A scene from the movie Agra.
With less than a month left for Cannes 2023, it has been learned that Indian director Kanu Behl’s Hindi feature, Agra will premiere at the event.
Indian director Kanu Behl’s Hindi feature, Agra, will premiere at Directors’ Fortnight, a sidebar to the Cannes Film Festival alongside Critics’ Week. Agra is the only venue in this section this year. This is a non-competitive category open to all festival goers.
Behl’s earlier work, Titli also premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2014. Agra has Rahul Roy (who was in Aashiqui), who is coming back with this film. It also stars Priyanka Bose (actor in the Oscar-nominated Lion) and debutant Mohit Agarwal, who plays the lead role.
Guru (25), a sexually repressed young boy, lives in a small house in Agra. He sleeps in the same room with his mother and on the upper floor his father lives with his mistress. In an already small house, the only available space is the terrace on the top floor. Guru insists that he is in love with Mala, an imaginary girl, and will marry her and live with her in a room on the terrace like his father does with his mistress.
Agra then becomes an odyssey of a young Indian male’s sexual coming of age as he falls in love with an imaginary girl; Online sex chatting with unknown girl; Ending up in bed with a 40-year-old crippled woman and ‘falling in love’ with her, having sex for the first time. Just as everyone in the house fights to use the terrace for their material gain, Guru struggles with his sexuality.
Behl, who has also written Agra, said in a statement: “This work has been a deeply personal and difficult exploration for me, a deep dive into the inner entrails of desire and male sexual repression and an attempt to understand hoodoo. I So glad the film is starting its journey at Director’s Fortnight and I hope it starts a conversation about sexuality and the ‘houses’ we choose to live in, as it reaches a wider audience.
“After butterfly, I was asking myself what I wanted to talk about, and I felt like there was some closed impulse that was pressing to get out and I wanted to figure it out. And also because I thought it was a look I saw in almost every other Indian boy/man around me.
“A strange familial hive bonding combined with a severe lack of space… too many people packed together in too many corners like a pack of sardines. As I explored this central idea, the film began to emerge.” Guru’s fight for the empty space on the terrace became symbolic of his epic twin struggles: first for his sanity, the solidification of his understanding of relationships, the difference between sex and love, trust and faith. To the end his own To understand that even though the sexual act may be the purest expression of love, there are innumerable cracks of human desire within it.
“Second, more importantly, I wanted to talk about the great struggle for Guru. One who fights against the people and the world at large. Slowly realizing that the problem of space in her home is real, and that the best solution is probably the most brutal. This cannot be solved by a mistress or her money, but by a more basic amputation. To overcome home base and go more vertical … make a ‘deal’ with the devil and get everyone what they want, by making themselves part of the system”.
The 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 16 to May 27.
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