Jaggi review: Anmol Sidhu’s film is a haunting tale of survival and dignity

But the film is about sex only at first glance because as it goes about peeling off its layers, it starts to indicate just how perilous it is when it is contextualized. “When lust takes over, one doesn’t care about anything, one can cross any limit, even if it’s ghastly,” says Jaggi (Jagdeep) in one of his disquieted monologues. Lust is often commodified in cinema to titillate and to propose that it is a step beyond intense romance — in Sidhu’s debut, however, romance is a rarity and what lust brings about is only pain in the lives of everyone involved.

A tale of sexual repression

Sidhu relays the tale to us in a bildungsroman style and uses a non-linear narrative to a solid effect. The present-day (in 2012) is wintery and grey and the very first visuals of the film show Jaggi breaking down into heavy sobs before stuffing a pistol in his pants, possibly wanting to rescue himself from something very important and dangerous. The moment, though, is nipped in the bud and when another integral character in this boy/man’s journey enters the fray, new things come to light — that Jaggi is set to get engaged the following day, that his father is a drunk and that sexual repression is a huge facet of his being. What we also gather from this scene is that Jaggi takes all of this and so much more in his stride with resignation, unwilling to act on anything let alone comment on it.

The clock then turns to 2008 and drops us into the belly of the drama, when Jaggi is a high-school student in a boys’ school. Everywhere he looks, there’s a chat about masturbation and when his classmates gloat about their respective hand-relief marathons, he cannot help but feel left out of the party; in one scene, he even confides with great naiveté that he has never masturbated and his friend’s response is that he is likely gay. The underlying issue of impotence is never even referred to because the culture and its communication rift are such. Instead, sexual frustration soon engulfs Jaggi like a sly demon and before he knows it, he has fallen prey to bullying and violence that he has no answer to, except relegating himself to a corner and cowering.

Sidhu masterfully keeps us at a distance from his character and simply makes us a bystander, almost suggesting that we are complicit in this. In a matter-of-fact manner, he shows how a promising kid is assaulted verbally, emotionally and more importantly, sexually on a daily basis for years together. School life and any kind of normalcy are forgone voluntarily but people around him don’t bat an eye, don’t wonder what the deal is. On top of that, the boy’s equation with his mother too involves a large open secret that plays on his mind at all times and leaves him even more confused.

A life in limbo

And yet, what’s most striking is that Jaggi never thinks of retaliation or payback and instead prefers his limbo because he probably feels that if he stays numb enough for a while, circumstances could change for the better. Life around him has hardwired him to not question or confide but to continue taking those psychological blows because this is a world where discussing one’s own mental well-being is blasphemy indeed.

In one scene, when a friend/helping hand offers him a beedi to smoke and forget his troubles, his immediate response is to say, ‘Punjabis don’t do shit like that.” In another scene, a girl inquires about his taste in music and the artists he can name are Kuldeep Manak and Harbhajan Mann, two singers belonging to an entirely different era. The Gippy Grewals, the Badshahs and the Diljit Dosanjhs have clearly taken over the landscape but Jaggi has no intention to keep pace with the rest.

The film remains unrelenting in its exploration and Sidhu’s proper punch in the gut comes in the latter half. A ray of hope strikes Jaggi’s life as romance enters tiptoed and a chance to redefine himself, to find happiness is finally presented to him. To make things better, his fiancée seems caring and even empathises with his trauma, sharing her own experience of being a victim of repeated sexual crimes. And as a welcome change, Jaggi learns to smile and look forward to greener pastures. But could he make the switch so easily? Or does everything bottled up inside him, that vast repository of grief and hate explode unceremoniously?

It’s interesting to compare the film with other more mainstream titles like R.S. Prasanna’s Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017) and Qaushiq Mukherjee or Q’s Brahman Naman (2017) as both of them deal with sexual repression/frustration in their own ways but through comedy. Sidhu’s film, on the other hand, is far removed from the grammar, the vocabulary and the urbanness, in general, that we are all used to while discussing sexual orientations. While watching Jaggi, several moments made me recoil and pause in deep fear of something unknown. It is neither a film that works on a plot or a design nor does it want to make a strong, tokenistic point about something. Heck, it’s even tough to recommend the film to someone knowing what it withholds. But its lure resides somewhere in that quiet and its will to just capture love, life, violence and everything else as it is.