‘Eeb allay ooo!’ film review- A biting satire on India’s modernism
More than half of India’s population is said to be under twenty five years old. That’s about 600 million people who would want jobs in the immediate future if they are not working now or currently looking for work.
Prateek Vats’ intriguing debut ‘Eeb Aally Ooo!’ forms a most illuminating watch in this context.
The film is about Anjani(Shardul Bhardwaj)- a migrant labourer from an unnamed Indian village who arrives at the capital- New Delhi- where he becomes a professional monkey-chaser.
Monkeys have been reigning over the Raisina Hill- the locality where government’s power centres are located- for centuries.
In Hindu culture, monkeys are considered sacred, by virtue of the Monkey God, Hanuman being a prominent deity in the pantheon.
This means that the monkeys that harass people and generally go about their monkey-business in the Hill are not to be harmed. Monkey chasers- many of whom trace that profession back by lineage- chase the apes away with carefully articulated noises.
If they physically harm the monkeys, they do so to their own peril.
Anjani though comes into the profession not by way of lineage but because his brother in law, who works as a security guard in a theme park, arranges the job for him. This pregnant sister is proud of him for getting a government job though he reminds her that it’s just a contract job with scant job security or other perks.
In fact, the job is downright hard for Anjani as he is both scared of the monkeys and cannot make the necessary noises to do his job well with anything approaching efficiency.
He plasters the neighbourhood of his beat with pictures of langur to scare the monkeys away. That works very well but his boss berates him for being creative.
He dons a langur costume, complete with a black painted face, and that too works well. But as a direct result of that, he loses his job. The powerful lording over the powerless is a recurring motif in this film lensed with a seemingly detached calmness by Saumyananda Sahi.
The film is one of the best socio-political satire to have come out of the subcontinent in recent times. But instead of flexing its satirical muscles to the fullest, the script by Shubham and the director often shies away from engaging with the larger political scenario in the country, instead opting to focus on the personal.
This is not necessarily a bad thing- especially given how Bhardwaj imbues the lead character with a persona that is a mix of both helplessness and wounded humanism. On the flipside, such restraint in the script also ends up making the film lesser than what it could have been.
Also, the script doesn’t provide enough space for the story of Anjani’s sister and brother-in-law to develop though we continually get glimpses of them as well-rounded characters in their own right.
Nonetheless, this is a show of heartfelt storytelling, grounded in realism even as the director doesn’t attempt to rub your nose in it. Highly recommended.
