Reading the title of the film, one feels that Prateek Vats’s Eeb Allay Ooo! couldn’t have found a better slogan for itself. This spectacle is the fruit of avant-garde cinema – the same vision as the poets behind Nagarik and Pather Panchali. Here one feels the neorealism of classic Bengali cinematographers and poets.

Vats is neither following in the vein of de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves nor emulating the romantic, fantastical situations of Pather Panchali. Instead, a slightly bizarre but mostly unassuming individual is put in situations where he is pitted against himself – he is looking for what interests him; he is struggling to get a job that he likes. The general tone is a conversation in metaphors on different issues in society, class and religious politics and the plight of migrant workers. But the starting point of this conversation is a monologue of the main character. The opening shots establish this with successive close-ups in which he is trying to pronounce the words eeb (rhesus monkey), allay (langur) and ooo (human).

Hence, Vats is obliged to use a largely-unknown and hence not rigidly typecast actor (Shardul Bharadwaj) to play Anjani, the main character. It is easy to give into the tried and tested cabaret of melodrama and tear-jerkers, but Vats manages to adapt the script to his direction without the ulterior motives that plague mainstream political dramas.

The central characters in Eeb Allay Ooo! the monkeys, exist out of time in a dislocated reality. They have been there for a while and will continue to be there. This is a live-action film, which is not to say that it is without rigour. The journey to find his voice that Anjani embarks upon is a rather frightening experience. Through him, the viewer experiences the anxiety that accompanies waking up one morning in a new city, to a new job, dazzled by the corridors of power around you and straightjacketed into a life you didn’t choose. Eventually, Anjani’s self-confidence and self-respect start to break down.

In this domain, there have been many great voices. But to approach this film from the European context would be to do it a disservice. The subcontinent, unlike European voices, carries the history of being colonised. Specifically, a colonial enterprise that criminalised nomadic tribes who operated outside of the centralised European governments. All the monkeys are brought to the zoo and made subject to laws – they have to operate by rules and languages alien to them. Today, this flocking continues, in the form of migrant workers displaced from their land by encroachments or hedged towards the city by economic disincentives.

Whether it be farmers in the Punjab moving to Delhi to protest against policies that endanger their livelihoods, or the I-11 slum dwellers in Islamabad who were termed “illegal” occupants and whose houses were bulldozed by the CDA in the name of “amn, salamti, behtari” (peace, security, improement), the modern city contains in its underbelly a legacy of coercive and corrosive consumption.

5,782 undocumented houses on Gujjar Nala are currently being bulldozed by the KMC. The compensation policy that has been drawn up will give rent money every month to the citizens left bereft of the shelter of their own homes. They will be dependent on the state as tenants. Meanwhile elite settlers like those in Bani Gala have been left untouched. This dichotomy of settlers comes into play in Eeb Allay Ooo!. Our protagonist works at Raisina Hill, the bureaucratic core of Delhi, but crosses two railway tracks to go to the slums, where he and his family, all contractual labourers, live in one bedroom. His life mirrors the lives of many on this side of the border.

Eeb Allay Ooo!’s style is simple and straightforward. Vats knows how to choose his tools and uses them well. The personal but mercurial style, which indicates expanse and ambition, is intelligent enough to invite us to experience the bitterness and joys of being alive. Contrast that with the domineering instinct to trap and cage people. Vats sees problems where other people see opportunities. In one scene, he shows a person setting up a cage to capture monkeys and who, in doing so, is himself behind bars.

An overhead 21st Century metro runs above a firmly 20th Century passenger train. This juxtaposition of the bizarre and the real, the charming and the ugly, is all too familiar. Vats is an anti-theoretician. He doesn’t comment; he just lets the camera do its work. The transitions are crisp and the intervening close-ups of monkeys do not seem gratuitous or staged.

Vats analyses the feelings of Anjani as he moves from a village to Delhi through subjective impressions that may traditionally be deemed too insignificant to be featured in the establishing shots. These impressions find their way into his interactions with his family. His sister’s stalwart approach inside the household but cowardice in her professional dealings is an interesting commentary on gender roles. It is a male-centred world with only two female characters.

The film captures the contraction of an eyelid as Anjani’s sister (Nutan Sinha) diffuses conflict or brings up a sore topic, and the force with which Anjani’s vocal chords choke out his words for a fraction of a second. This sensory cinematic imagination can only be captured by equally ingenuous camera movement. In the context of this ordinary story, these cinematic features become extraordinary. Relating the plot threads to the background and letting them play out by themselves is a palpable technique.

One forgets the ordinary plot of this ordinary story because one becomes so involved in the experience of the protagonist. Eventually, it all comes together in an extravagantly ambiguous ending. This structure reflects the neorealist traditions of Bengali cinema. Nagarik (directed by Ritwik Ghatak) also presents the conundrum of the rural migrant and has a similarly ambiguous ending. Perhaps, it is not a surprise that both Vats and Ghatak are playwrights and directors. Theatre in the subcontinent is a major rural and communal art form. Hence, neorealism done right is never gratuitous.

Slowly, the film’s thematic thrust emerges, and the narrative picks speed. It feels inevitable for one assailed by the bureaucracy, family and the city to descend into one form of madness or the other. For Anjani, it’s a strange form of ecstasy, in which he truly knows his place in the crowd and seems to accept it. In other contexts, he would be insulted and berated like a Dostoyevsky criminal waiting for his death sentence.

When Anjani tries to avoid his own sentence by asking his sister if he can find another job, she silences him with rationales he doesn’t understand. She asks him if he can drive a car, use the computer or speak English. Later that night, outside the confines of his sister’s one-room house, he helps a neighbour find her hair clip. The juxtaposition of these scenes is endearing; the struggle of cold hard reason against warm raw emotion perhaps convinces Anjani that he is not entirely useless.

The best scene lasts perhaps a minute but feels incalculably long. The fear creeps in slowly. At last, we hear the exclamation from Anjani “mujhe saans nahi aa rahi” (“I can’t breathe”), and they release him. His colleague, part-time oppressor and master, smiles not so unsympathetically after him and notes that Anjani has become “hopeless”. This is a film that retains its sympathetic side and doesn’t feel disillusioned or jaded. Even the ending shot keeps this sense of sympathy; it is as if Anjani has been framed by the authority of his employer, his family and the city. And it is now that he is seeing himself as a part of the crowd, smiling at his destiny.

So, is it the story of a mad man, a sad man, a happy man or a genius? Is it a film about love or hate? There are no simple answers here. Each close-up and camera pan poses the same question: who are you? The greatness of Eeb Allay Ooo! is its simplicity in showing us not what films can do, but what they can’t do. It is truth in the absence or denial of truth. For many the monkeys are a religious deity; for others they are satanic. For the monkeys, humans are the deities that praise and feed them but also the devils who cage them. Everything rings true in this otherwise false film; and everything remains obscure by the end of this otherwise illuminating film.

The writer is a student of history and comparative literature at LUMS