Mimi Cave’s Fresh has blown the lid off unconventional culinary tastes. Meat Steve, our heroine Noa’s latest date. And I do mean 'meat.'
You see, unbeknown to Noa, Steve is into human flesh. No, it is not a kink, it is his bigtime entrepreneurial passion. Yes, he is a cannibal who supplies human meat to the cannibalistic connoisseurs all over the world.
Noa, who is into online dating (warning to the young girls out there who are looking for loving-tinder-care out dare) meets Steve at the supermarket, ironically at the vegetable counter because as Steve grandly confesses he “doesn’t eat animals,” which is technically not incorrect. After the cute-meat, the pair is soon seen taking a torrid tumble in the sack and then, aha, Steve dreamily suggests a weekend holiday in the wilderness.
Here is where this savage horror-comedy (actually, the humour is lost in the gore-fest) loses its way: that a strong self-made intelligent girl, played by the beautiful and bright Daisy Edgar-Jones (of Normal People-fame, and how much abnormal can it get) could fall for a man without checking his identity or his social profile (he does not have one) is as hard to swallow as Steve’s cuisine for those who are not into human flesh.
In the way Sebastian Stan plays the cannibal entrepreneur, singing and dancing his way to the sizzling over, I was reminded of Armie Hammer… I mean, imagine if those scandalous text messages were actually a prelude to something far more sinister, far more culinary.
But oops, I am straying: something that Fresh never does. It is razor-sharp scalpel-precise in its narrative focus, adhering to Noa’s survivalist drama as closely as Steve’s scalpel on human female skin (always female, never male: Steve says we do not taste that good). First-time director Mimi Cave has a lot of fun with her feast-friendly hero’s ravenous appetite.
But the horror of a regular working class woman trapped in a scream-proof house with a suave psychopath never attains the chilling ferocity of Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome.
While the set-up for the captivity is a luscious mix of chilling and comic, the second movement of the plot, where Noa outwits her captor is messy and predictable. And dipped unnecessarily in sylized violence. Though horrific in its exposition of human flesh as gourmet, Fresh fails to fuel the fear factor with any durable artistic integrity, cinematic or otherwise. It is all done in the spirit of fearful fun. If you want to see a genuinely disturbing film about cannibalism then try the Assamese Aamis. Until we meat again.
‘Meat’ in the phonetic Hindi and Sanskrit sound also means 'beloved.' It is in the fitness of things in this bizarre but persuasive exposition on flesh-eating obsessions that the search for love, or for a 'meet,' merges into a growing obsession with meat that finally culminates in a horrific crime that is repugnant, and in many ways, deeply offensive.
Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis is not what it initially seems to be. A sweet love story set in a strangely stress-free Guwahati, between a wide-eyed innocent young man Sumon (Arghdeep Baruah) and a slightly older married doctor and mother Nirmali (Lima Das), whose husband is frequently out of town… too frequently, for things to remain as equanimous as they seem.
Writer-director Bhaskar Hazarika is unusually adept at capturing the sounds, sights, and smells of workaday existence… the rhythms of normalcy are captured in all their stripped-down fidelity by a camera and sound design that know their way around the characters. Hazarika constructs a case for a budding, beautiful, although strictly forbidden romance between the unlikely companions who share a common liking for meat eating-adventures, only to shatter the mood of the temperate and the humdrum with a twist in the tale that is original, jolting, and altogether appalling.
What Hazarika does to the romance in Aamis is, in some ways, unpardonably perverse. And yet the sense of doom that swathes the central relationship of this freakish fable is somehow, not an aberration but more an accreditation of the anxieties that swirl just under the placid surface of human relationships waiting to burst open at the first provocation.
This love story about two voracious meat eaters is hard to digest. But it is also hard not to get sucked into the vortex of the insatiable violence that gathers at the centre of this nerve-wracking drama. The film makes its journey from forbidden courtship to unspeakable crime in a narrative that is not fully convincing, but always compelling right till the shocking revolting finale.
This is not an easy film to pull off. Bhaskar Hazarika manages it with timorous but unwavering grace, thanks to his lead pair who furnish an uneasy but convincing graph to their off-kilter characters. Das as a bored wife who discovers a stunning appetite for adventure in her stunningly adventurous appetite, chews on every morsel of her meaty role as though it is her last. Arghadeep Baruah as Ms Das’ ‘Mann Ka Meat’ remains constantly wide-eyed and innocent even as his actions (which involve self-mutilation) grow unspeakably vile.
These are remarkably accomplished performances in a film that is savagely original. The closest parallel I can think of is Julia Ducourno’s 2017 French film Raw. And in that, no one crossed culinary boundaries for love.
In Bornila Chatterjee's The Hungry, a savage and stunning adaptation of Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. By the time the director lugged pulled and yanked the film to the sickeningly cannibalistic climax, I was repelled yet fascinated by the gore fest. The Hungry is a film where not one character is even remotely likable, except maybe the business heir who dies at the start. This is a pitch-dark Shakespearean tragedy as true to the original tale of deception and betrayal as I have seen any Shakespearean tragedy being in Indian cinema. Not for the faint-hearted. Like life itself.
It is not easy to do a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s most obscure tragedy Titus Andronicus for the simple reason that it is too complicated to withstand any kind of amendment and modulation. Bloody brutal and unpleasant, it is tale well left to anonymity.
Bravely in The Hungry, now out on Amazon Prime Video, Bornila Chaterrjee plucks into the inner innards of this internecine tragedy, looking for family feuds that can never come to a happy or even a comprehensive conclusion. This is a distracing play-on-film reveling in the bloody mess that greed and ambitious creates in those who worship money more than human relationships.
It is a film steeped in the ethos of violence. I would go as far as to say I have not seen a more violent Indian film in a very long time. Bornila stares unflinchingly at the raw wounds, invisible and manifested, of souls that never sleep. Her film is peopled by nocturnal predators feigning civility because it is expected of them. The varnish peels off even before night falls properly. And the ambitious self-destructive beast in all the characters rises to prey on all human values that make life worth living.
The film opens at a New Year’s party where Tulsi Joshi (Tisca Chopra)’s elder son (Suraj Sharma from The Life Of Pi, in a well-executed cameo) is brutally murdered. From this perverse preamble, the film ekes out a pain-lashed tragedy from the Shakespearean original, winding in and out of twists and turns that would leave a breathless David Dhawan comedy huffing and puffing.
Of course there is nothing even remotely humorous in Bornila Chatterjee’s bleak bleeding kingdom of massive ruination. Not once did I find myself smiling at the predatory posturing of the characters who breathe the toxic fumes of their ambitions until they are completely destroyed.
The film is blissfully joyless, shot by cinematographer by British cinematographer Nick Cooke with an eye for for sigh and a tooth for the truth.
Then there are the performances. So stunningly representative of a world toppling into disaster you can see the doom in the actor’s eyes. The basic dramatic conflict is between the characters played by Naseeruddin Shah and Tisca Chopra, who plays his daughter-in-law married to the ruthless tycoon’s weakling son, to get even. And boy, does she get her revenge!
Vendetta is scrawled on every nerve in Chopra’s persona. If looks could kill… Naseeruddin Shah, hobbling around like an evil Shylock high on the narcotic of unscrupulous entrepreneurship, is brilliant specially in the sequence where he crumbles to the ground after he sees a loved one die. The third vital character is the wheel dealer, the broker/dalaal who shifts loyalties according to the zeros on the cheque. Neeraj Kabi, who played a monk, who will not compromise in The Ship Of Theseus is unrecognszable as this ruthless marauder .
While these three stalwarts hold the plot together, the supporting cast is no less empathetic. Sayani Gupta and Arjun Gupta as Naseeruddin Shah’s children are specially remarkable in how much of the family’s feudal venom they inhale into their performances. These are no 'flesh'-in-the-pan occurrences on celluloid.
There is much more to these jolting films than the shockingly repellent cannibalism. They express a yearning to fulfil a culinary yearning that no kitchen can fulfill. Majrooh Sultanpuri unintentionally said it when he wrote, "Meat na mila re mann ka....."
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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