My logic behind watching a movie for Audient Bollywood on my plane ride back from America was twofold:
1) It would give me a discrete set of choices, however many were offered on the flight, which would allow me for once to have an artificial limit placed on my theoretically thousands of choices for this series;
2) It would give me 14 hours worth of flying time, and therefore, time enough to watch the longest movie Bollywood could possibly think of throwing at me.
But here's a funny little secret about the 14-hour flight between Melbourne and Los Angeles, which can fluctuate as high as 15 hours depending on winds and the like: It's actually not enough time.
How can you say that, Vance? you ask. Many people consider the biggest obstacle to visiting Australia not to be vacation time or the cost of the trip, but rather, the very length of the flight.
Once you've done this flight a bunch, though, you start to think of it less as a very long time to be trapped in an airplane, and more as a very short time to watch all the things you want to watch.
So when you factor in the fact that I ended up watching three other movies, as well as two episodes of the TV show The Flight Attendant -- and that I would involuntarily succumb to as much sleep as I could manage -- I ended up opting for the shortest movie I've watched so far in this whole series.
Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) caught my attention for a couple reasons, only one of which was its skimpy 98-minute running time. Another was that it was supposed to be the feature debut from an acclaimed documentary director, which is the sort of perspective that has been absent so far in this series. However, now that I'm back on terra firma I'm wondering if I may have misremembered this as the movie from the acclaimed documentary director, given that director Prateek Vats has never before directed a film, full stop. It might have been one of the other dozen or so choices.
But this certainly feels like the sort of film made by a person accustomed to making documentaries. It is easily the most realistic and naturalistic film I've watched in this series, and in fact the first not to feature musical numbers or Bollywood dancing of any kind. Being realistic should not mean there's no absurdity to it. There's plenty of absurdity, though the comedy, such as it is, is very straight-faced.
I should start with the title. "Eeb allay ooo!" represents the noises made by professional monkey repellers in Delhi. That's right, there are people -- at least in this movie, though I suspect in real life as well -- who are paid to shoo monkeys from government buildings, so they are less of a hassle to innocent passersby. The most effective means of doing this is through these sounds, which, I suppose, approximate the cries made by these monkeys' natural predators -- larger monkeys and other alphas. However, the sounds must be made very precisely or they will be totally ineffectual.
That last is the experience of Anjani (Shardul Bharadwaj), a down-on-his-luck man who has come to the big city to beg for work. A benevolent relative has vouched for him and gotten him this monkey-repelling job, which he hates and is not good at. He's bullied by the other workers and by the monkeys themselves, who thumb their nose at him while his co-workers seem to do their jobs with a fairly high degree of success. While he's at first on the verge of flaming out, his sad circumstances of trying to shape up -- as every other person in this movie tells him he must do -- eventually force him to become more serious and in fact to become obsessed with trying to be good at this job, ultimately resorting to forbidden tactics like posting pictures of alpha monkeys and even dressing up as one. While this actually worsens his prospects at the job, it leads to meaningful self-discoveries and even a possible transformation that will help him find his place in this world.
And it's a world I felt like I could slightly relate to. From a trip to Bali in 2018, I know a little bit about the menacing quality of these monkeys, how they beg and jump around in public areas and pose a certain threat to passing innocents. We went to a monkey forest in Bali and one of these things jumped on my back for a couple moments before dismounting. The scratch he left on my arm while scaling my body led to jokes about the start of some new international pandemic. It was funny, but it also left me feeling like I'd been in a situation that could have ended badly. (When I watched Eeb Allay Ooo!, I had also just watched Nope a few days earlier, in which a much larger monkey proves capable of lethal force.)
So I sympathized with Anjani in his initial ineffectual attempts to repel the monkeys. Not only was it truly a Sisyphean task -- repel one monkey, five others come back -- but the fear involved in constantly interfacing with these wild animals seemed perfectly legitimate to me, even if it reduced him in the eyes of his mocking co-workers. Anjani is one of those characters that can do no right, not because he's actually incompetent or lazy or anything like that, but because his best intentions backfire and can never be seen clearly by anyone in his life. We've all felt like that from time to time.
But there's also a very dry humor to this whole situation. There's a certain absurdity to trying to shoo monkeys from public spaces, since the monkeys clearly will do whatever they want, and if you lack any real resources that might more permanently resolve the situation -- say, weapons -- then you are operating at a real deficit. In fact, in an odd way, it is meant that the very mastery of how you say "eeb allay ooo!" is the key to doing your job effectively -- though why this should be the case is anyone's guess.
I really liked this movie, though I have to admit that watching it feels like a bit of a dream. See, the second movie on this 14-hour flight -- which this was -- is usually the time when you start succumbing to involuntary sleep, the kind that comes in fits and starts, even when you lack the resources -- speaking of lacking resources -- to have the sort of couple-hour sustained sleep you really need. So the 98 minutes of Eeb Allay Ooo! probably took about five hours to watch, as if it were one of the Bollywood behemoths I've watched this year, or plan to still watch in the future. It's a shame I didn't choose a different time slot for it, since this was easily my favorite of the four movies I watched on the plane (Ambulance, Asking For It and Firestarter being the others -- none of which crossed the three-star threshold on Letterboxd).
I was really hoping that Qantas would have Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, the one movie I knew I planned to watch even before starting the series, which is three hours and 44 minutes long. Since it didn't, I may see if I can tackle that one in September.
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