Brah­man Naman

We all remem­ber those awk­ward teenage years. That blur­ry haze of ado­les­cent expe­ri­ences – some­times excep­tion­al­ly hard to endure, oth­ers bet­ter left for­got­ten, but on a whole, com­pen­sat­ed by for­ma­tive events that evoke amuse­ment and enjoy­ment. The same could be said of Indi­an direc­tor Q’s Brah­man Naman. Set in Ban­ga­lore in the ​’80s, the film fol­lows a trio of sharp-wit­ted, sex­u­al­ly-frus­trat­ed Indi­an teenage boys, whose pri­ma­ry inter­ests con­cern exces­sive drink­ing, com­pet­ing in col­lege quiz chal­lenges and try­ing des­per­ate­ly (rather, fail­ing mis­er­ably) to lose their virginities.

“Odd­ly like­able” is the term allo­cat­ed to focal pro­tag­o­nist, Naman (Shashank Aro­ra), an odd­ly agree­able descrip­tion for a teenag­er who spends a pro­por­tion­ate amount of his time con­jur­ing new (and admit­ted­ly resource­ful) ways to relieve his alarm­ing­ly unre­lent­ing sense of sex­u­al frus­tra­tion. Whether it’s dry hump­ing the fridge or using a rotat­ing ceil­ing fan and rope to aid his mas­tur­ba­tion, Q cer­tain­ly suc­ceeds in cre­at­ing an ongo­ing bat­tle for view­ers with regards to decid­ing if Naman emits any endear­ing qual­i­ties at all, or is in fact just excru­ci­at­ing­ly uncom­fort­able to watch. Upon watch­ing, it would be safe to assume that most view­ers will grav­i­tate towards the latter.

Fol­low­ing scenes of the whiskey-drink­ing, cig­ar-smok­ing antics of the unre­pen­tant­ly horny trio and a sub­se­quent scene of Raman engag­ing in reli­gious fam­i­ly rit­u­als is a shot that illu­mi­nates the con­trast between the film’s crude nature and its com­pelling cin­e­matog­ra­phy. The shot com­pris­es a clothes­line of hang­ing under­wear posi­tioned before a scenic back­drop of Ban­ga­lore, itself a metaphor for the sub­tle under­min­ing of a cul­ture that the boys evi­dent­ly do not par­take in for any rea­son oth­er than that it is expect­ed of them.

Often shot at obscure­ly low angles, Bra­ham Naman not only spec­tates these teenagers as they ogle at vir­tu­al­ly every girl who cross­es their path, but also infers the boys’ wan­der­ing eyes. Cam­era angles from the leg up and the neck down rein­force this pre­vail­ing theme of infat­u­a­tion. It’s almost pre­dictable, then, that the film enters objec­ti­fi­ca­tion ter­ri­to­ry, as Naman phys­i­cal­ly uses a scarf to cov­er the face of the girl he is about to have sex with. Need­less to say – and much to the enter­tain­ment of view­ers – he is as unsuc­cess­ful in his endeav­ors here as he is through­out the film’s entire­ty. Looks like it’s back to the fridge for Naman.