Carnal explorations of the imaginary kinds

For an average cinema lover, Amartya Bhattacharyya's debut feature film Capital I would be a little hard to digest. It dwells on gender identity, people's perception of sexual desires, existentialism and the interlinking of science and arts in a manner that is farthest from simple, straight storytelling. Wrapped in the cloak of a whodunnit, Capital I has a disjointed narrative with overtones of surrealism. Along the way, one finds snatches of folk dance performances, a mime show and poems written by the director.

The 29-year-old director calls the film a psychodrama that explores the nooks and crevices of the mind through an interplay between the real and the imaginary worlds.

The film's offstage protagonist and eponymous character is a man who forever remains in the shadows. An elderly physics professor and a student of psychology form an unlikely bond to decode the mystery surrounding Capital I. Their clues are some sketches and random lines.

In the course of the film, one discovers that the student, sexually dissatisfied with her boyfriend, strikes a lesbian relationship with a girl who is a figment of her imagination. She returns to her heterosexual orientation after a carnal encounter with the professor in real life. "I have tried to debunk the idea of masculinity and femininity in sexual desire. The film shows that sexual pleasure is about role playing where men derive pleasure from dominance and women achieve fulfillment by being dominated. It's a return to tradition but not in a rigid way. In her real-life relationship, she clearly enjoys the upper hand due to which she wants to be dominated in bed," says Bhattacharyya, who apart from writing the screenplay in just two days, has also done cinematography and editing for the trilingual film.

But what explains the choice of a female alter ego in her hallucinations? "Her imagination is linked to her real-life bitter experience, and it goads her to opt for homosexuality," says Bhattacharyya.

The other characters too are inspired to carry out self explorations. "Capital I's (the character's) lines, such as 'bodies are embedded in bodies, times are embedded in times' provoke the girl to think more and she goes deeper and deeper into a world that is far away from the real-life constricting atmosphere of prejudice and convention," he says. "Yet, the girl can't entirely get rid of what she considers a guilty conscience, which is a product of many years of social conditioning." Following the act of physical intimacy with the student, a sense of morality also strikes the professor when his instinct — shown as an apparition — questions him about pure and impure thoughts.

Capital I was shot over 22 days in and around Bhubaneshwar and Puri in Odisha on a budget of a mere Rs 5 lakh. It features non actors, some of whom are Bhattacharyya's colleagues in a software company. Bhattacharyya, a software engineer, shifted base from Kolkata to Odisha for professional reasons. The move made it impossible for him to pursue his passion for theatre. "To fill that void, I discovered the joys of cinema," he says.

He has no formal training in any department of film-making. "Before making Capital I, I have made a few short films, including the poetic psychodrama Boba Mukhosh for which I won the best director at White Screen Film Festival in 2013 in Kolkata and the Best Editor at Rolling Frames in Bangalore the same year." All my films are dark and mostly surreal and psychoanalytic in nature, he says.