B.A Pass: Movie Review

Rating: ****

Screenplay:
Debutant director Ajay Bahl puts forward a little gem of story which radiates the colours of life's most grim and harsh reality in B.A Pass. There are so many young dreams dying every day in the metropolises. To envision the withering away of innocent aspirations in the merciless light of reality without a shred of self-pitying melodrama is not an easy task. Bahl does it with great confidence and sensitivity.

Somewhere towards the end of the protagonist Mukesh's descent into a self-created hell, we see him standing shamelessly at the roadside soliciting sex, being picked up by three drunken burly men.

The director has personally done the film's cinematography is such a beautiful circumstance for the film. One can really wonder if another cameraman could capture those places in these troubled characters' lives that Bahl captures with such force and vitality.

Moving fluently from the tender to the brutal, Bahl portrays the underbelly of Delhi with telling truthfulness. There are no false notes in this tale of seduction and debasement. What gripped me right away were the passages of screaming silence.

Story:
A little later, Shadab Kamal sobs in the bathroom, blood dripping to his feet in a trail of tell-tale brutality. The intense implicit violence that underlines this sequence reminded me of a similar process of sexual debasement undertaken by Mark Wahlberg in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.

That was a film about the porn industry in the 1970s. B.A. Pass is set in present day Delhi. Paharganj, to be more precise. Bustling with sights, sounds and smells of doom and despair, it is a gripping story of a young financially-challenged man's journey into a world of prostitution.

We could say, we have never seen this before. And we would be as close to the truth as this film tries to get. The taut screenplay by Ritesh Shah never allows room for superfluous moments. We follow Mukesh's descent into a life of compromised morality with an absence of condemnation and censure. Mukesh's environment and his circumstances as a displaced orphan are not exploited to generate pathos.

No one in this film allows us to feel sorry for the derelict lives. The characters fit into the film's wretched karma with disturbing inevitability, as though everyone we see in this motion picture was pre-ordained to suffer and fade away.

By the time we arrive at the finishing line, we know the protagonist has exhausted all his options. It is the end of the road for the film's achingly young gigolo-protagonist. Hard choices have to be made at this pen-ultimate juncture.

As we watch the talented Shadab Kamal lay bare his character's soul, we are suddenly reminded of how far we have come in his 95-minute journey from innocence and anxiety to despair and doom.

Verdict:
B.A. Pass is a stark and brutal saga of seduction and betrayal. It is that unusual work of cinema which explores the darkest depths of the human consciousness without losing sight of the light that underscores life.

The film italicizes the character's askew lived by bathing them in silence. The soundtrack composed by Alokananda Dasgupta, daughter of filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta is aptly minimal austere and unsparing.

The sex is suitably cold and detached. The seduction is swift and businesslike; the sex, sometimes ugly, never satisfying.

The film is mostly populated by unlikeable, loathsome people and yet in their selfish manoeuvres the characters end up being part of a plot that keeps the audience involved till the very end. These are real people living out of authentic homes that exist beyond the director's domain of 'action' and 'cut'.

While the supporting cast of unknown faces extends a hand of sturdy believability, it is the dynamics shared between Shilpa Shukla as the housewife espousing a secret life of sexual indulgence, and newcomer Shadab as a casualty of rampant promiscuousness, who provide a centre to this melancholic ode to a life of fringe fatal benefits.

It would be erroneous to treat this film as only a serious noire effort. It is that, yes. But it's also a film that makes an impact in unexpectedly blithe ways, creeping up into our conscience when we least expect an intrusion and lodging itself cosily in a corner.

IANS