Kiss movie review: Varun Grover’s ambitious directorial debut combats authoritarianism with empathy

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Adarsh Gourav headlines Varun Grover’s Kiss.

Sam waits patiently for the screening to end, confident that his film will emerge unscathed from the censors’ unnecessarily violent cuts. The men tumble out of the ravishing art deco auditorium. Something is wrong, Sam can tell. He asks them how it went, and they tell him. The two men simply cannot fathom why Sam would make all their lives difficult by including an extended same-sex kiss in his film; they’re so outraged at the idea of sexuality that they haven’t even begun to wrap their heads around the fact that the kiss takes place between two versions of the same character.

It’s like a lazy cop rolling their eyes in frustration at a petty theft complaint. So much paperwork; why can’t people keep an eye on the till? They’re openly disdainful of Sam and his artistic vision, although they don’t quite have the vocabulary to verbalise their complaints. Were a gun to be put to their heads, they would probably struggle to explain why exactly they’re so offended. Are they troubled by the simple act of sensuality, or are they more annoyed by the prospect of performing overtime just because little old Sam wanted a kiss in his movie?

Conditioned to view art through the lens of someone who sits at a ‘galla’, the two men demand that Sam present the timecodes for the kissing scene. He tells them that it lasts 28 seconds, which strikes them as odd. They could’ve sworn that it went on for longer. Sam suggests that they watch the scene again, with their timers on, only to make a more informed decision on how to approach cutting it. The three men trudge back into the old-timey theatre, and watch the scene again. A work of art has been reduced to CCTV footage.

Grover’s camera doesn’t get distracted by what’s happening on the screen; he trains his focus on the faces of the three men. Each of them gets a different reading on their watch; the same scene lasts under a minute for Sam, over two minutes for one of the men, and over three for his colleague. Time, it seems, is relative. “No good movie is too long and no bad movie short enough,” said the great critic Roger Ebert once. One wonders what he’d have made of Kiss.

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Varun Grover’s Kiss stars Adarsh Gourav.

The movie doesn’t limit itself to this one idea, though. Having established the premise, it goes for a grand payoff. Grover is, after all, a comedian; not to mention the writer of perhaps the single greatest Hindi film of the last decade. He understands structure better than most. Kiss is able lure us into its world with a clearly enunciated simplicity, before pushing the envelope ever so gently. Having trained the audience to expect the unusual, it takes the potentially divisive risk of swinging hard as it enters its third act. In the climactic five minutes, Kiss turns into what can only be described as a Nolan-esque reimagining of Ratatouille.

Both Sam and Grover are addressing their traumas the only way they know how: through their art. They have a right to be disheartened by the world they inhabit. But neither Grover nor his alter ego resorts to retribution. It would’ve been easy for him to vilify the two men. He’s in control; one turn of the dial here, one pull of the lever there. And et voila, he’d have a couple of two-dimensional villains. Certainly, most people seem to appreciate thinly written characters these days. But he approaches the story with a Javed Akhtar-level sympathy for the devil. Along with Rohin Raveendran’s The Booth, Shazia Iqbal’s Bebaak, and Faraz Ali’s Obur, Kiss is an urgent reminder of the paranoia that contemporary India has been cloaked under.

Kiss
Director – Varun Grover
Cast – Adarsh Gourav, Swanand Kirkire, Ashwath Bhatt
Rating – 4.5/5