The Inscrutable Oddity of Youth
Megha Ramaswamy’s What Are the Odds? (2019) is a film unlike any other about Indian young adults, harkening the uncertainty of youth on screen to present an experience that is at once innovative, surreal, and profound.
The plot-line is simple, perhaps a potential recipe for disaster, doused in cliché or damp with pedantry: two students, with seemingly antithetical personalities, bunk an exam to explore the labyrinthine cityscape of Bombay. Refreshingly enough, however, the actual film skirts past the traps of cliché with a fragile tenacity, not unlike the liminal intensity of young adulthood itself. This scenario of teenage flânerie belongs to Indian independent film What Are the Odds?. Released in 2019 and currently streaming on Netflix, the film takes up the tricky yet rich terrain of teenage, weaving the idiosyncratic with the socially relevant, to create a cinematic experience that is as unselfconsciously profound as it is formally innovative.
Directed by Megha Ramaswamy, What Are the Odds? takes the viewer on an impressionistic journey through an unusual day in the life of two teenagers. With echoes of Wes Anderson’s moody colour scheme and Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, wistful long takes, the film crafts an atmospheric visual style suffused with the dithering melancholia of all that is ephemeral and unspoken. It uses a magic realist palette to underscore that which is extraordinary within the mundane: an epiphanic moment of clarity, a brief sequence of emotional resonance, a feeling of sudden wonder short-lived and easily broken, a rush of adrenalin, and temporary escapades into worlds of fantasy and transient revolutions. The film pivots around a privileging of the interior lives of its young-adult protagonists, giving full amplitude to the complex amalgam of insecurities, jealousies, pride, naiveté, desires, confusions, and various stages of loneliness that constitute the emotional fabric of young adulthood, without subjecting this portrayal to a pre-existing moral framework. We—the viewers—are coaxed to eschew the rational adult movie-goer's perspective, and inhabit an altered existential space where events are prioritised and felt differently, and even the world of material reality takes on a different register.
It is this focus on bringing to the screen the specific psycho-geography of adolescence, this attempt to let the currents in the adolescent subjectivity do the talking rather than impose upon its representation a mature omniscient perspective, and this characterization of adolescence as a unique way of inhabiting time and space, rather than a mere sociological statistic or developmental stage, that makes Ramaswamy’s film part of a new landscape of young adult and coming of age cinema in India.
We are coaxed to eschew the rational adult movie-goer's perspective, and inhabit an altered existential space where events are prioritised and felt differently, and even the world of material reality takes on a different register.
Within the larger context of Indian film-making, the young adult genre remains a neglected one. Part of the reason for this can be traced to the historical emergence of children’s cinema in India in a post-independence landscape where popular media becomes a tool for indoctrinating the citizen subjects of a new nation state. As critics like Srirupa Roy and Noel Brown have shown, the relationship of the state to the subject in the Nehruvian era was framed along paternalistic lines with the latter cast as “ethically incomplete or infantile citizen subject(s) in need of statist intervention.” In light of this rhetoric, the young-adult audience is at once an actual demographic, a viewing position, and a metaphor for a new constituency of target audience in need of moral and educational guidance in order to come into full civic consciousness and become capable of self-governance.
The formation of the Children’s Film Society of India in the mid-1950s—a non-commercial, state funded organization—hence served as a point of convergence for these different configurations of cinema’s intended message and purpose. The juvenile subject represents both herself and a larger spectatorial cohort. This creates a template, as Roy and Brown both argue, for what is produced and mandated as suitable cinematic material for child/juvenile subjects. Fiction and feature films join with educational and scientific documentary narrative forms to explore formulaic subjects with a strongly didactic content. These work like coded textbook lessons in conventional morality and conduct, or are fed into the mainstream of popular family entertainment: elaborate song and dance embellished spectacles revolving around the assimilation of individual aspirations into familial—and by extension—nationalist structures.
As vehicles for shaping docile subjects cued to the ideological project of nation building, cinema specifically meant for children and juveniles ends up creating a wide gap between the complex multi-faceted physical, psychic, social dimensions of childhood on the one hand, and screen childhoods on the other. When it comes to the young adult genre, Indian popular cinema seems to have been heavily constrained by this demand for didacticism and the legacies of popular media’s role in moral edification.
The neglect of adolescence in both media and literary representations has a sociological root as well. Adolescence and young adulthood as a state of being and developmental period is still an emergent concept, in the process of being re-theorised, more finely calibrated, and approached with analytical tools that are different from those applied to studies of infancy and childhood. However, from its so called ‘discovery’ by the American Psychological Association in 1904, to the recent expansion of the scope of adulthood to include the young adult as a separate sociobiological phase, cultural attitudes towards adolescence have distinctly shifted. Interventions by neuroscientific and ethnographic studies have compelled society to adopt a more graduated and nuanced approach to processes of maturation.
Influenced by recent work in mental health discourse, the digitised and hyper-mediatised landscape of contemporary neoliberal capitalism is seen as a definitive factor in reshaping the boundaries of young adulthood. As a new global generation comes into the foreground, one that is not simply a developmental stage whose cognitive capacities are pervasively impacted by technology and novel configurations of networked sociality, it is no longer possible for cinema to remain inured to existing paradigms for defining youth, and not evolve to accommodate to these new conditions within which young people in neoliberal societies come of age.
In the last two decades a handful of films have offered sensitive, often insightful depictions of adolescent and young adult subjectivities. From Nagesh Kukunoor’s turn of the millennium pioneering attempt to chart the conflicted psyches of teenage boys and their tenuous negotiations with masculinity in Rockford (1999), the hard-hitting portrayal of parental abuse and a young adult’s transformation into an individual with agency in Udaan (2010), the sensitive engagement with issues of disability, female sexuality, queerness, and independence in Margarita With A Straw (2014), and to negotiations with terminal illness, untimely death, and the tragedy of youth cut short in the more recent The Sky is Pink (2019), there is an increasing attempt to recognise and bring to the service of narration the specific pressures, challenges, and pleasures of adolescence, while steering the coming of age narrative itself away from the closed telos of easy resolutions. The period of adolescence, as contemporary popular Indian cinema has gradually begun to examine it, progressively emerges as a space of contingency, irresolvability, and constant boundary-crossings. It is in such a space of randomness and chance that What Are the Odds? as the title itself indicates, locates its understanding of adolescence.
If there is any supposed-wisdom in What Are The Odds? it is in the form of what emerges as a consistent feature of the film: a self-deprecatory dramatisation of the perils of a pedantic viewpoint. The mouthpiece for this nugget of wisdom is the narrator of the film, the “Sutradhar” (played by Abhay Deol) doubling up as Valmik Barman, the somewhat parasitic, slightly fishy (pun intended) lead vocalist of a local band. The sagacious advice with which the film opens is both a serious summing of its central tenet — a re-enchantment of the humdrum quality of everyday life through a willing suspension of disbelief — as well as laced in ironic overtones, as any attempt to postulate a fixed position or an absolute core of belief is constantly undercut. Hence the same narratorial voice becomes a few scenes later the voice of Bunty, the goldfish, silenced briefly following Bunty’s tragic demise, only to miraculously shift bodies and be transplanted into that of another goldfish, Bunty’s new descendent, still speaking in flawless Abhay Deol voice-over. The unravelling of stable centres of authority, and the ironic, comic, or simply absurd effects it produces, is the torque around which the film revolves, echoing in turn the perennially shifting, perplexingly slippery texture of teenage.
Are we still in the real world? Perhaps not. But like an errant teenager, we have certainly begun to question the logic and definition of the real at this point.
In a manner that departs from the staple coming of age story, What Are The Odds? takes its protagonists out of the two primary institutional structures—family and school—within which young adult subjectivity is cast. If there is a subversive impulse in the film, in this attempt to de-situate the adolescent self from the claustrophobia of surveillance and instruction, thus recognising in the process that art too in its fundamental tendency to contextualise, can run the risk of creating barriers in the ways in which the domain of subjectivity is imagined. The move away from realism is perhaps Ramaswamy’s conscious steering clear of the realist trap of having to forgo a chance to explore the realm of new, speculative, invisible, unconscious sites of reality, in an effort to stay too squarely in the realm of what is or what is culturally, socially, ideologically delimited to be ‘real.’
We are launched right away into a confusing space in which normal contextual markers of time and place are dizzyingly inscrutable. We have two teenagers waking up in their respective rooms but there are no cellphones, no social media, and barely any technology, except clunky headphones and a tape recorder from another era (we are talking cassettes and mix tapes). A bumpy and a broken-down ride later, we are in the midst of a scholarship exam in a school with a badly managed office counter from where in an act of ‘protest’ certain key documents are intentionally and accidentally filched.
From this point on, the school is no longer a stock background endlessly replicated over a whole repertoire of coming-of-age cinema. The school, one that sets the conditions for juvenile identity formation, becomes a parody of itself. Whether it is the clownish exaggerated mannerisms of the staff, or the caricaturised exam hall scene, the trope of the school as a fundamental and decisive horizon of young adult experience is the first casualty of the film’s penchant for the odd(s). We follow the protagonists—the awkward, creative, opinionated Vivek (Yashaswini Dayama) whose name is the source of much amusement, and endearingly self-righteous head boy Ashwin (Karanvir Malhotra)—as they navigate the streets of a South Bombay, a city that feels strangely altered, depopulated.
The coloured smoke issuing miraculously from street corners, labyrinthine by-lanes that go in circles and gates that sprout out of nowhere, beetroots fertilized with pee, and Vivek’s screams that seem to work as a ready solution to any encroaching problem, place as context is quickly overturned, the city inverted into an objective correlative of the contours of the characters’ interiority. A road becomes a temporary performance space for a group of dancing senior citizens, a psychedelic bar is the scene of a carnivalesque rioting, a random terrace serves as a serendipitous meeting place with an eccentric man equally serendipitously named Amol Palekar (former director of the Children’s Film Society of India), who, in a crescendo of serendipity is saved by Ashwin from the suicide he may or may not have been attempting. These are the subtle insurrections, the minor modes through which fantasy and imagination are made to occupy everyday life’s routine apportioning of time and space.
Are we still in the real world? Perhaps not. But like an errant teenager, we have certainly begun to question the logic and definition of the real at this point.
The eccentric remapping of the ordinary however does not become easy escapism. Neither does formal aestheticism eschew an engagement with the darker concerns and contentious zones of social existence. There are polar opposites contending with one another: low angle shots of Vivek’s room, its chaotic quirkiness suggestive of her temperament, and long, fluid takes of the picturesque environs fringing the city echoing Ashwin’s curious and empathetic naturalist’s mind. There are also a host of liminal spaces: from a mock serious avant-garde art studio belonging to Ashwin’s muse, the warm but unimaginative socialite space of Valmik’s music, to the anarchic cacophony of a pet market, and finally, the bizarre stillness of a jail cell; the buried anxieties and shadowy sorrows of teenage swim like goldfish.
Ennui and angst about the characters’ lives are woven in with delicate brushstrokes, without using any of heavy handed terminology, including themes of Alzheimer’s and the loss of loved ones, the traumas of abandonment and childhood neglect, unrequited desire and disappointed hope, teenage idealisation of adults who turn out to be fallible and human, a bleak political horizon that doesn’t inspire enthusiasm for a potential voter, shocking encounters with the cruelties, calculations, and compromises of the adult world. These brushstrokes are often handled through sensitive dialogue, made more credible by their 17-year-old scriptwriter’s (Shreya Vaidya) work from the trove of lived experience. There is no mawkish sentimentality or moralising condescension in the film’s handling of these issues. Humour remains a constant, and often arises, refreshingly, out of the characters' own self-deprecating and unfiltered assessment of their situations and themselves.
The film also creates space for the young adult point of view, not just as a set of opinions and millennial wokeness, but as creative, inventive, often radically wise modes of coping with struggles. The narrative refuses the consolations of neat theorising and set jargon: cinematic, visual, or spoken. There is a certain aggression involved in imposing ideas and concepts that belong to a jaded, mature perspective, on the fragilities and uncertainties of adolescence. It is, in the film’s view, the same aggression that mutes and invisibles the value of the young adult point of view, and its attendant vulnerabilities.
The film creates space for the young adult point of view, not just as a set of opinions and millennial wokeness, but as creative, inventive, often radically wise modes of coping with struggles. The narrative refuses the consolations of neat theorising and set jargon: cinematic, visual, or spoken.
What Are The Odds? wants us to listen to the young person with a different set of listening tools and capacities. Its scenes are tender without being sugar-coated. Vivek attributes her father’s decision to leave the family to his possible queerness with remarkable intuitive empathy, as she imagines him happy in a life of his choice somewhere. We follow Ashwin’s attempt to honour his new friend’s love of her deceased pet by taking them on a long journey to a forest, where they construct a goldfish graveside, complete with a head boy badge headstone. We hear the two nit-pick each other’s flaws, and yet, share moments of unspoken connection. And we see them in the rawness of their impulses and weaknesses, attachments that lead to deep hurts, jealousies that manifest in shady botanical gifts, misdirected defiance and hasty judgements. Both Vivek and Ashwin struggle with identity constructs foisted upon them, losing these in their escapades through the alien and the new.
For a film that continually undermines its own claim to provide ready answers and neat resolutions about the chequered landscape of young adulthood, and whose primary moral-of-the story is the need to safeguard against forms of seriousness that prevent counterfactual, intuitive, fantastical thinking and wonder from growing, the stakes for What Are the Odds? are high. As the mixed reviews show, the film’s deliberate resistance to mean ‘something’ or carry a particular emotion or idea to a logical conclusion or dabble in various poses of profundity, have caused critics to consider it hastily made, unfinished, and an example of substance sacrificed to formal experimentation. Here the standards for making sense of the narrative seem to be alarmingly off track. The distinction between irreverent and profound, flippant and serious, fragmentary and finished, aesthetics and ethics, form and content don’t work in Ramaswamy’s scheme of things for What Are The Odds? simply because adolescence doesn’t harbour binary premises of this sort.
In an interview, Ramaswamy describes the film as an attempt to explore girlhood as an experience, the type that has got very little exposure in popular entertainment. The oddity of being a young girl between the ages of 13 and 18 is for the director a phenomenon that needs to be engaged with and represented without preconceived notions or didactic agendas. The awkwardness of this age, its tempestuous amalgam of the development of independent thinking and desires with a sense of displacement and alienation—owing to complex physical and mental changes—makes girlhood a rich resource for cinematic elaboration. In a culture that continually marginalises girls, oscillating between hypersexualising or infantilising them, What Are The Odds? is a timely intervention, privileging a model of adolescent girlhood that is refreshingly free of the line-up of limited and limiting stereotypes—the manic pixie dream girl, overachieving nerd, high school heartthrob, popular cheerleader or goth girl with issues—which have been peddled across a transnational divide.
Oddity is a valuable antidote, infusing with its androgynous versatility our tendency to pin down and categorise girlhood to biological, hormonal, and behavioural attributes. Vivek’s character—through which Ramaswamy channels her own memories of being an awkward teenager—speaks for the need for a perspectival shift in how we view girls. For Ramaswamy, this ties with her work as a female independent film-maker, a rare voice in Indian mainstream cinema, and her wish to carry her patent iconoclasm to the categories of popular and elite entertainment by mixing resources from Bollywood with indie energies.
The climax the film is neither romantic nor moralistic, but oneiric. The wishful thinking of an Alzheimer’s patient is translated into a visual tableau through the imaginative eyes of two teenagers: it snows in Bombay. What are the odds? While it contains snatches of The Virgin Suicides, flashes of Hard Candy, and Ladybird, What Are the Odds? takes its own slant, exploring young adulthood as a space of possibilities and wild dreaming. It is an original and much-needed intervention into the changing landscape of Indian coming-of-age cinema.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33
