15 MINUTES - Abhishek Juneja

This one is about those last 15 minutes of alienation that one can possibly feel inside a cinema hall, when you know that the film has reached its climax and something must happen, either to bring a culmination to the proceedings, or to salvage all that had been happening over the past 90 odd minutes. If this were a regular British film surrounding matters such as lineage, ancestry and tradition, you would expect a letter to be found, or opened, or saved till the end to draw the curtains on the suspense. You'd be surprised if it were something different, but you wouldn't mind. Au contraire, you are waiting to be surprised.

If it were the regular American techno-drama, you'd expect lavishly laid-out buildings, all set to be annihilated by fire caused by a series of helicopters hell-bent on an apocalyptic ending. The actor and the actress look at each in a manner so disapproving and yet romantic, you are seized by the feeling they would never meet again. If it were one of the cult French films, where the magnum though visible throughout the film, and sparingly used, is now put away. But as the actors make passionate love, a gunshot is heard, the Seine is captured through a lily-tinted lens this time. As Paris broods, the misen- scene is engulfed with a sense of melancholy.

If it were an Indian film, you would be desperately hoping the cliché is spared. Hope takes a U-turn every few seconds and in the end you are left in a strong faculty of dissatisfaction and contempt. And then there are times when you do not have these 15 minutes of alienation to yourself. The film is demanding, it has you engrossed till the credits begin to roll out. This generally happens in the case of a climax with a high emotion-quotient, where you may not conform to all that you are being treated to, yet there is no time to think to yourself that this could be yet another mirage of ineptness.

On the contrast, there are times when during the last 15 minutes you are so detached, your mind wanders in every direction. You look at people, to see how they would react to that particular ending, now that you have already predicted it. Or at the ceilings, the roof, the edges of the screen, the dust on the aisle. Or think of the wretched life outside the theatre, where nothing else matters. However the hell the movie may end here, life is going to remain the same. You do not wish to return and this sends down a flurry of nausea down your nervous system.

But I like my 15 minutes of alienation towards the end, when I think to myself, whatever they show in the next 15 minutes, however the hell they this may end, this one is going down as a masterpiece. I prefer to not
become a slave to the events. Art must give you a moment to pause, recollect yourself, or to lose yourself in a dream where the film becomes as much as an outsider as the real world. And after the show is over, you're slightly embarrassed, and as the fluorescent lamp over the exit door lights up, you wish to appear composed, or to just disappear from the scene, not having to look into the eye of the onlooker, who is waiting to read up in your eye, your reactions on the film. So while you hide your emotion, your pupils dilate, and with them, your thoughts and emotions, invisibly.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that he could see the film frame by frame even before he had started to shoot it. I wonder how incredibly boring the process would become to him from that moment onward. Cinema inspires, it is uplifting, it can alter your state of mind alarmingly, but in the end, one is condemned to return to the lowly, mortal existences we have designed for ourselves back in the places we call home. Art may reflect life, but life surely has its issues over returning favors, forget paying back in kind.