Express at Cannes: Anurag Kashyap, Kanu Bahl chart triumphal returns

Behl spoke to me a couple days ahead of the screening of ‘Agra’s journey from the drawing board to being chosen at Cannes. It’s taken a fraught five years from the time he began working on the script, to finding funding in India and France (it’s an Indo-French production), which included pandemic-induced delays and personal difficulties. ‘Everything shut down in 2020, life ka bhi pata nahin tha, forget about films, my dad passed away, and I was all over the place’, said Behl. ‘I wanted to find partners who would understand this very fragile film, and fortunately everything fell in place soon after.’

One of the most interesting faces in the cast is Rahul Roy, indelibly fixed in our memories as the callow young lover in Mahesh Bhatt’s 1990 ‘Ashiqui’, who returns as an older man whose libido is on full display even as his son, played by Mohit Agarwal, spends the film looking for his sexual and emotional groove.

Kashyap’s close friends and collaborators were out in full support on the red carpet: Sudhir Mishra, who gets a very special mention in the film, was there, as was Vikramaditya Motwane, who has also been part of Cannes with his outstanding 2010 debut ‘Udaan’.

When I bumped into Kashyap a day before the premiere, he was togged out in his made-for-the-red-carpet Manish Malhotra suit. ‘Kaisa lag raha hoon’, he asked, before racing off to the Palais for an appointment. The suit, and the wide smile, was there for all to see, last night.