FC Hotlist: Succulent

FC Hotlist is a series that spotlights films which are looking for buyers and distributors. It is an ongoing project to link indie filmmakers who are looking for a wider audience, to producers looking for fresh stories that stand out in the cinematic landscape.

Can loneliness be solved? If it can be solved, surely, it can be commodified. Writer-director Amrita Bagchi has a plan. She sends her protagonist M played by Merenla Imsong — whom you might recognize from her deadpan hilarious Instagram sketches — into the lives of people who are lonely from loss. M, an employee of a human replacement agency, roleplays their daughter, their sister, etc. Like an escort service, but platonic and emotionally resonant. Like role-playing, but platonic and emotionally resonant. 

M performs love. In private, she nurtures plants. Bagchi asks, can we displace love? Can we yank it from a lover, hold it in our hands, park it in the body of another, and move on as though nothing changed? Is M’s lunging towards green shoots an incarnation of the love she is not allowed to express outside? It is silly, this idea. It is bold, this provocation. And Bagchi’s treatment is mundane, a casual post-global metallic and stone cocoon where clothes still need to dry on surfaces — a towel flung over a bicycle that is laying waste in the corner.

There is, sometimes, dry humour (“Feng Shui machane ka hai”) but, always, pathos. That we are all, fundamentally, lonely or rattling towards loneliness. It is inevitable. But under the capitalist umbrella we take shade in, this inevitability is seen as a problem, an opportunity, and a problem necessarily needs a solution, an opportunity desperately needs to be milked dry. 

Edited by Faraz Ali, who directed Shoebox, one of the most moving films of last year and, perhaps, the most astounding “city film” which starred Bagchi, shot by Anand Bansal, whose credits include Gamak Ghar, Dhuin, and The Elephant Whisperers, with both clarity and beauty — see how he films light bathing the plants — the film, which clocks under half-hour, is modest in its reach. It neither allows for a neat solution, nor anger for a lack of one. A gentle simmer that merely asks a question, hums, pokes, and retreats. 

The writer-director Amrita Bagchi can be contacted at [email protected]