‘Agra is me trying to hold up a mirror and say: This is who we are now. It’s time to talk about this’: Kanu Behl

Behl’s film, now in theatres, strips away all pretence and stares directly at the rage and violence tied to sex, in the minds of repressed young Indian men.

There is often a tenderness to slice-of-life stories set in non-metropolitan India. People lean on each other; the light is tinged with gold.

‘I’ve felt something of what the protagonist Guru feels,’ says Behl, 45. ‘There was a time when I felt crippled by my inability to express myself to the opposite sex.’

Expect none of that in Agra.

This a world that is breathless, brutal and relentless.

The second feature film by Kanu Behl, 45, has made news for how few screens it has been given (a number that is slowly rising, with rising interest in the movie). It has made news for premiering at Cannes, as Behl’s first film Titli did, in 2014.

What it should be making news for is how it strips all pretence away and stares directly at the repression, rage and violence tied to sex, in the minds of sex-starved and space-starved Indian men.

Behl felt a little bit of this himself, as a teenager.

“I felt crippled by my inability to express myself to the opposite sex,” he says. “Still, I know that what I felt was probably only 10% of what someone in Guru’s circumstances would feel.”

Behl had the rare privilege of his own room, he points out. Like so many others, Guru, the protagonist of Agra, shares his living space with parents and assorted relatives who have the effect of keeping him infantilised and stifled. The pursuit of pleasure becomes sordid and quasi-violent in such a world.

Behl’s film, with its raw cityscapes and refusal to airbrush anything, traces what this sense of living on the edge can feel like. Hope still finds its way in; and love, of a kind. But can someone trapped for so long ever be free?

From excavating his own past to logging into chatrooms focused on sex, Behl discusses how he brought the world of Agra to life, in excerpts from an interview.

Mohit Agarwal as Guru. Deprived of space, agency and, in many ways, a sense of normalcy, the pursuit of pleasure becomes sordid and quasi-violent in the world of the film Agra.

* You’ve said that Agra is based, quite heavily, on your youth…

From my late teens to my mid-20s, I felt sexually repressed, crippled by my inability to express myself to the opposite sex. Looking back later, I wondered: Was it just me, or something bigger?

I had seen other boys go through even greater turmoil. I was aware that I had a great privilege: a room to myself, in my family’s middle-class, three-bedroom house in East Delhi. I knew boys who lived with their entire families in a single room. The way some of them talked about women was terrifying.

After I made Titli, I found myself thinking about this. About how, in India, where so many live packed like sardines, space so greatly shapes our sexuality, causing this strange vortex of lust, repression, desire, anger, transaction, loss and survival.

.

Agra treats its subjects with a rawness that is unusual. The result, for the viewer, is a sense of breathlessness, brutality – and startling insight.

* The man vested with these emotions, Guru, played so masterfully by Mohit Agarwal, feels like a piece of startling insight. What did it take to build this character?

I always start a story with something very personal, and gradually distance myself enough to create a larger ripple. A lot of Guru’s root feelings are mine, but it took me a while to get the rest of his character in place.

At first, I think I was self-censoring, perhaps because I was thinking about investors. I was made to realise this at a residency in Italy. My mentor, Molly Malene Stensgaard, the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s long-time editor, asked me, at one point: “Why are you doing this film?” I gave her my usual filmmaking spiel. After a long pause, she said: “So then why are you not doing it?” What she meant was: Why are you not doing it right?

That is when I finally stopped pussyfooting around the film and decided I really wanted to talk about this. I set my fears aside, wrote another draft… and realised it didn’t ring true either, because there was the problem of privilege.

What I felt as a young man was probably only 10% of what someone in Guru’s circumstances would feel. So I put myself in spaces where I could experience something of that level of repression.

I began to log into sex chatrooms, and now I was in the middle of the storm. It felt like a sexual blackhole where one could be completely subsumed by pleasures you might not otherwise be able to access at all.

Once I had arrived at this point, the film really started writing itself.

.

.

* You don’t try to soften the experience for the audience at all… it is breathtaking but raw, all through.

I was really worried about how to create empathy for this kind of character. I was worried he would be dismissed as “mad”. At best, I thought, the audience would “other” him: “This is not me, this is someone else.” I didn’t want that.

When other characters in the story started to emerge, I realised there was a way around this. If he’s mad, they are madder. And he’s the only one trying to talk about the madness.

For me, Agra is also a feminist film. It’s just that it’s being told from the inside.

There are graphic scenes, but it isn’t built for titillation.

I’m trying to hold up a mirror and say: “This is who we are now. It’s time to talk about this. Let’s not stay silent anymore. Let’s have that chat.”

.

* The end is genius. A dream comes true, a nightmare returns. Is this Guru’s fate; is whatever joy he finds destined to be tainted?

I wondered how to end this; what would happen to this boy after this whole journey. It felt like the only possible thing that could happen was that the repression had set in so deeply that it was his to live with now.

We live in a time when, if you want something, you have to cut a piece of yourself out to get it… In that sense, Agra is a reverse coming-of-age story. The film ends with the inevitability of loss.