Movie Review: X Past Is Present Is A Brave Experiment
The film suffers from high doses of narrative hiccups and self-indulgence though
One summer three years ago, I found myself in a picturesque Swiss town, covering the region's annual film festival, one of the most revered in Europe. A few nights into the fest, the city's local cultural rep hosted a party at a venue overlooking one of their several beautiful lakes. As the drinks got giddier and the night, dreamier, I had a nocturnal encounter with a gorgeous woman, an event that'd go on to affect my outlook towards unexpected trysts, romance and future relationships (I was 20).
In X Past is Present, Rajat Kapoor plays K, a fading filmmaker who meets a strange woman on the sidelines of a film festival. He spends the night with her, an event that sends him on a colourful trip of almost submissive introspection. (He appears to be in his mid-40s).
Swiss summers were never missed as achingly as they were last night, when I saw the film.
To watch the story unfold on-screen made me think about my past experience and among the several things that remained common was how a night can change the way we look at life, whether it means evaluating the past (K) or charting the course for the future, as was the case with me. For instance, I learnt that there is something miraculously beautiful about the sudden intimacy between two strangers, which may not always be true of a love developed over years and years of familiarity.
X Past is Present exploits this very trope with as many as 11 filmmakers captaining the ship, with some of them being well-respected film critics. As Kapoor recounts his past escapades with various women during different stages of his life, he is able to contextualise his present and determine which of them had the biggest impact on his life, and which relationship he wanted to save, and which he wants to perhaps erase.
Sudhish Kamath has helmed the larger plot within which 10 other segments intertwine, overlap and reoccur as they aren't told in a chronological order. When we think about past events, they don't come to us sequentially order but as a mishmash of jumbled timelines. Same holds true for K, whose memories take him to his first sexual encounter that goes horribly wrong (which effectively destroys another relationship) to infidelity to abortions to an insanely trippy psychedelic jaunt.
Among the many episodes is a heartbreaking beautiful love story (director Pratim Gupta) that unravels only through a shared love for poetry, wherein the couple never physically meet despite occupying the same space.
Another one starring Radhika Apte (directed by Rajshree Ojha) has the most realistic treatment, while Raja Sen's chapter with Huma Qureshi is powerful even though it appears to be the briefest of the lot.
While the film, at times, has a pretentious air of being worldly, it essentially explores the twisted psyche of a filmmaker and his creative exploitation of women (and their exploitation of him). Like one of the segments illustrates, for K, every experience is the quest for a story. The potentially fictional world the real can inspire is what K is consistently chasing until he reaches a point where his life looks like a rehash of the same old stories, a nightmarish reality for any writer and a case that has led to the success and downfall of several top filmmakers in real life.
In that sense, X manages to capture the anguish, the mind-numbing frustration, the loneliness and the borderline neurotic process of a filmmaker remarkably well, offering a window inside the beautifully chaotic mind of an artist on the futile quest of finding his true self. If the last segment didn't justify K's encounter, the film would have been a much more accomplished work, leaving room for interpretation of whether it was actual or imaginary, real or fiction, filmy or plain flimsy.
It sounds nearly impossible to imagine a room filled with 11 filmmakers agreeing on anything at all (that is without blunt objects being flung across). 11 streams of varied visions cannot, by any measure, form a cohesive canvas, the lack of which leaves you with a fatigued cinematic experience.
So for all its bravery and flashes of brilliance, X is not without some serious narrative inconsistencies. Ideally, all chapters should have worked independently as well as one whole unit, but here some not only fail but also weigh down heavily on the others.
Despite being in the competent hands of A Sreekar Prasad, the film's editing (which must have been a challenge and a nightmare), is weak. The sequences are not only haphazardly stitched; there are several moments when it seems the film has completely lost its plot, (or gotten into an overcooked one) with its brash over-indulgence, both in style and content.
The intrusive camera does nothing in terms of storytelling and is pretty bad in portions which could've been handled without those massive close-ups, a notorious indie-movie clich. The dialogue too veers towards uninspiring pop-philosophy with lines like, "Then what happened?", "Then, life happened."
However, despite these failings, X Past is Present is a brave attempt at film-making, one that would have required endless amount of coordination among all directors involved. While the end result left me quite underwhelmed, the fact that a film as bold and experimental like this exists and is able to get funding (Manish Mundra of Masaan and Umrika) and distribution, makes me extremely happy.
If not anything, X Past is Present is definitely an experiment worth repeating in the future.
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