Opening to a decidedly mixed response at Kashish, the film festival with a difference, Vandana Kataria’s debut feature Noblemen is set in an upper-crust boarding school where bullying is rife. An upcoming Founder’s Day production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice provides prescient backdrop to the goings-on.
The casting of Bassanio, the ‘romantic lead’ in the play, proves to be particularly contentious when drama teacher Murali (Kunal Kapoor) casts ‘tenthie’ Shay (Ali Haji) in the part, rather than movie-star spawn Baadal (Shaan Groverr), thus incurring the wrath of vengeful sports captain Arjun (Mohammad Ali Mir). This knowing glance at nepotism is one of many progressive touches that riddle this disarming indie feature. The top-notch camerawork by Ramanuj Dutta is replete with Hogwarts exteriors and a touch of the sinister that quickly strips a school setting of its innocuousness, as befits a grand and intricate tale of adolescent intrigue.
Layers of drama
While it isn’t difficult to identify parallels with the play within, it’s larger ideas that are borrowed — like loyalty or vengeance or prejudice — with subtext tacked on almost by default. Certainly, the naming of characters indicate allusions in spirit. Fresh-faced Pia (Muskkaan Jaferi), a rare girl in an all-boys school, could well be a Portia stand-in, while the homo-social bonding between bullies Arjun and Badal is akin to Antonio and Bassanio’s ambiguous friendship. As the object of abject persecution, Haji’s moniker evokes the much-ridiculed Shylock, and his constant intonations of lines from the play gets even more impassioned as the film wears on. Unlike the charged collegiate theatre backdrop of Kranti Kanade’s CRD , the school production in Noblemen never feels ‘high stakes’ enough. The rehearsals are too pat and the coveting of the prized part remains a theoretical blind spot. If anything, the play suggests the colonial hangover persisting in an Anglicised school stuck in a time-warp (gadgets and drugs notwithstanding), where the prime movers speak in pristine English, and Hindi-speaking lackeys form an underclass of sorts. Whether this is social commentary or the short-sightedness of a privileged gaze, isn’t entirely clear to the audience.
While the battle-lines are drawn up predictably — the outsiders in one corner, the ‘jocks’ in the other — it is to Kataria’s credit that she gathers these loose ends, and makes the clichéd seem edgy and stimulating while drawing up a slew of great performances from her cast. Haji, especially, is a revelation. As a could-be-gay person coming to terms with his individualism, Shay is a surrogate for those who have been at the receiving end of both slow-drip micro-aggressions and explicit bullying, inhabiting an interior world that is surprisingly full of pluck. In contrast, a sincere Mir is saddled with perhaps too much diabolism for a young actor to handle, in a good-versus-evil setup in which he is a camp villain of the first order, although he never veers over the top. In a thankless part, Kapoor is his usual well-intentioned self.
Balancing act
What proves to be the film’s undoing is the sensational handling of its macabre elements. While Kataria might be under the impression that she’s pushing the envelope when it comes to the more egregious acts of transgressions filmed, they come off as manipulative and exploitative, even gratuitously so. These include a graphic anal-rape sequence that is over-dramatised in an attempt to highlight toxic masculinity and its portents, or even latent homosexuality on the part of the perpetrators. Screening the film in a queer festival leaves it open to be minutely scrutinised on issues of representation. Kataria refreshingly normalises same-sex desire, as seen in her sensitive handling of Shay’s burgeoning desire for Murali, reminiscent of a similar angle in Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker.
While Shay is incredibly squeamish about getting into the politics of identity, Murali’s assertions outline the film’s liberal outlook. The overarching homo-eroticism that colours the film’s darker moments is unpalatable to those for whom queer-themed films must necessarily embrace a starched affirmative agenda (which should never be a given).
The film’s climatic twist, which some at the festival were blindsided by, strongly suggests how the trauma of abuse can slowly push an otherwise unassuming boy over the edge. Yet, in the absence of any kind of psychological detailing, it remains a subversive idea without a pay-off. Kataria must be lauded for dispensing with the cloyingly identifiable, but her film’s outré choices remain more convoluted than path-breaking, and shatter the film’s carefully crafted idealism.
