[From my Economic Times column]
Perhaps because I re-watched Woody Allen’s Manhattan recently – with its hysterical and bittersweet love-letter to New York in the opening sequence – I have been thinking about cities in cinema. And in a funny coincidence, last week I watched two unrelated films (each directed by a Dibakar) that begin with an unexpected location title involving Delhi.
Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, completed in 2022 but under a censorship cloud after being shelved by Netflix, begins with the words “New Delhi, 2043”… placed atop an image of an ocean (of all decidedly non-Delhi things)! Then, as an animated black cat – “Bheegi Billi” – walks towards the camera, we get the punch-line: this is a virtual image, communicating with someone who is physically located in the capital. 
Meanwhile Dibakar Das Roy’s comedy Dilli Dark – currently in halls – opens with a title saying “Dilli, 1240 AD”, along with a view of an idyllic forest. This is a reference to the Razia Sultan story and her supposed romance with a man of African origin – which serves as underlying commentary for a present-day narrative about Michael, a Nigerian who is trying to complete his MBA while negotiating the city’s racism.
These are very different types of films, but both show Delhi as a messy, threatening place where no one can completely belong – and which also, in its own weird way can be a pluralistic space when you least expect it.
It would be a stretch to call Tees a Delhi film (in the sense that Banerjee’s brilliant Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! was) – it is too wide-ranging for that, moving across a number of periods and settings, including the Kashmir of 1989, in its depiction of an India hurtling towards totalitarianism. But some of its most intriguing scenes, the futuristic dystopian ones (which probably played a part in getting the film held back), are set in a Delhi where new AI technology and Third World grime coexist – with images that suggest India will always, for good and for bad, be chaotic.
Dilli Dark is in a clearer way a Delhi movie, with the city as a character – but which version of the city? We get views of the vast AIIMS crossing, cluttered Neb Sarai, the Gyarah Murti statue, and the perspective throughout is that of an outsider. Samuel Abiola Robinson, who plays the lead (he also played the title role in the Malayalam film Sudani from Nigeria years ago), has a charismatic, sympathetic presence that runs through the film and makes even its slightly less inspired moments watchable. At a recent promotional event Robinson mentioned that some of the incidents depicted here came from his real-life experiences as an African in Delhi: exploitation by landlords, police being called on him for no good reason.
Still, I would venture that some of Michael’s dislocation and frustration is relatable even for those of us who have been in Delhi all our lives. Using goofy, irreverent – sometimes bordering on facile – humour, Dilli Dark gets many things right in depicting a city where, as Michael puts it, even two-year-olds learn certain cuss words before they process anything else (and such abuses can be used for anyone, not just Africans); where the topography of the place suggests that something is wrong with its Vaastu-shastra (“Insaan gol gol ghumta jaata hai, bas,” as a character puts it); and in one of the funnier descriptions of the Qutab Minar I have come across. (“Can you imagine the king who made this? It’s like showing a giant middle finger to the sky and saying, tu jaanta nahin mera baap kaun hai?”)
So, Delhi is about swagger and power. But it is also about anarchy, which can have a democratising effect. At one point in Dilli Dark, a city-wide power failure comes to the rescue by plunging everyone – including aggressors – into darkness. In the closing scenes of Tees, madness comes to the Delhi Metro, riding a horse – and one feels that even an autocratic government trying to be all-controlling, like China, can’t strictly regulate everything in a place like this.
As Robinson – sounding affectionate – put it when asked about the difference between working in Kerala and shooting in crowded parts of Delhi: “In Delhi you never know what the f*** will happen.”
[Related posts: Sudani from Nigeria (and other contemporary Malayalam cinema); Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!]
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