‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’: Arundhati Roy indie finally gets its due

Imagine you’re on the fringes of the Delhi arts scene in the late 1980s. A friend invites you to see a rare movie shoot in town. You head to the School of Planning and Architecture. The production is even smaller than you imagined. The director is married to the writer. The writer is the lead actor and production designer. Cast and crew joke around, smoke, flub their lines. You come away thinking it looks intriguing enough but not something that’d play in a cinema. Maybe on Doordarshan or straight to video.

This is what happened, sort of. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones didn’t release in cinemas. It played once on Doordarshan in 1989. Someone probably taped this, for it circulated for years on video cassette. Over time, something amazing happened. Pradip Krishen’s film never went away. Murky bootlegs burnished its cult status. The writer, Arundhati Roy, who based the film on her time in architecture school, won the Booker Prize. One of the bit players, Shah Rukh Khan, became Bollywood’s biggest star. All this meant there were enough curious viewers to keep the film around and discussed, which has culminated in a loving restoration by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) that’ll premiere at the 76th Berlinale (12-22 February).

Roy and Khan weren’t the only embryonic talents on the crew. Krishen became an environmentalist and went on to write the invaluable Trees of Delhi. Bobby Bedi produced Bandit Queen (which Roy tore apart in a review) and Maqbool. Raghubir Yadav, who has a one-scene role as “cheapskate cyclist”, became a great character actor (Manoj Bajpayee is also listed in the cast, though I can’t spot him). But none of them were well-known then—at least outside of Delhi—except for Roshan Seth, who plays department head Y.D. Billimoria, whom the students call “Yamdoot” (grim reaper).

No one is safe from Billimoria’s caustic put-downs (“My dear donkey”), but he reserves his worst for Annie (Arjun Raina), slacker supreme in a batch of slackers. Annie is an amiable wastrel, with the bemused air of a professional stoner, prone to sudden fanciful ideas (the titular “those ones”). The film begins with Annie and his batchmates days away from submitting and defending their fifth-year projects. Yet only a few seem fazed by the impending deadline, and almost no one seems to be taking architecture seriously as a career. This is a rare portrait of liberal arts college life in India, which rings true because it captures its aimlessness, a feeling of suspended time and deferred responsibility.

Billimoria has a more formidable opponent in Radha (Roy), a student who’s smart, self-possessed and just doesn’t like authority. For her final presentation, she turns up in a sari and a hat and proceeds to tell the jury that architects are gatekeepers and snobs. Radha could have been insufferable but is instead captivating—that combative classmate you had a terrified crush on in college. She shares an easy, physically affectionate chemistry with her boyfriend, Arjun (Rituraj), utterly rare for Indian cinema of that time. Roy’s unaffected line readings are so different from how a trained actor would have said them, which works perfectly in her scenes with Seth, whose modulated jabs seem to bounce off her (as Radha’s drawl infuriates Billimoria). Yet, while the students are as dismissive of Yamdoot as he is of them, Krishen leaves just enough room for Seth to subtly suggest that Billimoria is a kindly, if crabby, man trying to save these hippy layabouts from themselves.

Krishen’s first film, Massey Sahib, which starred Raghubir Yadav and also featured Roy, was recognisably in the parallel cinema tradition. But In Which Annie Gave It Those Ones had nothing in common with the earnest NFDC crowd. Instead, its freewheeling attitude and loose structuring placed it in conversation with contemporary indie films in the west. Around the same time Krishen was making his film, Bruce Robinson was developing Withnail & I, another low-budget slacker story, in England. And over in America, Richard Linklater was experimenting with a new kind of lackadaisical indie, first Slacker and then Dazed & Confused (Annie borrows from the latter’s spiritual predecessor, George Lucas’ American Graffiti, by including an epilogue with the main characters’ fates).

It’s always tricky to restore no-budget films in a way that accurately represents their humble origins. FHF’s 4K restoration, from a 16mm original camera negative and sound negative and a 35mm release print, is perfectly judged, removing the murk and hiss but ensuring the film retains its warm, grimy immediacy. With better sound and image, it’s possible to better appreciate the film’s handmade qualities: Roy’s pinpoint production design, the 1970s fashions, little splashes of art and creativity (including a memorable parting shot on Annie’s bald head), the inspired idea to score the film with instrumental version of Beatles songs.

Even as it’s made special by her presence, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones shows that Arundhati Roy would not be contained by indie film, or cinema in general. This isn’t to say she’s distracted or ill at ease, just that she already seems to be looking beyond. Radha’s battles with the professors anticipate the vivid polemics Roy would soon become famous for. Fascinating as these glimpses of a future Roy are, my favourite scene is non-verbal and non-confrontational. Radha and Arjun are in his one-room flat. It’s a summer afternoon. A cover of ‘Blackbird’ plays on the soundtrack. Arjun offers to make them coffee. Radha retrieves pens and cigarettes from her shirt, then stretches out on a mattress and watches Arjun over the stove. By the time he’s brought the coffee over, she’s asleep. These two minutes perfectly distil the lazy, lived-in rhythms of Krishen and Roy’s film, the little indie that refused to fade away.