Director: Karan Gour
Writer: Karan Gour
Cast: Mukul Chadda, Rasika Dugal, Nikhil Desai, Asmit Pathare, Chandrachoor Rai
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
Available in: Theatres
In Karan Gour’s Kshay (2012), a cash-strapped couple crumbles under the weight of a desire to own a lavish goddess Laxmi sculpture. The black-and-white story examines marital angst through the lens of middle-class obsession; a real-world need for money mutates into a fabled prayer for prosperity. Gour’s second independent feature, Fairy Folk, is a spiritual descendent of Kshay. Folklore becomes a literal character in this nerve-strapped relationship drama. Divine intervention for a jaded couple emerges in the guise of a mythical being – a genderless and hairless fairy that, as it turns out, has the ability to become a human manifestation of their desires. While most movies thrive on having their heart in the right place, this one is all about seeking a right place – and pace – for the heart.
Fairy Folk opens with Mohit (Mukul Chadda) and Ritika (Rasika Dugal) stranded with a sputtering car in Aarey colony, Mumbai’s very own middle-of-nowhere land. The ‘creature’ appears on the dark road, a cheeky nod to Aarey’s assortment of urban legends over the years (my favourite is the ghostly woman in a white sari who scares the living daylights out of motorists). Even in their panicked exchanges, it’s clear that Mohit and Ritika are the kind of couple who know each other too well to sustain their romantic chemistry – it’s the awkward sibling-like phase where familiarity breeds (too much) contentment. Once the fairy follows them home, the absurdity of their circumstances is blunted by the domesticity of their life. Mohit starts to bond with the subservient being, the way an idle man with a breadwinning wife might take to a pet or an artificial-intelligence toy. His dormant masculinity finds an outlet: Mohit ‘trains’ the fairy to be a server at house parties, takes it shopping, feeds and teaches it, and subconsciously shapes it to fit the male fantasy of an ideal partner.
Ironically, Mohit’s final frontier – physical affection – becomes his undoing. A drunken peck on the lips leads them to discover that this genderless being can transform into a new human, but with the soul and memories of the person it’s attached to. As a result, Mohit’s ‘mistake’ triggers the arrival of Kabir (Chandrachoor Rai), a perfect cocktail of newness and recognition for Ritika, who pushes for a fresh living arrangement. By shacking up with Kabir, she is at once with another man and her husband – the marriage feels both open and closed. Of course Mohit feels left out and engineers the arrival of an alternate Ritika, who, much to his chagrin, isn’t what he hoped for. She is a woman, but in a man’s body: They name her Vikrant, but she changes it to Hansa (“swan”). This is a deal-breaker for Mohit; he wishes for an early-relationship Ritika in female form, but gets stuck with Hansa, a familiar stranger he reluctantly bonds with.
Evidently, Fairy Folk is a weird film. But it’s a poignant and funny kind of weird. The parables fly thick and fast. The focus remains on Mohit, because his journey is an indictment of a man’s view of love as an inherently physical act. The conflict of Hansa’s gender and sexuality is a spoof on Mohit’s reading of intimacy as something that should look and behave a certain way; as a bodily quantity rather than a soulful entity. Unbeknownst to him, he has been fighting to reclaim a time – a heady honeymoon phase; a former avatar of his wife – rather than a person. He is trying to recapture an identity rather than revise an emotion. Ritika is happy with Kabir, because she was chasing a version of not her husband but herself; Kabir’s primal baggage, too, comes with the critique of marriage as a medium of caregiving. The fate of Hansa doubles up as a comment on how, in terms of modern storytelling, marginalisation lies in the eyes of the beholder. Her tragedy is that she exists with a predetermined passion for Mohit – and she is willing to sacrifice herself to give him what he (thinks he) wants. She brings to mind the melancholy of Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, where a ‘third wheel’ succumbs to the whims of a dreamy love story.
The subtext in Fairy Folk is rampant, but at no point does the social meaning overshadow its staging. It has shades of sci-fi auteurs like Shane Carruth and Mike Cahill, where the audacity of a concept mingles with the capacity of human behaviour. Gour’s editing does a good job of erasing the expository blanks of magic realism. The clever transitions – where the narrative often jumps from shock to acceptance; from revelation to regime – don’t bother with the plausibility of their situation. It cuts out the flab of characters coming to terms with things. After all, Mohit and Ritika just seem like the people who browbeat any fruit of excitement into a pulp of comfort and routine. The film also has a remarkable ability to switch between absurd and moving; fiction and truth; simple and abstract.
The improvised nature of the performances – it works meta-wonders that Mukul Chadda and Rasika Dugal are a real-life couple; that the supporting cast are all real-life friends – humanises the big swing of the script. Even when the themes get blurry, the specificity of the scenes is entertaining. Watching them speak and react like people who’re too close-knit to question each other’s sanity is, often, the point of the film.
Chadda, in particular, is terrific as a tense man struggling to confront the casualties of co-living. He plays Mohit as a Nice Guy whose anatomy of desire is scrambled after years of sameness. There is an ache about him, even as his anxiety drains their apartment of its warmth. Mohit imagines a ‘cure’ that defies the very improvisations of love. Yet, when he is with Hansa, it’s like watching two timelines of his marriage collide. Their little squabbles clash with moments of tenderness, unrestrained by the shackles of gender and conditioning. The other standout performer is Asmit Pathare who, as Hansa, reframes the language of trans life within the contours of an anti-fairytale.
One of the film’s better scenes features ‘newbie’ Hansa accompanying Mohit to poker night. Mohit is jittery, but Pathare lends Hansa the refined wonder of a woman sampling the levity of male friendships. You can tell that Hansa – while trying to be ‘one of the guys’ for Mohit – begins to enjoy her ambiguity as a partner. She can see that Mohit is a confident person here because, in his head, a husband and a man are mutually exclusive. It’s a first date of sorts, where she is simultaneously unlearning and falling for him. Mohit’s confused rejection of Hansa is a nice takedown of all those manic-pixie-tomboy tropes, where a hero craves for an all-in-one heroine who can oscillate between sassy buddy and saucy lover at will. These perceived dualities are what define Fairy Folk, a massive love story masquerading as a minor marriage story. The kshay (“decay”) is only part of the whole. The rest goes on to explore marital angst through the lens of urban romanticism: A real-world need for companionship mutates into a fabled prayer for love.