The difficulty in understanding men

The film Mod is a rare attempt at reversing the male gaze. A woman filmmaker tries to lay bare the complicated minds of young men who are themselves weighed down by patriarchy

March 26, 2016 01:41 am | Updated 02:14 am IST

A still from Mod.

A still from Mod.

It is rare to find a film where a woman goes behind the camera to cast a gaze on men. “I’m trying to understand boys,” says 28-year-old Pushpa Rawat in Mod to a boy who wants to know why she is zooming in on them with her camera. “But here you will only find those whom no one understands,” he replies.

Mod came from Pushpa’s attempt to understand her brother, an aimless drifter. “We were always very worried about Ankur, about what he would do in life,” she recalls. Despite being close to him, she found it difficult to communicate with him and wanted to “bridge that gap”. “I didn’t begin with the intent of making a film,” she says. “It was just a metaphorical search for my brother.” Mod (turn) — a unique documentation of vagrants like her brother who hang out at the infamous Pratap Nagar water tank in lower-middle-class Ghaziabad — was born during this search.

Victims like women The cliché is that the mind of a woman is difficult to fathom. Mod tries to lay bare the complicated, repressed minds of young men who are weighed down by the very patriarchy they are a part of and perpetuate. They are as much victims of role playing as women. These are the men on the margins, the dropouts who are unable to negotiate their rightful space in society, those who are not able to live up to the expectations of the world. They dismiss themselves as “third class”, “garbage”, failures stuck in a rut. Though they have not been educated beyond fifth standard, they consider jobs that pay them Rs. 8,000 a month menial. They see poetry in banal film songs and some of them insist on talking in broken English, believing that this means they have arrived. They take to odd jobs only to buy themselves an iPhone 6. They are the unsuitable boys, or those who cannot be the subjects of a film. These unknown guys — Ankur, W, Rizwan, Raj — find a voice through Pushpa and, in turn, an audience in us.

Pushpa, also a resident of Pratap Nagar, was always curious about the “tanki”. “It wasn’t considered a good, safe spot, especially for women. It had been the hang-out of the messed-up neighbourhood boys. If you couldn’t find them anywhere, you knew they would be at the ‘tanki’,” she says. “Tanki” is the place where these boys gamble, drink, smoke up, and rap. It is an escape from the realities of life. “They consider it their world, they don’t want to get out of it,” says Pushpa. Yet, she says, they also dream of a future when they won’t have to come back to it.

The 40-hour footage was shot on and off from October 2014 to January 2015. Pushpa needed patience to build a rapport with the boys. There were days when she used to just observe, nothing more. “It was intimidating, it took time to be allowed entry into their world. In fact, I started off by taking just shots of their hands,” she says. This is also the point where the film linear kicks off. However, despite sporting the tag of “bad boys”, they never misbehaved with her, she says. “I used to find the reflection of my brother in them, in their mistakes and follies.” Editing the footage, she says, took her and her mentor-filmmaker Anupama Srinivasan a long while. “We didn’t know where to start and where to end the film,” she recalls.

Simple filmmaking

Pushpa’s is an unusual voice in filmmaking. Her first film, Nirnay, explored why her romance with her childhood friend Sunil ji could not culminate in marriage. It is difficult to slot her films. They could perhaps be called a mix of personal and societal explorations.

Pushpa retains the disarming, fuss-free touch of Nirnay in Mod as well. Mod is a simple piece of filmmaking devoid of any flourishes. She is persistent, repetitive, but gentle in posing uncomfortable questions to her brother, father, the boys at the tank and their families which helps bring out their dilemmas with a rare candidness. Despite unlimited access to these people, she does not abuse it. Nor is she ever judgmental.

There are no resolutions offered either. The film does wonder if the aimless drifting is to do with parents, friends, or sheer loneliness. Pushpa’s father takes the blame for spoiling Ankur. “I never guided him the way I guided you girls,” he says. Pushpa only tells us during the interview that parents need to understand what their children want. Men at least have the option to go to the “tanki” when they have nowhere else to go, she says. Women cannot step out easily to vent out their frustrations.

There are times when Pushpa seems to be getting involved in the lives of her subjects — she tries to help them get their certificates from school and fills out forms. But while the film reaches out to the viewer, the filmmaker isn’t quite as satisfied. She feels she couldn’t pin down her subjects the way she would have wanted to. Speaking to them about sex, romance and relationships was also difficult, she says. It is not only the minds of women, but also that of men that are difficult to fathom. “Gents khul kar baat nahin karte hain [Men don’t talk frankly],” she says.

namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in

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