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The Plus point

M D Riti

Excuse me, but aren't you Sangeetha's sister?" the blue jeans clad young man with one pierced ear earnestly asks the pretty young woman at the pub.

The girl in shiny purple trousers, sitting at the bar counter with a beautiful aquamarine coloured liquid before her rolls her eyes heavenward, and smiles in amusement. Her friend decides that the opportunity to snub the two young men who stand before them should not be lost.

"No, she is not, but I am," she says, with a sly grin. "Sangeetha's here too. Want to meet her?"

The young men are cornered, realising their bluff has been called. "No thanks, just tell her I said hi," says the first young man, retreating hastily.

"Wait, what are your names?" the girls call out.

"Manoj Kumar," sputters one thoroughly embarrassed young man, as the pub erupts into derisive laughter all around. "Dilip Kumar," mumbles his friend, walking hastily back to his table.

"Cut!" said the young man sitting on the bar stool right beside the two girls, just outside the frame of the picture. The sweating cameraman, dressed in cotton shorts and shirt, seated where the bartender would have been standing, grinned happily. "That was a good shot!" he beamed.

The newly-formed film company, Boiled Beans, consisting of three young men who want to make good quality English movies, was shooting its very first film, Twenty Plus, at the popular Black Cadillac pub in Bangalore. Rediff.com spent a couple of afternoons with the young unit at the pub and came away pleasantly infected with the abundance of enthusiasm and energy that it saw.

"This scene begins with the familiar sight of three young friends, just out of college, sitting at their table, counting their pooled money desperately," says director Arjun Menon, 24. "That is invariably what happens when college students get together at a pub: they see how much cash they have between them and order their beer accordingly."

Then, the two girls walk in and decide to sit by themselves at the bar counter. One of the three friends decides to approach one of the girls. So he makes what is again a very common opening move, taking his friend along for support. The girls realise what he is upto and snub him roundly. The boys retreat quickly, realise that the whole pub is laughing at them and decide that it's time to leave with as much dignity as they can muster. "You never backed me," complains Sanjit to his friend.

"You didn't tell me what you were going to say or do," argues Arjun, in the film. "Anyway, who the hell is Sangeetha?"

The Boiled Beans trio refers to Twenty Plus as an extremely low-budget film which tries to take a humorous, yet positive and insightful look at the few months between the last day of college and examination results. It deals with the joys of freedom from the monotony of classes, anxiety over results, apprehensions and uncertainty about the future and life in the working world. It is set in urban, middle-class Bangalore.

The film is financed entirely from the trio's savings. They did try film financiers in Bombay, but found their terms too tough. They propose to approach commercial film distributors in May, when it's ready for release. Menon has already made a trailer of the film and showed it to some distributors who have evinced great interest in it.

"Actually, the budget is so low, it is just about as much as my fee for shooting a single commercial film," laughs ace Bollywood cinematographer Aseem Bajaj, who has worked on a variety of prestigious films, including Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen and the recent Sanjay Dutt blockbuster, Vaastav. "Working on this film is so very different from the usual work I do in Bombay," he continues, leaning back in his chair at the pub, adding quickly, "No, no, put your pad and pen away, they make me self conscious."

What does Aseem find so very different or enjoyable, apart from the language and the scale of the film? "Well, in Bombay, I would never worked with such a small crew," he says thoughtfully. "There would have been three assistant cameramen milling around me, over 100 light boys and even more technicians. Everything there is set, pre-determined and the same over and over again. More than anything else, you are under tremendous pressure to make your stars and everything else look very good, because your producer has spent so much money to bring in these beautiful, highly-paid stars. Here, I can experiment, film a place as it really is, and not as a falsely glamourised version of itself."

This film is almost an autobiography of what happened to director Menon when he finished college a couple of years ago. It's based on his script and screenplay, as this is how the trio has decided they will function. Each gets to direct his own script. Next, it will be the turn of industrialist Abhay Toshniwal, and finally, may be six months down the line, if all goes well, it will be Ryan Lobo.

The three filmmakers themselves are almost as interesting as their venture. Arjun Menon completed his BCom, assisted Shantanu Sheorey in his feature film Jadh, made six short video films on his own, worked for a television production company in Bangalore for a year and then decided to give it all up and devote himself completely to Boiled Beans.

Ryan Lobo, 26, completed BSc in Bangalore, studied cell biology at Ohio State University for a while, then came back to Bangalore and started an advertising agency called Opus CDM. He too, wrote and acted in a short film before cutting himself from all his other interests and jumping head first into the film company.

Abhay Toshniwal, 28, the oldest of the three, is the only one who works for the film part-time, as he and his brother Ajay jointly run a firm that manufactures transformers and battery chargers in Bangalore. He has been active in amateur theatre in Bangalore for almost a decade now, has varied interests ranging from car-racing to scuba diving, and is married to ex-chief minister Veerappa Moily's youngest daughter, dancer and choreographer, Hansa.

The success of Hyderabad Blues gave them the courage to try something similar themselves. "Until Blues, there was a fear that English films made in India would have no market here or outside India," says Menon. "Nagesh's film showed everyone that there is really a big market for this kind of cinema." Adds Toshniwal, "There are 250 million urban Indians, almost the size of the population of the US! I'm sure they would want to see our films."

There are four principal characters in the film: Arjun, Sanjit, Nirbhay, all students who have just passed out of college, and Shabana, a communications student who dabbles in modelling on the side, develops a romantic relationship with Arjun, who is, of course, the protagonist in the story.

Lobo plays Arjun in the film. Actually, another young man had been chosen to play the reel life Arjun. But by the time the film got underway, he got admission in a university abroad and left Bangalore. Menon auditioned some other young men informally, but finally found that Lobo was the best suited for this role.

In the film, Arjun aspires to be a filmmaker. Sanjit, played by Gaurav, wants to marry a rich woman and live in style all his life. Nirbhay, played by Gerard, dreams of doing an MBA and prosper in the world of business. "Actually, the characters are very far removed from our real life selves," laughs Gerard, who left home when he was 17, and never aspired to a conventional success-oriented career. Gaurav, on the other hand, says he is actually a very serious person.

"We all identify very strongly with the story and characters in this film," says Lobo, sitting with his minimal make-up on, waiting for the next shot to be made ready. "So the film has been great fun to do. Shooting went very smoothly, and was bang on schedule right through." The unit completed the last shooting schedule on March 27 and is now busy with post-production work.

"I really loved working on this film," says Niranjana (who plays Shabana). "I knew everyone in the cast well and am also fond of the character that I am playing. I have enjoyed the experience of getting under her skin and thinking like her."

Niranjana also hopes that this film will provide her the foothold she is looking for in the entertainment industry. She is basically a singer and has done some ad jingles with Louis Banks. All that she needs now is the kind of one-in-a-million break that another Bangalore girl, Vasundhara Das, got with Kamal Haasan and A R Rahman.

The film will be 100 minutes long and will have no song and dance numbers. But it does have two dream sequences, which are totally surreal. Menon has agreed with Sony Music to allow him to use snatches of their music, mostly either English or Indipop. There will be no special music scored for the film either. "I just wrote down the titles of whatever songs I thought would be appropriate for certain scenes, and am going to use them," says Menon.

The locations are all spots in and around Bangalore that the characters in this film are likely to frequent, such as St Joseph's College, Mahatma Gandhi Road, the tourist resort of Nandi Hills just outside the city and Alliance Francaise. Some sequences have even been shot in Menon's own house in Dollar Colony.

"The desire to make films like this is really a passion for us," says Toshniwal. "The decision to make Twenty Plus was really a question of heart over head. I think there is a good future for this kind of cinema in India. I believe that five years from now, we will be part of a full-fledged parallel film industry. We could never be an alternative to Bollywood, we would just exist on the side."

"The basic message that I am trying to convey through this film is that everyone should follow his or her dreams, no matter how difficult they seem," says Menon.

Certainly an appropriate message coming from three young men who are taking a major risk themselves and have either abandoned or neglected stable careers to follow their own dreams of making good cinema.