tenth DIFF: Audience Award for Best First Film winner, Amrita Bagchi’s Succulent exhibits how rent-a-family could appear to be in India sooner or later

If the pandemic/lockdown made us socially distant, turned us into deep-throated Amitabh Bachchans waxing eloquent about primary aur meri tanhayi (us conversing with our solitude), the drive majeure made us yearn extra for human/social connections. Pandemic apart, even after we lose/miss an absent liked one, can a stranger fill in that function?
Can they handle/soak up our repressed feelings, present us with closure? Amrita Bagchi’s futuristic Succulent, which picked up the Audience Award for Best First Film on the just lately concluded tenth Dharamshala International Film Festival, is our rendezvous with a dystopian actuality/future. Set to a balmy background rating by Ishaan Divecha (Udta Punjab, Qarib Qarib Single, Paatal Lok), Bagchi’s quick movie is inconspicuously unsettling.

A nonetheless from Succulent.
While Bagchi wrote the movie in 2018, earlier than Werner Herzog launched his Family Romance, LLC in 2019, each are in the identical vein — the previous a future chance in India, the latter a present actuality in Japan. Both function an company which sends out individuals for rental household service, to fill within the gaps in individuals’s lives. Neither Herzog’s Yuichi Ishii, who turns into a faux father/buddy, nor Bagchi’s younger lady M (Merenla Imsong) have entry to, or are allowed, human attachments. Being a rental particular person, maybe, helps them, too, to fill the void of their lives (M’s household denies her household time).
M’s firm, Complete Companions Inc., a cubicle (in Ghaziabad), like a defunct spaceship out of a sci-fi film, throws out shock absorbers into the orbit. For a price, after all. M is given coaching materials (PDFs, garments, pen drives) to turn into a stated particular person she’s to exchange: a Kannadiga Brahmin sister, a Jain daughter, a granddaughter. The anonymous M performs alongside, crosses the road (eats rooster pizza in a Jain family), and pushes again. At instances, it really works like a home on fireplace; at instances, it backfires.
Director Amrita Bagchi. (Photo: Gourab Ganguli)
M has for companion inexperienced mates, the one life she’s genuinely connected to. Imsong, in actual life, has even named her 42 houseplants. M is the succulent who’ll survive in any situation, nurture the soil she grows in, even prick her shoppers into senses. Like Aditi Iyengar — not accepting the Northeasterner M as her youthful sister Smita, as being conscious of their Kannadiga Brahmin customs and vocabulary — who initiatives her repressed anger and bitterness, from Smita’s premature demise by drunk-driving and her incapability to guard her, onto M. There’s energy dynamics at play, Aditi can humiliate M, she’s paid for her companies, however extra pointedly, how might the impersonator get pleasure from whereas she’s hurting.
Bagchi, 35, a Santiniketan (advantageous arts) and National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, graduate (graphics), has designed units for performs (Motley theatre group, and so on), does clowning work for kids (Clowns Without Borders), does commissioned writing. She’s dabbled in appearing: theatre (Manav Kaul’s Colourblind), movies (The Music Teacher, 2019), TV/internet exhibits (Mrinal ki Chitthi in Stories of Rabindranath Tagore; Hasmukh; City of Dreams). She wished to make a play about loneliness and household rental, a person and a canine — a metaphor that surfaces within the movie. The written script, nevertheless, was morphed right into a multilingual movie.
Poster of Succulent.
“At that time, my 82-year-old widowed grandmother was staying alone in a small town (Serampore), near Calcutta, very far away from us (in Mumbai). I felt like I wish there was somebody like me with her. So that’s where it came from,” she says. The Kolkata Police and a non-profit has this yr began a programme known as Pronam, the place they, by way of younger volunteers, conduct safety audits and wishes evaluation (medicines, and so on) of aged individuals/{couples} residing alone.
Bagchi was astounded when Imsong knowledgeable her about Japan’s rent-a-family trade, and examine it in The New Yorker. What struck her, nevertheless, is that in India, futurism could be very totally different. “There are going to be caste issues, complexion issues, geographical issues. And people will have 20 other problems, because no matter how united we may be, there are many things that have the potential to divide us,” says Bagchi. She misplaced her mom two months after this, and a few days earlier than capturing for Faraz Ali’s debut function Shoebox, which additionally screened on the tenth DIFF. Bagchi performs the lead in that movie, a couple of metropolis’s transformation, erosion of the acquainted, and a tough father-daughter relationship. Bagchi designed the Succulent poster and introduced on board a part of her Shoebox crew, govt producer Shanoo Sheikh, and Ali because the editor, amongst others. The theme of non-public loss, too, connects the 2 works. Three months later, Bagchi misplaced her grandmother, as properly.
Another nonetheless from Succulent.
Plants enter the narrative, then. “It is a form of attachment. We ask helpers/neighbours, allow strangers to enter our homes, to water the plants in our absence. My grandmother cared for her tulsi plant, this plant and that plant, all the time. I felt it was a good way to show personal attachment without bringing in more human beings into the picture,” says Bagchi.
Visual illustration of futuristic, dystopian issues/actuality (sci-fi movies, for example) is nearly at all times devoid of any greenery, she says, “I don’t agree that in the future, there’ll be people but no plants. There’ll be one dusty little leaf going somewhere. That’s just life. It was important, for me, to put it in the film,” says the director.

Replacement/capitalising loneliness will not be an answer, she says. Whether it’s Facebook/Instagram likes or courting websites/apps, “we keep running after these shortcuts to happiness, for one spike of serotonin, oxytocin in our brain”. These apps, for example, don’t work as properly in Tier-II or III cities as they do within the metros, due to roadblocks: caste, parental approval, meals habits. “We have so many issues, which leads to so much loneliness, and then we look for very urban solutions to a very traditional past,” she says. She speaks of cycles of feelings, like cycles of seasons, which “one has to go through, it’ll be painful. Grief is very unpredictable, and when unaddressed, turns into anger/bitterness (like Aditi’s). Ask for help, but move on. There’s a saying, when you lose a limb, you learn to dance with a limp.”