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Ankhon Dekhi is a 2014 Hindi film written and directed by Rajat Kapoor and Produced
by Manish Mundra . The film stars Sanjay Mishra and Rajat Kapoor
in lead roles.The music is composed by Sagar Desai and cinematography by Rafey Mehmood.
The film edited by Suresh Pai under the studio Mithya Talkies.
The movie is set to release on the 21st of March,2014.
Raje Bauji (Sanjay Mishra} is a man in his late fifties,
living out a dreary but eventful life in a small house in old Delhi- where he lives with
his extended family. A random incident is going to change his life
in a dramatic way- though he does not realize at the moment. Bauji’s
daughter has been seeing a boy of ill repute. When that fact is revealed to the family,
after much deliberation they decide to do the obvious-
lock up the girl and go beat the willful boy.It is a funny old journey of this man, this old
fool- who is both Lear and the fool.
Rajat Kapoor doesn’t entirely agree, but the title of his latest movie, a picaresque
comedy about one man’s matchbox-sized dreams, is autobiographical in nature. Ankhon Dekhi,
which is set in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk neighbourhood, is inspired by the new-found belief
of its lead character that lived experience is superior to second-hand knowledge. The
21 March release also doubles up as a return to roots
for Kapoor, who grew up and spent 25 years there before moving to Mumbai.
It’s Kapoor’s first film to be set away from Mumbai, and uses people and places dredged
up from his memories of growing up in the Walled City.
“It is autobiographical, in a way, but the title is also most apt for a film that talks
about the knowledge you gain from experience,” Kapoor says.
What took him so long to return home? “I finally had a script,” he says.
Ankhon Dekhi stars an ensemble cast of film and theatre veterans,
but gives pride of place to Sanjay Mishra, best known for his off-kilter roles in several
films. Mishra’s Bauji is a travel agency employee
who chucks up his job one fine day and embarks on a series
of minor adventures to understand his place in the world. Forging ahead with the belief
that lived experience is the best teacher of all,
Bauji turns his world inside out, much to the chagrin of his family,
pushing his long-suffering brother (played by Kapoor) into moving out of the family home.
Most of the movie plays out within the confines of the joint family set-up, with the location
and production design by Kapoor’s wife Meenal Agarwal lending
immense flavour to this home-cooked soufflé of the self-transforming efforts of an ordinary
man.
The 147-minute movie is set in the national capital,
but by choosing to lock itself up inside the Walled City and rarely venturing beyond the
borders of Bauji’s cramped but cosy confines, Ankhon Dekhi adds itself to a growing list
of native town cinema that is characterized by harmless eccentrics, quirkiness,
modest dreams and goals, and an innocence that predates globalization.
Kapoor wrote the film over four years ago, and although it is set in the present day,
the production design is strictly from the 1980s,
says Agarwal, who has worked on several of Kapoor’s films. “It had to be a realistic
scenario without making it decorative,” she says.
“There are period elements too—for instance, Bauji talks about landlines,
letterpress printing. As an art team, we decided to dress the film
for the 1980s, since the character’s mind at a subconscious level is still in that decade.”
Since the story unfolds over several months, Agarwal assigned the colours of Delhi’s
various seasons to key phases—deep blue and cold lighting for winter,
for instance. “The idea was to create an actual house—to make things as real as possible,”
she says. “We sourced the props in terms of what the
characters in the movie could afford to buy, borrowed stuff from people’s houses in the
neighbourhood.” The main location was rented from a Chandni
Chowk resident, who lives on the floor below the terrace flat
in which the bulk of the story plays out. “I believe in the energy of the space very
much,” Kapoor says. “I believe the film is made because of that.”
Cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, Kapoor’s long-time collaborator, effectively conveys
the family’s cosily cramped conditions, dividing the frames into sections and planes
spilling over with bodies and bric-à-brac. “When we realized that a lot of the film
would be indoors, we started cramping the space,” Kapoor says.
“That became very interesting—we didn’t move the camera, and every frame spills over
with people. This also happened with the sound, where there
are several people talking at the same time.” Kapoor has worked with Mahmood since his first
feature in 1997, the unreleased noir drama Private Detective,
and they decided “never” to do a shot breakdown of the screenplay, says the film-maker
and theatre director. “It’s terrible when you say that you know
exactly what you are going to shoot—it kills the excitement,
makes for dead shots and is not organic at all,” Kapoor says. “We did have a script,
but when we got the actors together, we asked them how they wanted to play out
the scenes.” The improvisational quality, which is also
an influence of Kapoor’s years on stage, pushes the characters to the forefront of
the narrative. Opinion is likely to be divided on whether
Mishra successfully carries off the journey inwards into his soul,
but the movie is a late career boost for the silver-haired actor, who has been seen in
a prominent role only in low-budget films such as Saare Jahaan Se Mehnga....
Kapoor cast Mishra after working with him on the kidnapping drama Phas Gaye Re Obama
in 2010. “When I was writing the film, his face kept coming before my eyes,” Kapoor
says. Mishra brought his own tics and tricks to the part.
“He has a weird sense of humour, he can play scenes on a tangent, and he is great
with improvisation,” Kapoor says. “When we started shooting, some people in
the unit thought that he was on a wrong note, but I was willing to go with the way he was
playing it.” Also standing out in the diverse cast is Maya
Sarao, who plays Bauji’s lovelorn daughter, and has previously appeared in a small role
in Patiala House. The joy of film-making is “to find actors
who work for the role and who are great actors too”, Kapoor says.
Ankhon Dekhi is characterized by an insistence on portraying the Walled City’s denizens
as a shiny, happy bunch whose cuteness insulates them
from the anxieties of being part of a rapidly globalizing city-state.
“The idea of humour is very important to a narrative,” says Kapoor,
a self-declared acolyte of experimental film-makers Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani whose own cinema
has rarely been as abstruse or inaccessible as his mentors’. “The idea
is to explore a series of totally unpredictable experiences, but without any judgement.”