It’s the 1980s in Bangalore. A team of socially awkward boys who are avid quizzers enter a national competition, determined to beat their arch-rivals from Calcutta. They set out on a cross-country alcohol-fuelled journey, desperately trying to lose their virginity on the way.
Brahman Naman is, in short, the kind of film Q aka Qaushiq Mukherjee likes doing best: low-budget, experimental, exploring sex, drugs and underground music, as with his previous works, Gandu and Tasher Desh . “Where’s the fun in life without drugs?” he said, in his trademark provocative fashion, over a phone interview.
The film, named after its protagonist (Shashank Arora, previously seen in Titli ), also marks the acting debut of Siddharth Mallya, liquor baron Vijay Mallya’s son; he plays a cameo role.
The Indo-British co-production has been selected for the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, where it has entered the World Cinema Dramatic competition, a section that chooses 12 films by “emerging filmmaking talents around the world offer fresh perspectives and inventive styles.”
This is the first film Q is directing for which he has not done the script himself (it is written by S Ramachandran) and it’s also his first English language film as a director. Another first: the genre — ‘dirty comedy’ — hasn’t been attempted in India before. The loss of the virginity trope reminds one immediately of the most popular film of this genre, American Pie . Q partly agrees: “At one level, it is that: -- a jerk-off boy story; I would say, an American Pie with brains. But it’s closer to something like Napolean Dynamite ,” he says, referring to the indie art house comedy that incidentally also premiered at Sundance in 2004.
Brahman… is set in the 1980s, which is when Q was growing up. “The late ’80s was a time in vacuum, a time when nothing was really happening,” he told The Hindu . “We didn’t have anything; even the mindsets of people were very different from how we think now. One of my main objectives of making this film is to capture that time. We shot it in Mysore which still has parts that look like Bangalore of the time.” He declined to go into more details about the movie, saying he would discuss these only after the film’s premiere at Sundance in January next year.
