that place.

You favour a bold, almost overwhelming sound design. There are these factory-like sounds that really make a particular scene with Guru [il protagonista].

Apart from the factory noise in that scene, there's a really high-pitched sound. It’s the little thing that goes in your teeth when you're in the chair at the dentist's. The idea was just to create a string of really dissonant spaces. With the drones we try and give you a sense of the white noise that he's feeling - especially when Mala [his girlfriend] appears, you hear the noise. Slowly the drones start blending into his internal pain. In a critical scene with Guru and Chhavi [his cousin], the drone you hear is literally like he's not able to take the noise within himself anymore. In the final act of the film, there are a lot of sharp sounds you find in the construction space.

There's very little music. Did you feel a score might intrude?

Absolutely, because there's no music in his life. Very early on when I was writing, I knew this. The montage at the end - that's my Bollywood song. But that little calm or peace is also acerbic. I wanted to use score as a counterpoint to action in the second half.

Did you rehearse a lot?

No, there was little rehearsal, just a lot of character-building work. It's more about taking the character that you're playing from day one in their lives to the point where they start the film, so you know them as intimately as possible, so that when we're shooting the actor is the best person to decide what that person is feeling. That character needs to be lived fully by the actor. Most of the stuff in the workshops is designed towards arriving at the point where you start the film'.

- ‘Agra’ isn’t for the faint-hearted - and director Kanu Behl won’t have it any other way, Nandini Ramnath, Scroll, 25 maggio 2023. Intervista concessa da Kanu Behl:

'In Agra, Guru’s [il protagonista] fractured mind is mapped on to the architecture of his home, which becomes a bargaining chip between him and his family members. The film traverses inhabited spaces as well as the inner recesses of Guru’s increasingly fragile mind, resulting in scenes ranging from the disturbing to the explicit. (...)

Q. It’s not always clear which year Agra is taking place in.

A. There’s a curious thing with my films. I don’t like to commit to a particular time and space. I wanted it to feel like it could be taking any place anytime. It could easily be a few years earlier. It’s deliberate - I think it gives the story a bit of a fable-like quality.

Q. The title gives the impression that the film is about insanity. There are surreal moments that seem to be taking place in Guru’s head. Yet, is Agra more about the crisis of Indian masculinity rather than madness?

A. The film was about being able to very honestly look at this troubled guy who was not able to express himself. It was sort of a lament, a call for help, for some sort of honesty in our closest, most private moments. Guru is seeking truth in a sexual union in its true meaning. Within moments where you are supposed to have an honest interaction, he finds various cracks of desire where other transactional desires come up. He arrives at that moment where no one is really trying to talk about the truth of the sexual repression that he feels and that they all are dealing with. They are trying to label him as the crazy guy, whereas from his point of view, they’re all crazy. It’s a reverse coming of age, where he realises, all these relationships are transactional, so I will show how transactions are to be done. You can’t keep devolving your house or physical space through a woman. That’s cheating, a gaze on ourselves as men. Guru wants to rebel against that. He says that in the world that we live in, there is some sort of an amputation that is involved with this need for the almost phallic, vertical rise-up of space.

Q. Much of the film is playing out inside Guru’s head. The space he inhabits too reflects his struggles.

A. I don’t quite know how to completely talk about the film purely in a socio-political-cultural context. For me, there were these human undercurrents. In addition, I was looking at the idea of physical spaces, this need, a very personal need of every Indian family, to make a house. I’ve seen this need play out in my family and a lot of families around us. Everybody wants to make a house, but what is weird is that the people living in those houses are not quite a family in as many ways as they would want to be. Yet when they make a house together, all their small transactional dreams are invested in that house. That I found curious - the act of making this house; how, when you are crammed into a house with so many people, your sexuality gets affected. (...)

Q. The narrative is fragmented, whether in the human experiences, the layout of the house, or the manner in which scenes have been designed and filmed. There are explosions and lulls.

A. When I started thinking about this film, I wondered if I could understand the levels of Guru’s repression. I was not intimately aware of who this person was. I had felt sexual repression myself, let’s say to a degree of 40 or 50 or maybe 60%. But I knew that I was talking about 100%. I didn’t want to do a false piece, a piece from the outside. I decided to put myself in situations where I first understood exactly what Guru was feeling. I had to find ways to be very safe about it. For example, I spent six-eight months in sex chat rooms. I tried to actively put myself in a place where I was not writing a film, I was just being me. I subsumed myself into that chaos to see what people were feeling. I was trying to hit those notes, which is what the fragmentation comes out of. The more I got to that place, I realised that if your desire, some black holes within your secret self, are not addressed in a certain way, it creates such a strong storm within you that you get fractured. You almost live a double life. The pathway between the public and the private gets destroyed. Sensing that time-and-space texture was important to reflect, the feeling of being inside Guru’s head. Otherwise it would be a safe film.

Q. Did you mesh real locations with sets?

A. The whole film is shot in Agra. (...) We wanted to incorporate as much phallic and vulvic sort of imagery as possible. The film’s texture is full of repressed sexuality. The biggest battles for us were the house and the internet cafe. We did a lot of work on the house. We’ve hidden a room at the back, we remade the bathroom, including the tiling. We were using a lot of blue, and we wanted the blue to spread everywhere. The terrace has been redesigned to feel bigger. That’s the last space of the house they are fighting for - it’s the main play area, it’s everybody’s desire. The internet cafe was a much bigger battle. I wanted it in the middle of a busy market. It’s difficult to find exactly the space you’re looking for. We built it from scratch. We found a hole in the wall with bricks and open sky. (...)

Q. There has been a pushback in arthouse cinema against the depiction of explicit sex. Your film has several such scenes, and you haven’t used an intimacy co-ordinator.

A. I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know if you can respond to the film on the basis of whether you had an intimacy co-ordinator. A film is a film. Your first interaction with it is to have a conversation with what it’s trying to say. If your first reaction is, how did you shoot these sex scenes and did you have an intimacy co-ordinator or not, then you haven’t really seen the film. Do the actors feel comfortable within the discomfort you are trying to create? Do you feel part of a specific piece where you feel the discomfort of the characters? How and why can we engage in conversations about sexuality without looking at the sexual act itself? How do we hope to do a revelatory piece without going into the most secret things that we do? That would go into PSA [public service announcement] territory, where you are saying something from the outside. When you choose to be in the realm of the senses, you can’t say, why was it made this way? If you have made the choice to be in Agra, you have to be able to breathe in its time and space, however difficult it is for you, to see where it is trying to take you. My responsibility is to make the film in such a way that it is a conversation, not a sermon. The audience response tells me more about them than me. If they choose to walk away saying, he’s just showing us sex rather than seeing the humanity and the struggles, it’s their conversation with the film'.