Director: Abhishek Udaykumar
Writer: Abhishek Udaykumar & Felix Jackson
Cast: Felix Jackson, Shilpy, Anjali Hiregange, Ekta Singh, Santosh P, Umme Salma, Sri Ranjni T.S.
Running time: 1hr 23mins
A lot of what passes for ‘discourse’ on social media in the last decade has focused on the length of a film. It is disrespectful – no, arrogant – for filmmakers to expect people to go through a three-hour story in one sitting. Unless of course that film takes place amid an expanded universe of other features which you have to watch first if you want this one to make any sense. That’s just fine – because it comes with flashing lights, and big final battles where one CGI lump mashes into another until the day is saved. It’s not a debate I am particularly interested in – life’s too short – but it’s one I bring up, because I do not want to be perceived as an anti-Scorsese Marvel-ite when I say the following:
Abhishek Udaykumar’s existential feature film Cadmium Hollow is too long.
The film follows a nameless artist through his interactions with several other nameless characters, over an 83-minute run-time, which doesn’t sound like very long at all until you realise less than a quarter of that consists of actual conversation. The average scene sees The Artist (Felix Jackson) wander through an unspecified, dimly-lit locale, stands gazing at the wall, make himself a drink, sit down for a while, maybe type or draw a little, then get up and wander off to look at something else. The bulk of this adds nothing to Cadmium Hollow, besides plentiful filler to help meet its arbitrary target of a feature run-time.
Again, it is not that I don’t think there is a time and a place for long-form filmmaking. Steve McQueen’s remarkable historical drama Hunger torments its viewers with some of the slowest-burning visuals ever conceived. Among them are a seemingly endless stationary shot of a cleaner sweeping piss from the corridor of a cell block, 55 seconds of a swirling mural painted in protest with a man’s shit, and over a minute of an inmate fixating on a fly which has found its way into his room. It is not an easy watch – but nor should it be; as a film about both the nightmarish limbo of being a political prisoner in Maze Prison, and a man slowly starving himself to death as his only means of fighting back.
You come out of Hunger feeling like you just served a life-sentence, and then some – and that is filmmaking to be commended. When you exit Abhishek Udaykumar’s feature film – a semi-farcical character study of a middle-class poet struggling to get laid – with a similar feeling, however, that is much less apt.
What passes for a plot sees The Artist stroking his chin and trying to intellectualise his way into the pants of a woman literally credited as ‘Girl Who Is Leaving’ (henceforth referred to as Gwil). Gwil is physically portrayed by Shilpy while her voice has been dubbed by Anjali Hiregange – but ironically in spite of this, she is still one of the only characters with anything approaching an authentic voice. After another rambling burst of platitudes from the bumptious Artist suggests “you are living poetry”, Gwil bluntly rebuffs him with a glorious “shut the fuck up”.
As incredible as The Artist might find his own ability to play with words, Gwil can see through the pretentious prattling to understand that he is risking nothing with his ‘poetry’ – while trying to talk her into giving up something a lot more perilous. She swiftly cuts him down to size by stating “Oh, you just want to fuck me” – something which finally gets The Artist to open up and share something he is clearly much less confident in: his paintings. Only then is Gwil willing to continue with the conversation.
This kind of interplay means that when she is on screen, Gwil steals the show – and helps to engage us more deeply that any other time in the film. Because every time The Artist seems to address us, it is to go on some meandering soliloquy about how aimless or absurd life is, so there is little point trying to change it – all delivered from the comfort of his writer’s chair. We need someone to cut through his pompous, establishment nonsense more regularly – but Gwil only seems to be present for two scenes in his presence.
Another presence, who would have been very welcome throughout the film, is the sex worker, who The Artist also tries his luck with in the opening scene. When he asks “how much”, she responds with 3,000 Rupees-an-hour (about €33). “That’s a lot of money,” he counters, leaving the statement hanging as though blatantly fishing for a discount because he is just so remarkable. But the sex worker (again, nameless, and credited distastefully as ‘The Hooker’) simply delivers a majestic ‘take it or leave it’ that parodies the existentialist drivel The Artist spends the rest of the film peddling.
“Either you can take me home and have a ‘different reality’, or you can go home and wonder where I went and what I did. But one thing is for sure, when you come back, I won’t be here. You have two realities in front of you, which one do you choose to make disappear?”
Umme Salma is great in this brief role – and had her character returned to deliver further philosophical castrations like this throughout the film, it would have made spending any amount of time with The Artist more palatable. After all, he is an abject loser. A man who sees women as beneath him, and his word as all the irresistible payment they could ever need to make them want him – both leading to him belittling someone who seems to be a long-time friend (though more has to be done to establish that relationship in this script), and to barter with a sex worker.
Were Cadmium Hollow more overtly willing to eviscerate its lead in this way, it might actually be an interesting watch. Provided it were to overcome its two other major issues, anyway. First, when there is someone for The Artist to interact with, the film seems to have something against us knowing who they are. Jackson and Udaykumar’s script steadfastly refusing to give anyone a name, while the murky lighting and the distant, black and white lens of the camera bars any possible context clues that could help us know who is here. And then, of course, there are those long, long shots of nothing. And we’ll have plenty of time for that when the lights go out. Until then, life is too short.
There is something character-driven here which feels like it could work, if it were accentuated in place of the plentiful shots of nothing. However, the fact that so much prominence seems to have been given to some – at best – mediocre cinematography in place of anything more human (not to mention the offensive naming of one of their more relatable screen presences) also suggests those aspects might have been an accident. Abhishek Udaykumar and his team need to go back to the drawing-board with this one either way, and to have a serious think about what it is they want to say about life through their characters.