Kiss movie review: Varun Grover's ambitious directorial debut combats authoritarianism with empathy
Comedian-writer-lyricist Varun Grover's directorial debut, Kiss, contains multitudes. The ideas that it is preoccupied by can be upsetting, even terrifying. But, made by someone who has clearly benefited from therapy, the movie is able to comprehend, contest, and communicate these preoccupations with a necessary calm. Kiss was finally released for public viewing on MUBI recently, a full three years after its festival run first began. It isn't at all like Grover's feature-length debut All India Rank, although both projects are marked by a decency that seems altogether absent from our culture these days.
Fascinated by the idea of cinema as a therapeutic medium, the 15-minute short stars Adarsh Gourav as Sam, a young filmmaker who finds himself in a rather awkward ideological stand-off with a couple of men after the dreaded 'censor board' screening of his latest movie. The two men are played by Swanand Kirkire and Ashwath Bhatt; they're meant to represent this unnamed censor board, but they may as well be the moral police that sends filmmakers to prison in Iran, the settlers who drive people out of their homes in Palestine, or the Romeo squads that torment young lovers in India. Kiss could be set in the distant future, for all we know. There is a certain dystopian quality to the movie.
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Sam waits patiently for the screening to end, confident that his film will emerge unscathed from the censors' unnecessarily violent cuts. The men tumble out of the ravishing art deco auditorium. Something is wrong, Sam can tell. He asks them how it went, and they tell him. The two men simply cannot fathom why Sam would make all their lives difficult by including an extended same-sex kiss in his film; they're so outraged at the idea of sexuality that they haven't even begun to wrap their heads around the fact that the kiss takes place between two versions of the same character.
It's like a lazy cop rolling their eyes in frustration at a petty theft complaint. So much paperwork; why can't people keep an eye on the till? They're openly disdainful of Sam and his artistic vision, although they don't quite have the vocabulary to verbalise their complaints. Were a gun to be put to their heads, they would probably struggle to explain why exactly they're so offended. Are they troubled by the simple act of sensuality, or are they more annoyed by the prospect of performing overtime just because little old Sam wanted a kiss in his movie?
Conditioned to view art through the lens of someone who sits at a 'galla', the two men demand that Sam present the timecodes for the kissing scene. He tells them that it lasts 28 seconds, which strikes them as odd. They could've sworn that it went on for longer. Sam suggests that they watch the scene again, with their timers on, only to make a more informed decision on how to approach cutting it. The three men trudge back into the old-timey theatre, and watch the scene again. A work of art has been reduced to CCTV footage.
Grover's camera doesn't get distracted by what's happening on the screen; he trains his focus on the faces of the three men. Each of them gets a different reading on their watch; the same scene lasts under a minute for Sam, over two minutes for one of the men, and over three for his colleague. Time, it seems, is relative. 'No good movie is too long and no bad movie short enough,' said the great critic Roger Ebert once. One wonders what he'd have made of Kiss.
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The movie doesn't limit itself to this one idea, though. Having established the premise, it goes for a grand payoff. Grover is, after all, a comedian; not to mention the writer of perhaps the single greatest Hindi film of the last decade. He understands structure better than most. Kiss is able lure us into its world with a clearly enunciated simplicity, before pushing the envelope ever so gently. Having trained the audience to expect the unusual, it takes the potentially divisive risk of swinging hard as it enters its third act. In the climactic five minutes, Kiss turns into what can only be described as a Nolan-esque reimagining of Ratatouille.
Both Sam and Grover are addressing their traumas the only way they know how: through their art. They have a right to be disheartened by the world they inhabit. But neither Grover nor his alter ego resorts to retribution. It would've been easy for him to vilify the two men. He's in control; one turn of the dial here, one pull of the lever there. And et voila, he'd have a couple of two-dimensional villains. Certainly, most people seem to appreciate thinly written characters these days. But he approaches the story with a Javed Akhtar-level sympathy for the devil. Along with Rohin Raveendran's The Booth, Shazia Iqbal's Bebaak, and Faraz Ali's Obur, Kiss is an urgent reminder of the paranoia that contemporary India has been cloaked under.
Kiss
Director – Varun Grover
Cast – Adarsh Gourav, Swanand Kirkire, Ashwath Bhatt
Rating – 4.5/5
Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police.
You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at rohan.naahar@indianexpress.com. He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More
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