Onir (2023)
Introducing Pine Cone at BFI Flare, the Indian film-maker Onir told the NFT3 audience that the film was especially important to him because it was ‘semi-autobiographical’. Onir’s protagonist is a film-maker, Siddharth (Sid) Mehra, an out gay man determined to make boldly affirmative gay cinema. In the opening scene Sid (Vidur Sethi) is doing a Q&A with a group of young film enthusiasts, perhaps film students. He castigates the hetero-normative world for trying to dictate to film-makers like him how to do their job, for warning against queer cinema that’s too in-your-face. Who, he asks, would think of telling a straight film-maker how ‘subtle’ they need to be? (Sid asks the question rhetorically although in Europe and North America today – India may be different – the answer is plenty of people, particularly if the film-maker is male and his film has sexual content.) Sid insists, to enthusiastic applause, that he’ll continue to make films as he likes, leaving straight critics to ‘deal with your own phobia’. Sid is Onir’s representative on screen; Onir shares his alter ego‘s view (a Variety interview I’ve read since seeing Pine Cone confirms this). Sid’s opening broadside therefore registers as a challenge not only in the world of the film but also to audiences watching it.
We’re told that My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), with its gay Asian-British protagonist, changed Sid’s life: he had never before seen ‘himself’ represented on the cinema screen. A poster for Stephen Frears’s film is one of many on the wall in Sid’s apartment; others that I noticed are less distinctive choices – canonical works like Persona, 8½ and The 400 Blows. Apart from his confrontational words at the start, we don’t get much idea of what Sid’s movies are actually like. What Pine Cone does reveal is a disjuncture between his confident public pronouncements and uncertainty in his private life. Romantic betrayals have made him mistrustful of falling in love ever again.
Onir, who wrote the screenplay with Ashwini Malik, divides the narrative into three parts and decades. He starts in 2019, works back to 2009 then 1999, returning finally to when and where the film began. In 2019 Sid, an established director, is spending time in the city of Kochi on the Malabar Coast. In 2009 he’s based in Mumbai, where his cinema career is just getting going. In the shorter 1999 section, set in the state of Sikkim, Sid’s a teenager (played by Hanun Bawra) – we see him on the day he leaves high school in Gangtok, on the eve of his departure for film school in Mumbai. Each part of Pine Cone‘s timeframe links to a significant development in Indian gay rights. The inaugural ‘Friendship Walk’, the first pride march to take place in India and South Asia, was in 1999. Ten years later, the High Court in Delhi declared ‘prohibitions against same-sex conduct to be in direct violation of fundamental rights provided by the Indian Constitution’ (Wikipedia). And 2019 marked the first anniversary of the Indian Supreme Court decision to legalise homosexuality nationwide.
That anniversary features in a news report on the television in Sid’s hotel suite in Kochi, where he has just returned with Rehan Qureshi, aka Ron (Sahib Verma) – the ‘beautiful man’, in Sid’s repeated description of him, who turns up on the margins of the Q&A and whom Sid immediately makes a play for. He’s impatient to get Ron into bed; Ron suggests that he first show Sid the Kochi sights; Sid agrees reluctantly but they both enjoy walking and talking together. Ron, who helps run his family’s textile business, seems circumspect – a shade envious when Sid declares that his family has always accepted his sexuality. Once they’re in the hotel, though, Rob is ready to make love and stays the night. By next morning, the two men’s attitudes have been sharply reversed. Ron is eager to pursue a relationship. Sid, already busy on his phone, is preoccupied and tersely offhand. Tensions build quickly until Sid insultingly dismisses Ron from the hotel room and his life.
Onir explains this volte face in Pine Cone‘s two subsequent sections. In 2009 Sid hooks up online with a man he instantly wants to meet in person: he quickly embarks on a physically passionate affair with Sudhanshu (Amit Gurjar), who jokingly calls Sid, struggling with writer’s block, ‘the tortured artist’. Their meetings always take place in Sid’s apartment and at night; Sudhanshu is cagey about extending the scope of the affair, stressing that his family is very conservative. When the two eventually go out together they bump into Meghna (Bageshri Joshirao), prospective producer of the film Sid is meant to be writing, and her companion, Nikunj (Korak Roy). Sudhanshu’s manner changes instantly and he breaks off contact with Sid for several weeks. When Sid happens to see Nikunj again, the latter voices surprise that Sid wasn’t at the recent wedding of ‘your friend’, whose real name is Mohit Shah. Once Sudhanshu/Mohit returns from honeymoon keen to resume the affair, Sid agrees to see him solely in order to rail at his lover’s treachery and end the relationship. In 1999 Sid and his long-time best friend Derek (Aniket Ghosh) celebrate the end of their last day at school; still in school uniform, they joke and drink together as they walk through hilly woodland. They lie down to rest, touch each other, kiss and have sex – both of them for the first time. Sid, overwhelmed, decides on the spot that he won’t go to film school in Mumbai after all. On the phone next morning, Derek tells him that what they did was wrong and that they shouldn’t see each other again.
Pine Cone is interesting but unsatisfying. Carnal explicitness isn’t an issue, by the way: the sex scenes in the film, honestly done as they are, come over as discreet, whatever Onir may have intended. A main problem is – even though you can see the appeal of the idea – the juxtaposition of the story’s events with contemporary landmarks in India’s recognition of same-sex relationships. It’s not clear how the two things connect, except in illustrating that the formal legitimacy of a type of relationship is no guarantee of personal fulfilment in it – a point too obvious to seem worth making. Another difficulty with the timeframe Onir has opted for is the length of the interval between each of Sid’s key relationships. The film conveys little idea of his sex life in the intervening periods – except that, when Sudhanshu has gone AWOL, we see Sid with an older man (Damandeep Singh Chaudhary), whom he appears to have picked up but is about to chuck out of his apartment. In the IMDb cast list this character is listed as One Night Stand; a decade later, a one night stand is as much as Sid wants from Ron, despite the engaging build-up to it. Is the doomed romance with Sudhanshu the only time in twenty years that Sid, heartbroken by Derek’s rejection of him, dares to commit to a relationship?
Sid’s repeated assertion that his family always accepted him as gay looks to be true. Nothing is said, at least, in his seemingly frank conversations with his sister, Radikha (Surabhi Tiwari), to contradict the claim. In the 1999 episode it’s implied that Sid tells his father it’s because of Derek that he wants to stay in Gangtok rather than go to Mumbai. The father agrees to this, as Sid excitedly tells Derek; one infers that Sid must also then have explained to his family that he has changed his mind back, because Derek has changed his. Sid’s parents don’t appear at all in the film. It might have been an idea to expand the Gangtok part of the narrative to show their unusually enlightened attitudes in action. That could have given the viewer a stronger sense of Sid’s growing up in a safe place, liable to be more shocked by the homophobia of the world outside it. As it is, he doesn’t add up as a character, even though the man behind the camera is drawing on his personal experience. The contrast between Sid’s professional persona and private miseries is a given, rather than an explored theme. Whether that contrast is reflected in his cinema is barely hinted at.
As individual dramatic sections, the Kochi and Gangtok parts of Pine Cone work better than the Mumbai part. The dialogue between Sid and Ron, well written and well delivered by Vidur Sethi and Sahib Verma, is absorbing evidence of how well their characters hit it off; this gives increased impact, especially after their joy of sex together, to Sid’s startling change of mood next morning. Hanun Bawra, as the schoolboy Sid, can’t possibly grow up into slender Vidur Sethi, who has very different facial features, but Bawra and Aniket Ghosh both give good performances in the woodland scene. The boys are convincingly surprised by what suddenly happens between them. Less effective is the too-considered conversation that follows, in which Sid explains his long-held feelings for Derek, which he says he couldn’t express for fear of losing his friendship, and Derek’s calm acceptance of it all. This aftermath is presumably designed, like the early scenes between Sid and Ron, to make a morning-after U-turn more shocking but it sticks out as a device. It’s too obvious in the Mumbai episode that Sudhanshu isn’t to be trusted (even his online designation is Mirage) – and hard to believe that Sid, in view of his reluctance to trust, would be taken in. Hard to believe, too, that Sudhanshu would agree to any kind of public appearance with Sid. Their chance meeting with Meghna and Nikunj is another blatant plotting means to an end.
BFI’s handout for the screening comprised an interview with Onir, in which he laments ‘the beautiful films we’ve seen recently with a queer narrative – The Whale, Call Me by Your Name – all ending without hope’, and explains his determination to do something different. Sid keeps as a memento of his precious afternoon with Derek a pine cone from the woods. Years later and at a low ebb, he starts to burn the cone. He then has second thoughts and removes it from the flames, although the top of the cone is already charred. ‘There is loss in my life,’ says Onir, ‘but I’m a pretty happy person. It’s why [Sid] doesn’t throw the pine cone away. It’s burnt, and you do get scarred in life, but that’s precious too’. In the closing stages of Pine Cone, mournful Sid, still in Kochi, talks with his sister on the phone; Radhika then puts her little daughter, Tara (Aashvi Partani), on the line. Tara says that her mother has told her that Sid is gay. He’s silent and apprehensive until his niece then says, ‘I love you, uncle’. She then asks why he doesn’t have a boyfriend. It’s a light bulb moment. Sid looks for and finds Ron, sitting alone except for his laptop and a coffee. As Sid keeps apologising for his earlier behaviour, Ron’s face doesn’t crack. He then slowly pours the coffee over Sid’s head. After a pause, both their faces break into a grin. Most of Pine Cone‘s ninety-five minutes are as doleful as Call Me by Your Name or The Whale and Sid Mehra, in his private life, emerges as abjectly cynical. It’s nice to think the sudden happy ending may be another bit of Onir’s autobiography. That doesn’t render it credible in the context of the film he has made.
22 March 2024
