Manu Joseph: Why do Indian films rarely ever depict the reality of how Indians speak?

They may think they are the first of their kind, but whole generations before them have had the same conversations and same lives; just that we may not have seen it in an Indian film.

They love sex, though maybe not equally. She can make him bathe by promising sex; but he doesn’t have that sort of power. She, in fact, blames him for his mediocre technique; he blames the mysteries of girls.

They have a lot of time, a lot; like many young people, they are billionaires of time. These two don’t have to send money to parents, or worry about them. They are the type of young people whose problems are themselves.

They have friends like them, who are couples and who say that to be in love is to be bored with each other. They are proud of this observation, which they suspect is deeply philosophical.

It is such a rare, real and delightful Indian film, one of the best written in my recent memory. I do not have the heart to call it independent or ‘art cinema’, though it is, because Indian fringe cinema is generally dreary or at least dour and fake, intended for the lottery of foreign acclaim on the festival circuit and made by urban people who do not belong to the world they claim to portray.

Scenes from a Situationship, directed by Vaibhav Munjal, who has also co-written the film with Vaishnav Vyas, one of the two remarkable lead actors, Shreya Sandilya being the other, is the work of people who belong exactly in the world they depict.

The achievement of Scenes… is that it is art that is entertaining, which is the only part of art that requires talent more than narcissism. Its other achievement is that it feels real. Realism in cinema is not reality, but a fantasy of reality. And this film’s realism comes from the most difficult aspect of life to capture in art: conversations.

How modern Indians speak is a part of Indian life we never get to see in any form of cinema—neither in ‘good’ movies, because they are charlatan, nor in mainstream cinema, because they are farces.

The film is brilliant because it is independent in a way that most independent films are not. Usually, films made on a shoe-string budget have only one market: the international acclaim market, which has some unspoken requirements.

An Indian film, for example, is expected to show exotic forms of misery. Scenes… is doomed in that market. Not only is it entertaining (and for some reason the high priests of art are allergic to entertainment), it is also about conversations that one can picture any young couple having in a Western city. Yet, it was made.

The film does not try to hide the fact that it has been made with very little money. In any case, it is not something that can be hidden. Its austerity, though, enhances its grimy realism.

The film’s creator, Vaibhav Manjal, told me that he had funded the film himself with some friends and by giving equity to key people who worked for free or almost nothing. But how much exactly did the film cost? He refused to divulge the figure, fearing that it would diminish the ambition of the film.

Usually, a film like this is made this way: someone writes it, then someone who knows someone in a studio or a platform suggests changes; then someone in the studio suggests more changes in return for funding the film; then actors, if they are reasonably well known, gives notes.

In not seeking studio or platform money, or not having the chance to seek it in the first place, Munjal could make the film he wanted. But the process after that usually is to ‘send’ the film to international festivals to gather acclaim and attention.

Munjal, who is 31, was very clear he wanted to stay clear of “validation," which is a young person’s word for acclaim. He says it is a trap. Once you allow yourself to fall into its lure, you will spend your whole life making things you don’t believe in but will get you compliments.

Munjal completed the film, packed it and “gave a narrow window for the OTTs," but figured that selling to them would be a long and difficult process. In any case, Munjal knew the YouTube medium. He is the co-creator of Chalchitra Talks, a hugely successful channel on YouTube that recommends films and books. He has also released short films on the platform, which is a great medium, he says, if you are not serious about recouping the money.

Money is the hardest problem to solve in filmmaking. Even some of the most famous filmmakers in the world struggle to find funds. Then there is a greater struggle to recoup that money.

This is odd because most of the world is in the trance of cinema, which is now called by many names. People spend hours everyday looking for themselves in drama. And they almost never find that in mainstream or art cinema.

In an ideal world, an entertaining art film should have a chance to make money. In an ideal world, it should be streamed on YouTube and people would pay a ticket price to watch it. Half a million people, which is a small niche for cinema, paying ₹300 could create a whole new enjoyable genre. People tell me there’s no chance of it; that it cannot happen. I think that is the future of honest entertaining art cinema.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.