Hulla
An excerpt from Avijit Ghosh’s book 40 Retakes: Bollywood Classics You May Have Missed
In National Award-winning writer Avijit Ghosh’s 2013 book about unsung classics in Hindi cinema over almost 100 years, Hulla was picked as one of the 40 films that stays underrated. The chapter on the film is reproduced below.
Chapter 36
Hulla
(2008)
Producer: Sunil Doshi
Director: Jaideep Varma
Cast: Sushant Singh, Rajat Kapoor, Kartikadevi Rane, Mandeep Majumdar, Chandrachood Karnik, Vrajesh Hirjee, Dibyendu Bhattacharya
Music: Indian Ocean
Why it makes the cut: Because few films have shown the urban mind’s ghettoisation so succinctly.
What do you say of a full-length feature film made on someone unable to sleep because of the noise made by a watchman’s whistle? That it is too trivial a subject to make a film about? And was that the reason why most critics carelessly dismissed Hulla?
Director Anurag Kashyap was a rare contrarian. After watching the film, he wrote in his blog, ‘Before going to see the movie I read every review I could find… I told myself the film could not be that bad. Jaideep Varma is the guy who wrote Local, so he couldn’t have written something unintelligent or non-entertaining… I saw the film and it saddens me that people did not see in the film what I saw. It was so there. After a long time I saw a film where you saw the author as someone who observes, someone who had things to say. Oh yes, it wasn’t a perfect film… but what a script! And it was the script the critics have been trashing. A bloody courageous movie to make and an important one, but I guess everyone went only to laugh, and that, too, in the wrong places.’
Kashyap is spot on. It is due to the sparkling script that a story which, at first glance, looks good enough only for a television episode of thirty minutes, becomes an engaging feature film of almost two hours. And Hulla (‘Clamour’ in English) isn’t a comedy; it is human drama. And like any observation of life, the movie offers its share of laughs, even in its cruel and dark moments. The story is about on-the-up stockbroker Raj Puri (Sushant Singh), who has just moved to a Mumbai suburban apartment with his attractive wife Abha (Kartikadevi Rane). The problem of his sleeplessness grows more acute when the apartment’s secretary Janardhan (Rajat Kapoor) insists that the guard’s whistling is essential for the society’s security. But as the issue remains unresolved, the strange predicament begins to consume Raj. His work gets affected adversely and so does his relationship with his wife. And the contrary points of view with the secretary escalate into a war between the two.
Hulla’s real strength lies in the way debutant director Varma colours the invisible bar codes between civility and cussedness, anger and angst. This is a film of hidden meanings, of things that happen at the subterranean level beyond the fully frontal events of life. There’s a class subtext to the battle between Raj and Janardan. Raj is on the comfortable side of the upper middle class; small-time trader Janardan is the sort of guy who will be hit by any hike in petrol prices or revised electricity tariffs. The secretary’s job gives him a sense of power, redeems his self-worth. In his face-off with Raj, he uses rules as a weapon to get even. As a professional, he is powerless every day before the businessmen who refuse his goods, treat him condescendingly. But against Puri, he feels omnipotent. The duality of his situation stands at the heart of his existence.
Actor Sushant Singh points out that the clash is also a clash of two generations. ‘Raj and Janardan are separated by ten to fifteen years. Raj belongs to the pampered generation that earns a car in its first year of working; Janardan belongs to that era when people had to struggle for a lifetime to buy a car. Their antipathy has these elements too,’ he says. Raj is uncouth and cocky. He values nothing but money, and hates his high-minded, Arthur Koestler-reading father-in-law who sees him as an upstart. In fact, you wonder what Abha, a smart marketing executive, sees in him. But the movie isn’t about the Abha–Raj love story — though actor Sushant Singh makes Raj more amiable than he actually is. The disintegration of their relationship, almost in slow motion, is one of the most remarkable things about the movie. Abha is unable to cope with her husband’s obsession with the whistle. Her changing stance — from sympathy to tolerance, from bafflement to disapproval — is wonderfully framed. It is ironic that while their relationship plummets under stress, the bond between Janardan and his wife grows stronger. The latter is unhappy with her lower middle-class status and wants more; but in this time of distress she becomes his anchor. We discover that there’s more to the foundation of their relationship than what Raj and Abha have between themselves.
The movie’s best comic moments come from the minor actors. The neighbour with high blood pressure who always tears his vests when angry, the next-door woman who shrieks hysterically each time her daughter breaks something, the cop at the police station who gives Raj a lesson in phonetics as he tries to pronounce his surname, Pople, and Janardan’s yoga-loving wife who wants a little more than what she has — all synergise in the comedy.
The movie’s making is as interesting as its theme. ‘The film’s origin lay in a one-page humour column written by me in January 2000 in a magazine called Gentleman. That, in turn, was inspired by real-life events that occurred to me,’ says writer-director Varma. Like the film’s protagonist, Varma is a light sleeper. And like his main character, he too has written letters of complaint about late-night noise to the chief minister and even whistled into a phone to annoy a housing society official. The screenplay was ready by 2001. But the filming kept getting delayed as several producers, directors and actors got involved with the project before dropping out. Finally, Rajat Kapoor suggested to Varma, who was initially only the film’s writer, ‘Why don’t you direct the film yourself?’ The idea was radical. Varma hadn’t been on a film set before. But he decided to bite the bullet.
There were still hurdles to be overcome. One month before the shoot, producer Sunil Doshi insisted upon a ‘test shoot’ on a budget of Rs 20,000. Varma says he took it as an opportunity to check out the long-shot camera moves with his cinematographer, Paramvir Singh.‘We shot three sequences within that budget in just one day, with practically no props. The producer, however, was convinced that we had done a shabby job and threatened to pull the plug on the film if I did not change my technical team. I refused to do that, and instead offered to drop the film altogether. He relented then, but the shadow of his lack of confidence manifested several times during the shoot. However, when he saw the completed film, to his credit, the first thing he said was that he had been wrong to doubt us as the film did not look like it had been made by first-timers at all,’ says the director.
Hulla was shot in twenty-eight days with just a two-day gap in between. Total cost: Rs 96 lakh. ‘Everything was so hectic that it is all completely a blur now. The one thing I remember generally is that we could not, as a rule, go beyond four takes. So to get things right, with zero rehearsal, was very stressful,’ he remembers. Actors put in their bit too. Sushant really looks sleepless. ‘The challenge was to bring out the sleeplessness physically on the screen. Otherwise, the character would have fallen flat,’ he says. To create the effect, Sushant was particular about his make-up. Since the film wasn’t shot in chronological progression, he also made notes on the number of days the character wouldn’t have slept for a particular scene and acted accordingly. ‘It was part of the homework,’ the actor says. Despite competent performances and without any box-office concessions such as an item song, the movie received terrible reviews. Positive reviews and good word-of-mouth publicity are oxygen to off-beat, low-budget flicks. With its shows getting cancelled from the very first weekend, the movie didn’t have a ghost of a chance at the box office. ‘Some said, a film blog I had written (in my attempt to be “honest”, I had criticised the shallowness of the media, even before the film’s release) was responsible as it rubbed too many people the wrong way, and claimed that the director was reviewed, not the film,’ says Varma. The movie was savaged by critics and collapsed at the cash counter. It was a demoralising blow for Varma and he would take some time to get over it. Three years later, his documentary, Leaving Home, on the music band Indian Ocean, earned a National Award.
Now with the benefit of hindsight, Varma feels that some people found the basic concept of Hulla too flimsy; some also felt that Sushant’s character was over-reacting. In other words, they simply couldn’t relate to the movie. ‘But since I know all of this actually happened to me… there was a certain conviction I had about the validity of the subject matter,’ he says. It is possible that both reviewers and the audience saw the film as a comedy and were disappointed not to find it amusing enough. The human drama escaped them. The climax is subtle and sad, and there’s no feel-good resolution. Perhaps that, too, went against the movie.
Hulla is, as Kashyap wrote, ‘what independent cinema should be about, a new original voice, minimal resources and a good script… It is a proud first film.’
And it is a movie with multiple takeaways. You can view it as a tale of urban India in stressful times when even trivial issues detonate beyond control. But Hulla can also be seen as a parable on intolerance. In these undemocratic times, when there is a general unwillingness to listen to the other person’s point of view, when there is a rapid vanishing of middle space, the whistle becomes a metaphor for everything we want to shut out of our lives.
Short story:
Actor Saif Ali Khan was also approached to play the lead part in Hulla. Recalls writer-director Jaideep Varma, ‘He ostensibly loved the script, jumped up and down with delight and later that night called up Ashish Patwardhan (who was directing the film then) and said how the writing reminded him of Harold Pinter (which I thought was a bizarre reference) and how he really looked forward to doing it. Then, within a week or two, he abruptly stopped taking the director’s calls, without bothering with any explanation. So, either he backed out wilfully or he erased a part of his memory by mistake. Interestingly, a few months later, he called me directly and asked me to tweak an existing script for him “in the style of Hulla”. It was for a remake of The Wedding Planner.’
GHOSH, AVIJIT — 40 RETAKES (2013) Tranquebar
A video review of this film by Ford Seeuws (the Surfing Violinist) who discovered the film from the very same book.