All the drama, in short

Sa Re Ga MaCarvaan plays on the radio in an old-style house, the kind where potted plants line the balcony in a neat row, and the mistress of the house glides from one room another on her umpteen chores — a romantic image of domestic bliss, tinged with nostalgia, is how the film Pressure Cooker lets its audience in. But all is not well and, soon, the cracks in this idyll become apparent.

To break the sweet melody of the radio there are two irritants at hand: Pallavi Joshi’s husband, who calls out to her repeatedly in a plaintive voice, in between chanting his morning mantras, and a pressure cooker, whose piercing whistles drown out the radio anchor’s mellow morning voice. Joshi is clearly irritated, her mood in contrast to the anchor’s sweet commentary. “ Kya hai (What is it)?” she screams back at her husband from the kitchen, but the latter will not reply and merely continues to call out to her.

In search of the spotlight: Pallavi Joshi plays a harried homemaker in search of some validation in Pressure Cooker

Heena D’Souza, the director of Pressure Cooker , is also the director of the production house Hamaara Movies. “We wanted to locate the film in a time where home appliances meant a lot to families, which would take care of them and use them for decades. We wanted to utilise that as a metaphor in the film,” she says. Set in the mid-’90s, the film does just that.

Short films like Pressure Cooker are everywhere on social media — they pop up as suggestions on YouTube, and are shared on Facebook and Twitter as 10-20 minute episodes that can be watched anytime, anywhere. Some of them, notching up millions of views, are making the industry sit up and take notice. Interestingly, many of them have women-oriented narratives, and women directors and producers backing them. Says Mansi Jain, director of Chhuri , a film starring Tisca Chopra and Anurag Kashyap, “A lot of the film production houses that are funding short films are hungry for scripts that tell women-oriented narratives, so it is a good time to be a woman storyteller in the industry.”

Chutney , with over 120 million views on YouTube, is directed by Jyoti Kapur Das. From benign, the plot rapidly turns sinister. Tisca Chopra, in dentures and prosthetics, plays a demure-on-the-outside but sharp-as-a-razor-at-home housewife. Her husband, played by Adil Hussain, is having an affair with the young Rasika Duggal. Playing a person from rural Ghaziabad still adjusting to city life, Chopra shines in the film.

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Much like feature-length films, the shorts, too, largely centre on the themes of interpersonal relationships, marriage and infidelity, power dynamics, and the unfair bits of life. However, without the weight of audience expectations, or restrictions imposed by the star system, the medium offers elbow room to experiment. The fact that women filmmakers, producers and screenwriters are hogging much of this space is telling enough. But what is an even bigger highlight for D’Souza is the fact that big studios are backing these films, and even the big stars want to be a part of them.

When the bell tolls: Darshan Jhariwala plays the businessman who renounces it all andembarks on a spiritual journey to Varanasi on the Mumbai Varanasi Express

Anurag Kashyap, Radhika Apte, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Konkona Sen, Rajkummar Rao and Neeraj Ghaywan are among the leading names associated with shorts in some capacity or the other. “I don’t think such films are a novelty any more, as they have been around for sometime, but the digital media provides the much-needed space for audiences to access such films,” D’Souza says. Jain agrees, “With so many powerhouses coming forward and supporting these films, there is no reason for anyone with a story to not try and make their film any more. In some ways, it is even better than in the western countries, where people depend on crowdfunded campaigns on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, or self-finance their films.” She contends that while some A-list actors may still not have a finger in this pie, others such as Priyanka Chopra, Neha Dhupia and Swara Bhaskar have already jumped into the fray.

Migration , a short written by Zoya Akhtar and directed by Mira Nair, is a public service feature on AIDS awareness. With Raima Sen, Sameera Reddy, Shiney Ahuja and Irrfan Khan in the cast, the film captures the poignancy of the migrant’s day-to-day life. At one end, we have a bored housewife searching for some meaning in life and, at the other end, we have Ahuja, who travels to the city to work as a mason, leaving his wife behind in the village. Playing Sameera Reddy’s husband, Irrfan has a secret affair with a man played by Arjun Mathur.

A common thread running through these films are the complexities peculiar to modern-day marriages, and couples negotiating equations and commitments in a post-feminist world. In Chhuri , a comedy with Tisca Chopra and Kashyap in lead roles, the wife goes to the house of her philanderer-husband’s love interest and tries to broker a deal — “you keep him for two days in a week, but he stays at home for the rest... how’s Tuesday and Saturday?” Quick comes the reply, “Tuesdays I have yoga class, and dance class on Saturday.” Throughout this exchange, the husband remains hidden inside a cupboard, as both women hammer out the details of how much they wanted (or did not want) him around. After all, you see at the beginning of the film how Chopra runs around to arrange breakfast for the entire family, while her husband just sneaks in for a half-bite, doesn’t interact with anyone and leaves... little wonder then that being with him can seem such a chore.

Pressure Cooker , on the other hand, does not write off Indian marriages yet. It, instead, leaves you with a message: ‘Just because something old isn’t working any more, doesn’t mean one needs to replace it. One can simply mend it’. Just like Pallavi Joshi manages to repair her pressure cooker successfully, it gives us hope that her marriage, too, can overcome the rough patches.

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Similar to short stories in print, short films often bank on the element of surprise. The Affair , directed by Hardik Mehta, takes us to Mumbai’s Marine Drive, an oasis for couples in search of privacy and space in a city that never sleeps. As the film progresses, we see a couple meet and embrace in public, and we assume that it is an illicit rendezvous conducted in the anonymity afforded by the sheer number of other couples present there. However, the story takes a surprising twist (spoiler alert) — there’s a fight between them and we see them leave separately, only to meet again at the home they share as a married couple with their two children and parents. The need for even married couples to meet in secret is an unsaid truth in cities such as Mumbai.

Day in the life: In Ida Ali’s Lift, all the action takes place within the four walls of this ubiquitous space in modern-day buildings

Lift , a film made by Ida Ali, filmmaker Imtiaaz Ali’s daughter, is about a burgeoning love story between a young boy and girl who live in the same building. Shot entirely in the building’s lift, the film is 500 Days of Summer -esque in its treatment of its characters. As time goes on, the couple graduate from getting to know each other, to falling in love, and then falling out of it. Through it all, the lift is an unchanging element in their life, a space where they see each other on a regular basis, whether they like it or not. Ali said, “There are so many intriguing conversations I hear in a lift. So many stories I witness. So I wanted to work around the idea of a lift. Adding the love story gave the film a relatable aspect. I liked the rhythmic opening and shutting of the lift... it gave the film a flow.”

Khaaney Mey Kya Hai , a short that has garnered over five million views, has a mother and daughter conversing in innuendos, about the great honeymoon experience the latter has just returned from. While the mother admonishes her over her frankness (again, in innuendos related to food), the daughter tries to explain that there is nothing wrong in enjoying sex, and the older woman should try it as well!

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Quiet before the storm: Shefali Shah, the star protagonist in Neeraj Ghaywan’s critically acclaimed Juice, takes a breather as the film nears its end

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Juice , with over two million views on YouTube, is set on a very hot day, when a party is in progress at a house. While Mrs Singh (Shefali Shah), as she is referred to throughout the film, cooks and cleans and serves, the men sit around debating self-importantly on something inconsequential. The debates are interspersed with jokes about their wives — “harmless banter”, as far as the men are concerned, but pinching comments as seen by the women.

Alongside throwing light on the unfair segregation of household chores and responsibilities, the film also highlights the unequal division of resources — Mrs Singh fills the air-cooler with water for the men sitting around chatting and then enters the hot kitchen to make food for them. The women guests, too, are relegated to the hot kitchen, where they discuss pregnancies, and affairs.

In pinpointing the skewed gender realities in a household, the film’s screenplay starkly echoes the realities of the women who work behind the screen in showbiz and find the industry an unfair place. As Kapur Das explains, “It is very hard, as a woman with no connections, to make it in this industry. Honestly, it is tough for guys as well, but people are just not ready to back women. The film industry is completely volatile, and there is no knowing what the audience is going to like, so who is to decide, anyway, what will work? In such a situation, women in general get very little time in the sun.” The short film, by being independent in nature, makes room for stories that serve as critiques and question gender imbalance.

D’Souza, however, cautions that with the growing viability of short films, and with big studios increasingly getting involved, the independent nature of this format is potentially threatened. “Say, it has taken my film ₹4 lakh to be made, but another studio-backed film has a budget of ₹20 crore. How is it possible to have similar films with such a huge difference in budgets?” Big promotional budgets cannot really guarantee a hit film in the digital world, even as some of the most popular films may not have any marketing budgets to speak of.

Kapur Das shared her experience on Chutney , “Tisca Chopra had been performing a Bhisham Sahni story as a monologue, from which we took inspiration for the film. Avneesh Mishra worked with us for the script. No one could obviously predict that Chutney would be such a hit — it has crossed 120 million views right now. The truth is that all the views are organic, and I would call it a fluke. I’m not saying it’s a bad film, it’s a decent film, but who knows why the audience has liked this one so much and not some of the other films out there?” Chutney received a Filmfare award in Comedy in 2017, while Chhuri got a nomination in 2018.

One glaring difference between the screenplays for feature-length films and short films is that the former are largely aspirational, while the latter attempt to be more relatable. While the big stars have begun to act in shorts, it is more common to see new faces, irrespective of whether the director is a big name or not. The casting tends to be more body-positive, and women have meatier roles. The plots are more open to discussing taboo subjects, especially since the digital space is much less monitored compared to the big screen.

Reiterating that the short film is not a new phenomenon, D’Souza says it has only become more viable of late and has seen the entry of more professionals. “The production house that I’m in-house director for has been making shorts for ten years, and has more than 200 short films in its kitty.” Moreover, she refuses to see shorts merely as a stepping stone for filmmakers aiming to make feature-length films. “A lot of audiences are dedicated watchers of short films, and the length affords space for the kind of experimentation that a regular film wouldn’t offer.”

Shorts also offer people who aren’t professional screenwriters a chance to try their hand at it. As a result, there is a lot of diversity that the traditional industry usually lacks. Apart from their release on the internet, there are several film festivals dedicated to shorts. Even the mainstream Mumbai International Film Festival, Dharamshala International Film Festival and International Film Festival of India all have a shorts category. Explaining a crucial difference in work approach, Kapur Das says, “Some people in the film industry use their short film as a showreel — but the truth is that it is a completely different ballgame from a feature film. Every film student has to compulsarily direct a short film as part of her/his course, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to direct a feature, right?”

What’s cooking: Khaaney Me Kya Hai, with over five million views, has a mother-daughter duo discussing sex entirely through innuendoes