Cannes Film Festival 2023: Kanu Behl’s ‘Agra’ and what it ‘feels’ to be a sexually repressed man

Patriarchy is a harrowing malaise enabling far-reaching human damage in the films of writer-director Kanu Behl, who’s back at the Cannes Film Festival. This time, his new film Agra has been selected for the prestigious Director’s Fortnight, the only Indian film in the non-competitive segment.

In his first feature film Titli (2015), screened at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, the father in a lower middle class family of three sons in a suburban cul-de-sac of Delhi doesn’t speak much; when he does it is like a raspy, guttural polyphony. He is a terrifying presence in a film that strips all the sentimentality, gloss and faux-bonding we are used to seeing in the family in an overwhelming majority of Indian mainstream films in any language. This is a family coiled into a terrifying loop of violence — of the fist, which the most daring son hands out, and of abuse trapped in  the psyche of all the film’s characters. In 2019, Behl made a short film, Binnu Ka Sapna, which is streaming on MUBI, which is a more piercingly direct portrayal of patriarchy — in a running time of 32 minutes, Behl packs in generational trauma which a father passes on to a son and an almost entire lifetime when such trauma acts out in a man. He looks unflinchingly at that which is commonplace and ugly in Indian families.

Agra, set in the Taj Mahal town, goes deeper into similar psychological caverns. Behl shares credit for the story of Agra with Atika Chohan (Margarita With a Straw, 2104; Waiting, 2015), but it’s been long in the pages. Agra is also about family rot. At the last leg of his post-production for Agra at an editing studio in Mumbai’s Western suburbs, Behl says, “It was a deeply personal and hard subject to explore.” In 2016, he started working on the screenplay and over several months, he chiselled it to no satisfactory end. He was later selected to the PJLF Three Rivers Residency in Italy. “I was in a way beating around the bush. My mentor at the residency was Molly Stensgaard, she’s the editor of Lars Von Trier. It was she who pushed me to the direction it is in now. She advised either to let go of it completely or bring out what exactly I had in mind: To show exactly what sexual repression feels like in a man.” The film got funding from the prestigious Cinema du Monde fund in France and is almost ready for its Cannes journey. It is produced by Saregama India Ltd, UFO Production, and 028 films.

Rehearsals with actors spread over a few months, during which Behl broke down the entire life and impulses of the main characters to the actors playing them — debutant Mohit Agarwal in the role of a young man Guru, Rahul Roy (the lead actor of the 1990s’ hit Aashiqui makes a comeback) is Guru’s father; the other characters include Guru’s mother played by Vibha Chibber, an aunt played by Sonal Jha and others played by Ruhani Sharma, Aanchal Goswami and Priyanka Bose.