Mod

Nagesh Kukunoor’s new film and the strangeness of his filmography

The filmography of Nagesh Kukunoor is one of the oddest. He starts off with an auteurist charmer like Hyderabad Blues—innovative, witty, a young, urban, niche film that connects so well with its audience—then quickly drifts off with fair to middling films with no soul (Rockford), then makes a comeback with quality work like Iqbal, and then, inexplicably, turns into the mediocre filmmaker of today.

It would be easy to say that the star system and big budgets have compromised Kukunoor. But Mod is a small film, with a tightly-controlled single location at a hill station in the Nilgiris. There are no major stars, and the story, though inspired by other work, is his own. Yet, it is a movie full of the cliches of Indian ‘Middle’ cinema of the 1980s.

Which is really odd for a director who made his breakthrough in the late 1990s. About a girl called Aranya (Ayesha Takia) who makes a living repairing watches and has her hands full looking after her tippler, film music-obsessed father (Raghuvir Yadav), the story traces her falling in love with a problematic young man.

The disconnect with life and cinema starts with the film’s premise. Even people of an older generation don’t often repair their watches these days and cellphones give you the time. Fixing watches does not ensure a middle-class existence in a sleepy small town. The unreality starts here and extends dramatically to Aranya’s love interest, Andy (Rannvijay Singh), who, it turns out, has a psychiatric condition straight out of Hollywood ‘Film Noir’ .

Except in Mod, there is none of the play of light and shadow of those obsessively dark films. This is a sunny, cheerful film about a pretty horrific malady. Reality tells you that lovely Aranya is going to have her life destroyed by this seriously ill man. Kukunoor tells you that Aranya is walking joyfully into a brave new world.

filmographymaladyNadesh Kukunoor