Lord Curzon ki Haveli + Shorts [Wench Film Festival]

I didn't actually plan for the Wench Film Festival, attending only one of the 4 days, which is why this is very fragmented coverage. For the record, this is a fest devoted to fantastic genre cinema primarily directed by 'Women and Non-Binary Filmmakers'. It is engineered by Sapna Bhavnani, an enthusiastic maverick who has worked in fashion and film. The screenings were conducted in a little performance space called Veda Black Box. It's about the size of one of those illicit video screening halls and I had the dickens of a time finding it after Google Maps dropped the ball badly. But it works perfectly for a niche segment like this.

Anyhoo, onward to the films I saw. Apart from one feature-length film Lord Curzon ki Haveli, I saw a bunch of short films of varying impact. A number of the shorts shown on this day were commissioned as a collection of horror outings set in the time of the pandemic. Each film was followed by a Q&A with available crew members from the film. There was also some kind of session with Kaizad Gustad, but I opted to go outside for a break in that time, for fear of becoming sufficiently enraged to murder the maker of the atrocity called Bombay Boys.

These were the notable short films I saw:

Entanglement (Yashaswini Nath) - Relationship drama meets SF in this non-linear movie featuring a couple having severe marriage issues...or is it two sets of couples from mirror universes who are having visions of each other? It's not always on the ball script-wise, but its good parts feature strong performances from the leads (Harleen Sethi and Harman Singha) and thoughtful direction.

Demons (Adesh Prasad) - Tumbbad co-director Adesh Prasad does a incredibly gory and immensely funny take on a 'cure' for drug addicts to be free of their demons. I won't bother with a synopsis for such a brief film, but this was a lot of fun, an affectionate twist on the Mohan Bhakri - Vinod Talwar style B-budget Hindi horror cinema.

Landfills of Desire (Sapna Bhavnani) - More music video than narrative, this one shows a vampire making her way through empty Kashmiri locales (it was shot during the pandemic).  It features an avant-garde percussive score, color filters and flashy editing.

Batshit Crazy and Giallo (Yogesh Chandekar) - These were both more overtly message-y, but had a good deal of visual humor and genre homage. BC features the travails of a Naga dude in Hyderabad running from a bunch of goons targeting him as a 'bat-eating Chinese' responsible for the Covid pandemic. I mainly liked the opening shot where a Ramsay-style Gothic structure enshrouded in fog is revealed to be the Charminar as a municipal worker brandishes a fogging machine. As the name would suggest, Giallo openly references the style of genre masters Mario Bava and Dario Argento (hat-tipping them with an 'Argento Pizzeria' and a 'Bava Heights' apartment complex). The gaudy color schemes and Goblin-inspired score make this a chuckle-worthy watch for fans.

The Lurking (Divyansh Sharma) - Shades of EF Benson's eerie stories in this beautifully shot tale of a dysfunctional family living on the edge of the wood. A harsh domineering father (Ajay Mehra), a mother (Snower Sania Vasudev) who is loving but may have psychological issues, and a child that sees something from within the wood. As the film unravels, different facets of the characters are revealed. Furkan Ali's cinematography and careful grading make for an amazing visual experience.

Anshuman Jha's Lord Curzon ki Haveli was the feature-length centerpiece. This one is a (mostly) one-act thriller with a Hitchcock/Polanski influence. A stuffy Indian-origin British doctor (Paresh Pahuja) and his decidedly more desi spouse (Rasika Dugal) visit the house of the wife's friend. This friend (Zoha Rahman) and her partner (Arjun Mathur) are a strange contrast to our couple, liberated bohemian spirits who have no issues about leaving their guests alone to go up for a quickie in the bedroom; not exactly effusive hosts. They also seem to have a mocking attitude towards the pompous doc and his frigid attitude towards his wife, spiking her drink to see what fun ensues. As the evening progresses, we see a clash of personalities. Issues like the status of immigrants, and the doc's pride in his British citizenship provide fuel for a grotesque black comedy. For me the biggest problem was the thin caricature of the doc's character - he is shown to be such an outright heel that the personality clashes are unbalanced. A good black comedy should be able to shift sympathies between characters, but he starts off as an jerk and as the film moves ahead, behaves even more idiotically. This makes the film a bit of an ordeal to sit through. The always easy to watch Rasika Dugal gets a major character shift over the course of the story and she executes it with relish. It's probably not meant to be taken seriously, but the end seems to suggest that immigrants should react to racism and class snobbery by going the Bonnie and Clyde route.