Love? Lust? Life? is not for the fainthearted. The 20-minute long ‘short’ film, written and directed by Utpal Jha, has already been awarded the Best Short Film Award at SAARC Film Festival (2015) and been selected for Short Film Corner at Cannes Film Festival (2015), Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (2015), Delhi International Film Festival (2015) and Niagara International Film Festival (2016). No mean feat given the fact that the film was written, conceptualised and directed by a recent graduate of film studies.

Love? Lust? Life? is best described as a visual poem in which the words have, surprisingly, become redundant. Tracing the imagination of a poet, played by Divya Dev, who struggles with creating the poem ‘Love? Lust? Life?’ and explores the many realities that his imagination has unleashed, the film comes across as quite intriguing. For one, it was obviously made from a surrealist position that is heightened further by the deft cinematography of Robin Sharma and editing by Animesh Sapkota. Hemanta Chalise’s art direction holds well throughout the course of the film as does Kalsag Lama’s costume designs. Finally, Bipin Sthapit’s intuitive sound design is beautifully augmented by Camilla Ankerstjeme’s vocals.

Love? Lust? Life? pulls us to the edge of the ‘real’. When I first read the dry text about two years ago, I was not impressed. Having watched the film after hearing of the many accolades it has received, I was pleasantly surprised by the directorial and cinematographic vision that has transformed the jarring, often flaccid, text into a beautifully crafted visual treat that works perfectly as a cinematic experience. Juxtapositions and oppositions form the basis of Jha’s cinematic vision. Where the words are sometimes shocking for their erotic content and immature adolescent outbursts, the visual is extraordinarily smooth. Jha and Sharma seem to have mined a series of 20th century classics for visual archetypes and then inverted them, starting with Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The recurrent use of shots that touch upon images which have already filtered into our collective unconscious, is a popular surrealist strategy. Whether Love? Lust? Life? achieves this on purpose or by accident is anybody’s guess. The film succeeds in creating an almost ritualistic aura around it as it moves through seemingly impossible associations along an equally impossible narrative and yet manages to attain audience loyalty by the end. This probably happens because of the sharp contrast between the relentless onslaught of its jarring words and the dreamy, mesmerising quality of its visual narrative and background vocals.

Alize Biannic and Mahesh Tripathi, as well as the rest of the cast, have performed beautifully and in subservience to the camera’s supreme role. As already mentioned, Divya Dev wears the poet’s mantle well if lacking a little in enunciation.

The overall feeling of disorientation that the film generates says volumes about its capacity to plumb the depths of our unconscious while pulling at the edges of memory as it tries to establish connections between instinct and intellect. We need to see more by Jha to be able to judge whether he is on a consciously planned or coincidental route. And I look forward to that!