Movie Review: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: Of Dreamers and Rebels
IT IS 1974 in Delhi when students lived in garages, and campuses echoed with Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Young people felt guilty about privilege, and architecture students spoke about preventing rural urban migration by planting fruit orchards. This is where In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) is set. The focus is on the National Institute of Architecture, based on the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi.
Anand or ‘Annie’ (Arjun Raina) fails each year; Radha, played by Arundhati Roy, who also wrote the screenplay, is the constant cynic. She knows architecture deepens the divide between the citizen and non citizen. The film, initially shown on Doordarshan, was never theatrically released. But a newly-restored version by the Film Heritage Foundation allows us to appreciate it again. It is a slice of life, at a juncture in India’s history where one could have a discussion on Marx and Marxism, between the Bharatiya Nari and the flower child, between urban sophistication and tribal sensuousness, between purpose and purposelessness. There is great joy in watching it as a cinematic archive.