Eeb Allay Ooo! (Prateek Vats, 2019) (Patreon)

I wanted to jot down a few quick words about this film before it completely evaporated from my memory, because it's actually not bad, and will be the only film I will end up watching from the We Are One Film Festival, an event so poorly timed it almost seems like a throwaway joke in a Pynchon novel. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Etc.

As it happens, most of the films featured in this online pseudo-event were several years old, since despite the supposed spirit of COVID-era camaraderie that provoked the international alliance, almost none of the participating festivals wanted to squander any good titles they'd secured, just in case the virus "just went away," or some other window of exclusivity opened up that would permit premiere-jockeying and oneupmanship to carry on as usual.

One exception was the Mumbai International Film Festival, which contributed a fresh, high-profile festival title to the mix, one of the only ones to be had. Eeb Allay Ooo! played the Berlinale earlier this year after winning several prizes at Mumbai, and although the film is director Prateek Vats' debut, the film has the substantial muscle of executive producer Anurag Kashyap behind it. With some attention, it's a film that could get around, assuming there's a world left to screen it in.

The film is essentially a slicker version of the "parallel cinema" of the 60s and 70s, focusing on the plight of the urban poor but taking an ironic, almost resigned approach to its depiction of the exploitation of the weak by the strong. It's not that Eeb Allay Ooo! doesn't care, or sides with the many bullies stationed at various points along the new democratic-capitalist caste system. It just doesn't profess to have any suggestions for how to repair the present nightmare. Although Modi is never mentioned, he is a structuring absence, and the Delhi that Vats depicts is not so different from America under Trump.

The film centers on a double-bind. Delhi is plagued by monkeys. Everyone wants them to go away. However they are held sacred, so they cannot be harmed. This creates an extremely low-level municipal position, a monkey chaser. There are crews of them, and there are specific guidelines for their behavior. (The title, "eeb, allay, ooo," refers to the standard sounds the chasers are supposed to make to frighten the monkeys away.) 

EAO! focuses on Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj), a Bihari immigrant who has come to Delhi to live with his pregnant sister (Nutan Sinha) and her husband (Shashi Bhushan). He sucks at the job, everyone hates him, but most importantly, his attempts to innovate -- posting placards of langurs, the monkeys' enemies, or dressing as a giant langur -- only get him in trouble. Despite the rhetoric of India's economic miracle, you'd better not try to innovate or be an entrepreneur. Stick to your station, peasant.

To its credit, Eeb Allay Ooo!  offers no solution to this conundrum. Its conclusion, a sort of unanticipated merger of Claire Denis and Jean Rouch, finds Anjani either achieving ecstasy or embracing madness. Is this the mass hypnosis of Modi's patriotic zeal, or just a recognition that nothing ever mattered in the first place? Either way, it's obvious that the monkey on his back isn't going anywhere any time soon.