“You do not really come out of TheMerchant of Venice feeling happy for anybody,” said director Vandana Kataria whose debut feature Noblemen releases today. Over a phone interview, Kataria shared how she picked the controversial Shakespearean play when Saregama was looking for scripts based on literature. “What struck me, was how Shylock who is this tragic hero tries to stand up but gets so greedy with his idea of revenge that he loses everything,” she said. The futility of retribution along with the themes of homosexuality, homophobia and toxic masculinity drew Kataria to the project. “For me, the underlying theme of the play is that revenge does not get you anything,” she elaborated, “the very idea of revenge leads to Shylock’s downfall.” Her protagonist similarly loses everything in his quest for retaliation and audiences, she feels, will come out of the film with mixed emotions.
Universal themes
“If you don’t keep the monsters in check, it creates many more monsters,” added Kunal Kapoor who plays one of the leads in the film. “The victim often then becomes the victimiser,” he emphasised. It’s this escalating and relentless cycle of violence, the actor explained, that is one of Noblemen ’s overriding themes but also equally applicable to our society. It’s an idea that leads to a discussion around the continuing relevance and universality of Shakespeare’s themes, a range of interpretations and an exploration of complex human emotions that the bard’s work has led to.
Kapoor acknowledged his enduring fascination with the playwright and cited his film Veeram , an adaptation of Macbeth made in 2016, as an example of Shakespeare’s ability to persistently generate new meaning in every age and context.
Noblemen takes place in an all-boys boarding school, a setting which lends itself to the play’s themes of bullying and oppression. Kataria who went to a boarding school herself — Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun — said her own background had a role to play in the selection. “I understand that world well,” she admitted. “I wanted to talk about this elite, privileged world where we also do bad things… to look into these schools where we are supposed to be making the next generation of responsible adults.”
Abounding challenges
For Kapoor, apart from the gripping story, it was the authenticity of the treatment that proved appealing. “If you look at Hindi films that are based in our schools and colleges,” he said, “everything is sugar-coated. Here I felt that the world she [Kataria] was creating and the issues she was dealing with were very relevant. It is a story of an imperfect world because that is the reality. We live in an imperfect world where kids have to face challenges every day.”
With the story unfolding in this upscale setting, English seemed like the natural choice for the characters to interact in. However, when Kataria took the film to colleges across the country, she faced questions about the choice of the language and, given the significance of the issues raised in the film, its ability to exclude potential audiences. There were even suggestions to dub it into regional languages. “I do realise that it might be a tiny hindrance and that we may not be able to reach the widest audience possible but [that] world is still that English-speaking world, so had I set it here and had the characters speak in Hindi, I don’t know if it would have made a difference,” she asserted.
For Kataria who has worked as a production designer, the new role of director brought on a host of fresh responsibilities. For starters, there is no knowing what or how much is enough, she said. Moreover, there is a constant traversing of the delicate line between controlling and letting go. “As a production designer, I’m used to working with my hands whereas as a director there is an entire crew that’s working with their hands. Letting other people do things, building trust in a crew were things I had to learn which was a very humbling process for me,” she conceded.
A cautionary tale
Noblemen screened at the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival last year to a somewhat polarising response. While the theme of homosexuality is one borrowed from the original, Kataria’s research into lives at boarding schools showed her that the children bullied most now are the ones with alternate sexual identities. “We are just beginning to talk about it in our societies and these kids are baring their sexualities at younger ages at schools. They become part of the non-majority population and get picked on,” she explained.
However, it was the nature of representation that sparked a debate at Kashish which she says applauds visibility and the act of coming out. “My film in many ways is the opposite of that,” stated Kataria. While sympathetic to the audience’s need to go to cinemas to watch positive, aspirational stories, she maintained that Noblemen is a film, firmly rooted in reality and carries within it a cautionary rather than a celebratory message.
