Durga under lustful eyes

A young woman’s hand in his, Kannan Nayar was in the middle of the road. In the dead of the night, enveloped by hissing silence, they, more specifically the female, were no exception to leering men seen on the street at that point of time. Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga was just beginning to roll. “People did not believe we were actors and it was a film shoot going on. Somehow our crew members, very less in number, managed to convince them to not meddle in the affairs. We were mistaken to be real-life eloping couple, though the situation we were enacting was exactly that. We couldn’t slink away that easily,” Kannan recollects a funny part during the film.

Kannan, the protagonist is on cloud nine, as his filmy debut hit the bull’s eye winning the Hivos Tiger Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Even if it falls under the ‘road movie’ genre, completing a 13-day schedule was risky. “The ‘set’, a jam-packed Omni van, accommodated 10 people, comprising actors, director, cameraman and sound recordist. We actors were somewhat squeezed in the available seats. As everyone knows, there wasn’t a pre-written script in hand. Things moved according to the director’s plan. Even my character was getting named Kabir out of the blue,” Kannan rewinds. Being a skilled theatre-person, to emote and express in a ‘minimalistic’ setting was challenging.

“A 22-feet stage is like a playground. That space can be utilised in the way an actor wants. Here, the female actor (Rajshri Deshpande) was mostly seated on my lap. The street lamps provided lighting. Sound recording was done on the spot. Whooshing wind often landed things in trouble and re-takes were straining which meant taking the van again from the starting point, to repeating the dialogues and redoing the parts we have enacted. Imagine, all these happened from 12 am to 4.30 pm,” he says. The shoot had taken place in Kovalam and Poundkadavu regions in Thiruvananthapuram. How’s the hero’s take on controversies? “That public reaction during the shoot tells it all. When goddess Durga is a symbol of reverence, a woman with the same name is looked upon as an object of sexual pleasure. The movie simply throws a question mark at these double-standards with enough cues. The viewer only needs to connect things and understand the message we have attempted to put across,” Kannan signs off.