User Reviews

There is a little search for meaning lost in each one of us. It pops its head up once in a while and bothers us till we are more lost than we were before and abandon the pursuit. Just That Sort Of A Day explores this search for meaning through four independent characters and their thoughts through the course of a day. Each has a take on life unique in itself and universal at the same time. They grapple through randomness, and what comes out of it in the end, is the film maker's answer to the question of existence itself.

There's a perfect balance between abstract and obvious. Just That Sort Of A Day is as simple as it is complex. It is not a story and yet there is a story told which one takes home almost without knowing. The characters have no names or faces and yet you know them deeply and shall for a long time to come.

The film maker has put as much of himself as each one of us into making this film. And that's the beauty of it. What else is strikingly beautiful about the film is its form. Lucid and serene, the visuals gracefully meander their way to a realization. The music is akin and equally enchanting. The pace at which it rolls out, lets the film communicate directly with the mind. Un-hurdled by the senses.

It is difficult to compare the film with anything one might have ever seen before or lend it a genre. Just that sort of a day is just that sort of a film. It is like one of those rainy days where everything around you is laden with meaning, forcing you to let go, and think, all at once.

...just that sort of a day is a short film by someone called Abhay Kumar. The film has re-defined Indian cinema and has won many coveted awards in festivals like Rotterdam, Tribeca, NYIIF etc. The film is a hybrid short film which tries to decipher between randomness and meaning; through four random characters whose thoughts are visually captured through the course of a day.

All the four characters in the film form images which in themselves don't mean anything. The film doesn't exist in parts; the film exists as a coherent whole.

The aesthetic grounds of the film is akin to Jean Paul Sartre's phenomenological essay 'Being and nothingness'. The characters in the film give detailed description of their conscious experience without having to contort with metaphysical explanations. They form possibilities only to annul them in the realm of oblivion. The images exist as they are. No lyrical digressions, no symbolism, no allusions to other literary art forms; they stand for themselves with profound verisimilitude. It is a brilliant examination of ontological time.

The film is made in a shoestring budget with limited or absolutely no resources. The camera quality is poor as it is shot on an ordinary handy cam. The film is narrated by a voice-over of a lady. To offset the poor image quality, Abhay used a very robust sound space to distract the audience from complaining about the poor camera quality. This was an intelligent ploy to hide production weaknesses. But to my mind art can never be intelligent. The moment an artist tries to maneuver with his audience, he loses the spiritual connect with his craft. The end result becomes representational. In JTSD, the sound space is so loud that it pierces your ears like the edge of an echo.

The narrative that runs through the film is extremely thin – the contours get blurred as if the film exists outside its own boundaries. If I were to compare JTSAD with a comic strip narrative, for me the characters tend to exist more in the gutter than in the panel frame. Yet exactly there lies the irony of the film.

Like the depth of an ocean cannot have a consciousness, there can be no subtlety in war, and temptation cannot be lethargic; similarly JTSAD as a film cannot go beyond itself into signification.

I have seen Abhay's previous short films on YouTube. To my mind, it is imperative to understand the mind of the director if at all one wants to move a tad closer to understand his films. To understand JTSAD, it is necessary to peep inside Abhay's mind.

In my view, there are few aberrations in his craft which I find dilute his aesthetic sensibilities.

Abhay's films have a certain sly quality – these films pierce rather than solicit. He doesn't encourage the audience to participate. For instance, in JTSAD he picks up common threads of pain and inflictions of a flailing bourgeoisie and then tries to posit their deep-seated fears and outlandish desires as a rationalization for loss of self. A sign of a realist film maker who tries to underpin the objective truth of the characters / protagonists with cinematic sleight-of – hand (loud sound space, stick characters against real backdrop), thus rendering a mythic quality to the truth that they conceal.

Especially when the entire setup is trying to be realistic, he starts tempering with form which reduces his craft to mere representation. This masking of the realistic with deliberate cinematic sleight of hand makes the piece of art puerile at best, pagan at worst with no cinematic religion (Abhay calls this lack of cinematic religion as HYBRID). Abhay tries to draw inferences from the works of great film directors and then applies these multiplicities into a cogent mix of realist content and experimental form - a rather uncanny unification. With the sole ambition of creating something radical or path-breaking, yet attempting to create a secular code, there is only one problem- the overall composition becomes incomprehensible.

This departure from conventional mores is unintended and hence becomes arbitrary. The end result equates in trying to tell a lie by way of telling truths – an antithesis of an Aesopian fable. This mode of storytelling laden with the modernist allegory of 'experimenting with form' can at best be understood as precepts of film- making by an artist who is still trying to be there – the lofty pedestals from where the great guns fire.

The film tries to go beyond itself into signification. Art becomes dissociative when it tries to reconcile emotions that the artist doesn't feel. It evokes associations, when the artist successfully creates images that are reflections of his own inner realizations. For art never experiments, it never purports. Art is the imprint of a struggle between the artist and his need to create. An artist never seeks. He always finds. It's there within him. Science discovers. Science claims. But not art. Art is never logically deducted. The infallibility of science is threatened when a genius scientist is compared with a great artist, for an artist is; a scientist can be.

Yet Abhay struck gold with JTSD in that, the idea of putting animated characters against realistic backdrop is something never heard before. But then again, is the purpose of art to communicate ideas? I do not think so.

But no art is perfect. Art is not reality. It's a hieroglyphic of truth and not the truth itself. JTSAD is not a theorem that needs to be proved. It is as incoherent as a prime number, never having to conform to a fixed set of rules. It has its own rules and cinematic codes. Despite its few flaws, JTSAD remains as one of the finest attempts to create a new language in cinema.

The film deeply blends itself into a poignant, yet an amazingly ecstatic scenario. What basically amazes me is the demeanour of the characters. The way it progresses along, shrouding into enigma and inscrutability whilst holding its deep convolution, it's simply beyond comparison.The film renders you able to rethink a lot of your deeds, and well that's how it is , cool and cracking.The extraordinarily bewitching style of music is what appeases me the most. It entirely pacifies our greed of listening to soothing music. The visuals leave you speechless as they jeopardize your preimage of awesomeness and takes it to a completely new level.