During his days as a struggling actor, Nawazuddin Siddiqui used to frequent an office where he had become good friends with the receptionist. Whenever the boss went into his cabin for meetings, the receptionist would correctly guess whether the boss will entertain that person for two, 10, or 15 minutes. When Siddiqui asked him how he knew so much, he responded that he knew everything about the boss and his preferences, looked after all the details, and was aware that the boss was entirely dependent on him.
“Ayyan Mani is like that,” he says about his recent role in Sudhir Mishra’s Serious Men. “It’s the point of view of the locals of Mumbai. Whenever they do a job, they make their boss fully dependent on them. And from here and there they do jugaad and even get their own work done (sic),” he adds. “So the film is like that, the character is that, the focus is also that.”
Mani, the protagonist of the film, is a Dalit Tamilian living in Mumbai, working at a research institute as the personal assistant of Acharya, a Brahmin boss. While the film is set firmly against the backdrop of caste politics, the film is primarily a father-son story.
Aakshath Das and Shweta Basu Prasad. All photos are screenshots from YouTube.
Focusing on the individual and being a character-driven director is Sudhir Mishra’s inherent attitude as a storyteller. “The [social] issue [with any story] is the backdrop. Everything emerges from that backdrop. The characters emerge from somewhere, and become real people. If you know how to listen, they try to keep telling you what to do with them, where to take them. And then they tell you more about the issue,” says Mishra. With Serious Men, the process was more complicated since for the first time, Mishra has worked on a film that’s adapted from a novel — author and journalist Manu Joseph’s 2010 novel of the same name. Already having a source instead of working with an original script meant that “some things are predetermined” and even as the novel transformed considerably, Mishra kept the novel close at hand “to keep in touch with Manu [Joseph]’s head.”
But when Joseph saw how his novel was being carved and moulded into a script fit for screen, he realised that “there’s no point in trying to impose the novel on people who are very good at their jobs.” And although he was kept in the loop about their decisions, he assumed the role primarily of “a privileged observer.” The one thing Joseph had focused on above all when writing his novel was anger. “I realised that that is not a bad way to start a story, from sentiment,” says Joseph. “I myself had lived in a chawl and we were a middle-class family. And then I was right in the middle of posh people who were talking nonsense, who didn’t know anything. The kind of people who think Bombay is cosmopolitan. The migrant is not cosmopolitan. They talked about a different dimension of Bombay I didn’t understand. So I had this anger. I understood the anger. And that anger is actually Ayyan Mani,” he adds about his protagonist.
And with the Mani that Mishra and Siddiqui together created on screen for Serious Men, the anger, frustration, love, kindness, street smarts, and local Bombay flavour, all variously make themselves apparent in him.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui
While Mani is the protagonist and the story is told from his point of view, it’s his relationship with his son Adi that defines the film, making the child actor equally important. “This kid was special,” says Mishra about Aakshath Das. “He wanted to be in every shot. He’d get really bored when you’re not shooting with him. Even when you speak with him like a professional actor before the shoot, it somehow instinctively gets to him. It’s very interesting.” Working so closely with children has been an interesting experience for Mishra. “They teach you so much about direction. About how much to say and not to say, [knowing when] to leave the actor on his own at times, to follow his instinct at times.” While it’s fascinating for Mishra to direct a kid, he adds that “the best actors are also like kids. The actor is very finely honed in his craft but he always leaves something to the moment. There’s a childlike quality in every great actor. In a sense s/he enjoys make-believe. So Nawaz and the kid are the same.”
Aakshath Das
Several delicate scenes with the children, focus strikingly on how on the one hand, education is the way to get ahead in life and on the other hand, highlights the hierarchies inherent in the Indian education system. “In my village, I was studying because everyone else was, there was no specific ambition. Slowly I realised that it’ll help me find a job. I’m the first graduate in my area, my family,” says Siddiqui about his personal experience. But now that he’s a parent himself, he realises that for his children, education isn’t something he can take lightly. “You have to give them the best education. ‘Best’ is the one with the highest fees, the school which looks the best, [even though] we don’t know anything about the quality of education there.” This contradictory, often-superficial nature of education is something that even Joseph has observed. “I find education very interesting because it’s a combination of so many things,” says Joseph. “It’s evil. It’s the elites setting the rules so that others are forced to follow and be subordinate to them. At the same time, we have no choice. We know knowledge is good. We want the best for our children and at the same time we don’t want to torture them… I feel that everybody with a child is vulnerable, because we don’t know what to do. This is where things are right now, there’s no solution,” he adds.
Indira Tiwari
Mishra further adds, “I think for me making pieces of work is like a psychoanalytic session. I make films because there is nothing else I can do. That’s what I am. But I enjoy the process, I like it. I like being on set, working with actors, this interaction with human beings. And then creating something. If I had not done this, I would have gone mad.” While working closely with other creatives, Mishra’s process also involves a respectful collaboration with his fictional characters. “They become alive in your head. They’re all so connected with people and they remind you of some people you know, they remind you of some aspects of yourself. The best stories, the Persians said, were those that combined what you’ve seen and read and heard with what has happened to you.”
Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Along these lines, Mani — who contains Joseph’s anger, and to Siddiqui, represents the quintessential Bombay local — is for Mishra both a reflection of his self and an inspiration that he can learn from. “The effort of Ayyan Mani’s journey!” stresses Mishra about what he took away from Serious Men as a viewer. “This dynamic character who shakes off the knee on his neck, and deals with life on his own terms and has such an alive interaction with it, is somebody who teaches you.”
Watch the trailer below:
Serious Men will stream on Netflix from 2 October.
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