‘Body’ Movie Review: A Hindi Indie Full of Craft, Curiosity and Naked Ambition

Director: Abhijit Mazumdar
Writer: Abhijit Mazumdar
Cast: Manoj Sharma, Khushboo Upadhyay, Sunil Shanbag, Sandeep Sridhar Dhabale, Amol Deshmukh, Jatin Negi, Kritika Pande, Shivam Parekh, Sarthak Pandey

Once adulthood sets in, and once we’ve accumulated enough years, most of us have two types of recurring dreams (and nightmares). One revolves around the terror of remembering that the exam is tomorrow and we haven’t touched the school syllabus. The other is shaped by the horror of finding ourselves naked in routine situations, while being totally helpless about it. Both of these are trauma responses to our fraught relationship with society. Both feature a link between social conditioning and shame, but Abhijit Muzumdar’s Body confronts the steeper task of exploring the second dream. It’s a testing watch, but ultimately quite a rewarding one.

Body is a metaphysical drama centered on Manoj (Manoj Sharma), a troubled theatre actor who begins to strip in public places after a brutal bullying incident. He struggles to stay functional; his live-in girlfriend Khushboo (Khushboo Upadhyay) reaches her wits’ end; he misses his play rehearsals; he grows distant. Manoj then notices the life of the kid next door as well that of his new gym trainer — and embarks on a strange path to self-discovery. It’s a familiar arc. The execution, though, is anything but familiar.

The anatomy of Body is not as simple as it looks. First-time director Abhijit Mazumdar crafts a disorienting cocktail of reality and fiction, delusion and truth, a tortured mind and a flowing heart. Despite its curiosity about the nature of abstraction, the film-making is rarely pretentious. Several shots are remote, long and static, creating the illusion of an outer-body experience; it’s the visual language of dreams merging with the aural language of life. The uncanny sound design supplies this dissonance. It’s like listening to a Mumbai on the fringes — a minimum city (Mira Road and Bhayandar) not often validated, and violated, by the excesses of storytelling. So much of the place is unrecognisable because the stories there jostle for attention by commuting to the more ‘cinematic’ suburbs.

But there is a method to Manoj’s madness. There is a roadmap of his nowhere-ness. It’s revealed early on that the play he’s acting in is a Hindi adaptation of Normal, a courtroom drama featuring a young lawyer and the rejection of his insanity plea by his serial-killing client in pre-war Germany. Manoj seems to internalise the essence of both lawyer and murderer at different points of his anti-journey. It’s unclear whether he’s acting insane or he simply succumbs to the non-linear pressure of insanity. It’s revealed later on that Manoj’s parents died during the pandemic; he is still tormented by the nightmares and images of those days. All these factors combine with the bullying incident — where his friends drunkenly leave him naked by a river outside the city — to unlock a coffin of emotional lacerations.

In a poignant way, Body is a rare film that addresses the unfilmable world of post-pandemic trauma. Manoj is haunted by the intangibility of grief — of losing his parents as well as himself — but his pain is so shapeless that he copes by locating another sense of purpose. Like most people, he tries to overwrite his dark memories with new ones, only to discover that anguish need not be replaced by a different kind of anguish. His wounded body can be infused with empathy, the equivalent of a blood group that’s a universal donor. We’ve seen stories about disillusioned men being healed by the influence of a child, but this film also subverts the trope by allowing Manoj to exist in the ambiguity of his intent. At first, it looks like he’s finding solace in the company of strangers; he alienates his friends, colleagues and partner because they are instruments of his vulnerability. He befriends his trainer and goes to the same lake that triggered his spiral, but the sequence doesn’t unfold the way we expect it to. If anything, it teases our biases about mental health. It’s only his medium of performance that changes. At one point, he lies about how the viral video of him naked on the streets was actually him acting in a low-budget independent movie. The lines between the actor within the film and the actor of the film — between Manoj and Manoj Sharma — are intentionally blurred; it’s hard to tell the commitment from the confession.

In terms of ambition and psychological grammar, Body reminded me a little of another recent indie called Fairy Folk. Karan Gour’s film is about a dysfunctional marriage unmasked by the arrival of a genderless fairy, but it shares a few things in common. The nakedness and daring budget-shoot aside, Body too stars a real-life couple in Manoj and Khushboo — and is defined by their ability to excavate the subtext of their companionship. I have great admiration for actors who live to create. The willingness to bleed on screen, and to mine the personal until it’s no longer a possession, is not for the lily-livered. Manoj Sharma bares it all in more ways than one, fuelling our notions about life itself being the grandest performance. There are moments when the camera almost shies away from getting too close to him. Sensing him from afar is like watching our worst fears come alive, followed by an investigation of those fears. It decodes the randomness of the subconscious — the sound of our pieces is attached to the suppression of our peace. After all, the only thing scarier than the irrationality of feeling exposed is the rationality of feeling exposed. The body is merely the impression of the mind.

The Body is playing in the International Competition section of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) 2024.