To bee or not to bee? A lost dog, firecracker psychos, Bugonia, and the joys of misanthropy

(I wrote last month about my harrowing Diwali-week search for my lost building dog. Couldn’t resist letting off some steam by writing an Economic Times column around it too. Here it is.
Also... see the second image below for my Sherlock Holmes avatar, created by ET's friendly resident robots)
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It was my third visit in two days to this unfamiliar colony – including one that had extended till midnight, and another very early the next morning. A space eight kilometres from my home, and from his – a space he had somehow arrived at in disoriented terror as the sounds of firecrackers exploded all around him. I was searching desperately, based on just one sighting mentioned on an animal-care group, and slender hope. Fatigued and demoralised at the sight of other lost dogs running helter-skelter on the roads (occasionally turning back to approach me, since they were looking for friendly humans), I was about to head home when the call came.

It was from a local dog-walker whom I had just happened to run into an hour earlier, shown a photo to and left my number with. He had seen my Pandey, one of countless victims of the noise terrorism of the past month; could I come quickly, he said. Heart pounding (because I knew how fast this particular dog could vanish when nervous), I got there just in time. Pandey ji whined accusatorily when he saw me, as if all this had been my fault. The wounds on his paws may have prevented him from going further afield, in which case I would probably never have seen him again. Small mercies.

This story may not seem to belong in a film column, but my lost-dog search had elements of popular cinema: drama, tragedy, some unintentional comedy – with spots of guilt and recrimination, hope rising and ebbing, two good Samaritans encountered at crucial moments, and an emotional reunion deserving a Hans Zimmer score.

It could so easily have been something else instead: an “arty”, non-narrative film with no clear beginning or end; no closure, only bleakness. But this was mainstream, a box-office smash full of action. And loud bombs too, spread over many evenings. Along with caricatured villains who had mwahaha-d callously at me – and encouraged their children to laugh too – when I confronted them a full ten days before Diwali and asked them not to burst so many loud fireworks; tried to tell them about the hyper-sensitive hearing of the sentient creatures who shared our spaces. These were people who hid their most toxic impulses behind the cloak of “our tradition”, and claimed they were celebrating Rama while behaving like the worst of Ravana.

Anyway, for Pandey, this was a happy ending. And a few days after this, I was watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant new film Bugonia, which also closes on a happy note – happy, I hasten to clarify, for the misanthrope, for the endangered honeybee, and for many other animals across the earth. It’s a marvellous sequence, scored to the plaintive “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (the Marlene Dietrich version) – the effect is comparable to watching parts of the great animated film Flow, or the ending of Dr Strangelove, where Vera-Lynn’s lovely voice sings “We’ll Meet Again” over images of mushroom clouds bedecking the planet.

What I have written here might be deemed a spoiler for Bugonia, but the joys of this film (if it works for you, that is) lie in many other places, not just in its ending. This story about two men who abduct a CEO, believing she is a malevolent alien, has Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons displaying a Buster Keaton-worthy talent for deadpan humour in utterly absurd situations. It has the controlled lunacy that marked some of Lanthimos’s earlier work, including Kinds of Kindness (which also featured Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in a story where the former believes the latter is something other than human) and Poor Things.

To reduce a zany film like Bugonia to a “message movie” would be a boring thing to do: Lanthimos’s universe resists such classifications and takeaways. But our responses to films, especially controversial or off-kilter films, can depend on our state of mind at the time. When I watched this one, I had just come off those hellish firecracker days when I was even more of a people-hater than usual; in ugly confrontations, trying to respond to sub-humans who coolly informed me that “our children’s pleasure is more important than animals”.

The last minutes of Bugonia – a tapestry of humans frozen in the middle of mundane actions, including religious ones – were therapeutic, because they allowed me to live out a personal fantasy I always re-live during the Diwali month: that some of the worst offenders in our colony would have a vagrant bomb explode on their hand or in their face as they were lighting it. Judge me for that if you like. Pandey and countless others like him would approve. So would Bugonia’s honeybees.