Saibal Chatterjee
Writer-director Bhaskar Hazarika’s sophomore feature Aamis (Ravening) is the only Indian entry in the official selection of the annual Tribeca Film Festival (April 24 to May 5). But it is ‘meaty’ enough to offset the lack of numbers — it is a story of obsession and repression that equates one primal human need (love) with another (food) in a startlingly original and highly provocative manner.
The Assamese-language film, which is world premiering at the festival, is one of 10 titles in the International Narrative Competition. Coming in the wake of his National Award-winning debut, Kothanodi (The River of Fables), Aami —strengthens Hazarika’s status as a unique storyteller with a penchant for the uncharted.
The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 in a Manhattan neighbourhood by veteran actor Robert De Niro, film producer Jane Rosenthal and philanthropist Craig Hatkoff in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. It has since become one of North America’s premier showcases of independent cinema. Aamis tackles a twisted theme in a strikingly sophisticated yet profoundly unsettling way, which has the potential to leave the audience squirming in discomfort. The film definitely isn’t for the squeamish — it explores the destructive power that love wields when it is allowed to fester in the face of societal constraints.
For the delineation of the relationship between a woman and a younger man in the early parts of the film, Hazarika adopts anunwaveringly deadpan approach only to replace it with a sense of disquieting urgency as suppressed feelings get the better of the two individuals devoured by unquenchable desire.
In Tribeca’s International Narrative Competition, Aamis will be up against, among others, French director Anne Fontaine’s White as Snow, German maverick Sebastian Schipper’s Roads and British filmmaker Scott Graham’s Run. The premise of Hazarika’s film — the story pivots around an unlikely couple’s shared fondness for meat of all kinds — is bound to set it apart from the rest of the field. The film is produced by Poonam Deol of Signum Productions, Shyam Bora of Metanormal Motion Pictures and Wishberry Films.
The two principal characters, on the face of it, have absolutely nothing in common. The woman is married and in her late thirties, the man is in his mid-twenties and still finding his way around in life. When experience on the one hand and eagerness on the other cross paths, runaway inner urges push the pair towards a bizarre zone that is fraught with danger.
Hazarika, in his director’s note, spells out the logic behind the dark, disturbing plot: “Aamis tells the story of two people whom love finds and yet, with too many boundaries between them, it degenerates into self-destruction…. The film explores a bleak nihilist view of life where every character emerges scarred in the end. At its core, Aamis is not designed to carry any message other than empathy for those who make terrible choices in the pursuit of love.”
Nirmali (Lima Das) is a Guwahati-based child specialist crushed between her work routine in herhome clinic and her chores as a mother to a schoolgoing boy. Her husband, Dilip (Manash Das), also a doctor involved in medical relief work in nearby areas, is rarely in town. Nirmali’s life seems serene, but there is clearly something missing. Her first encounter with Sumon (Arghadeep Baruah), a research scholar working on a thesis on the meat-eating habits of the people of the Northeast, is innocuous enough. On a Sunday, a day when Nirmali’s clinic remains closed, the boy requests the pediatrician to rush to the aid of a vegetarian friend suffering from severe stomach spasms after gorging on meat for the first-time ever. She reluctantly agrees to follow Sumon. “Meat isn’t the problem, gluttony is,” Nirmali tells the ailing boy.
But it is meat that drives Nirmali and Sumon to the brink. For the latter, no meat is taboo. For the former, the excitement generated by the discovery of ever-new kinds of meat takes the form of an escape from the drudgery of her existence. But the two go too far as their ‘forbidden’ relationship — completely platonic, but not devoid of underlying sexual tension — obscures their sense of what is acceptable and what isn’t. Aamis works equally effectively at two levels — the psychological and the visceral.
from The Tribune http://bit.ly/2Pyv4WT
via Today’s News Headlines
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