There are few things more stimulating than works of art that call out surveillance and policing. But the best among them do so with a hint of mischief—a wink and a flying kiss. Varun Grover’s actual directorial debut (yes, even before he came out with All India Rank), a quiet and inventive experimental short, is part of that same category. And it's called KISS, too.
In a frame narrative of sorts that the film opens with, Adarsh Gourav is an idealistic filmmaker who’s directed a film about homoerotic love between two versions of the same person separated by time. The eponymous kiss is a drawn-out (even humorous, I daresay, in the sci-fi punt that Grover has attempted) moment between the two men (who are essentially the same man).
Shot and produced in 2022, KISS was the Official Selection at International Film Festival, Rotterdam this year, before being shown at local film festivals of note around the world, including the Dharamshala International Film Festival (2022), Seattle's Tasveer Film Festival (2022), Moscow Shorts (2022) and Beijing Queer Film Festival (2022; official selection).
Grover’s thought-experiment, adjacent to the narrative ballpark of the Rashomon effect, which they also namedrop at one stage in the film, is rather stimulating. The idea is that one perceives an experience—in the case of this film, how long it is—on the basis of their own insecurities, fears, traumas and prejudices.
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Towards the resolution, the film tends to get a bit predictable, however, and the Grover’s penchant for therapising narrative psychological problems comes to the fore. With all three men struggling to understand why the perception of time is warped for them (their individual stopwatches corroborating it), a projectionist offers to help. He explains that the theatre that is the screening venue for the film within the film, is a wondrous device. It brings this method of perception of time alive by sensing the same insecurities, fears, traumas and prejudices and reflecting them back to the mind’s own internal clock.
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So, the same kiss that Gourav’s character perceives as half a minute long, is replayed back to the censor board representatives (Swanand Kirkire and Shubhrajyoti Barat) with a much longer-feeling reception. Sylvester Fonseca's (Amar Singh Chamkila, Kennedy, Sacred Games) lens, too, keeps the proceedings from getting into a Kafkaesque/Orwellian vibe—the film seems more interested in resolution and inclusion than deadpan commentary, despite the censor board representatives' dismissive comments at the beginning about the kind of work (progressive and modern, so to speak) that filmmakers like this produce.
And yet, KISS is an experimental work of conceptual boldness. Grover layers the subtext of trauma, and the need for psychological fight and flight, with the narrative ruse of time, which in itself is a delightful exercise. It's the best 15 minutes you'll spend looking at a screen today.
The film is now playing on MUBI.