A Taste of Love

Assamese film-maker Bhaskar Hazarika talks to us about his film Aamis and why a love story turning to darkness is a world apart from a dark story turning to love

- Praveena Shivram

In Bhaskar Hazarika’s world, words are like the women of Shaheenbagh, relentlessly and fearlessly protesting against all that is being propounded as the norm, as something that is ‘good’ and ‘required’. Here, and by that I mean Hazarika’s world, the cinemascope version of his stories are fine examples of what the shape of possibility could be when boundaries are redrawn, when the centre shifts, when the rules no longer apply. Here, and now I mean in both spaces, words ring true because they fill the impossible void of silence, and stir the stagnant muddy waters of repressed thought. Here, ideas shine through because they reiterate the qualities of love, equality and hope.

I watched Hazarika’s Aamis (Assamese for ‘Meat’; 2019) as part of – a dynamic eight-year-old film club in Madras – early this year and the film left me deliciously uncomfortable. The film, on one level, is about a younger man falling in love with an older woman – a regular cinematic romance trope, if you must; but on another level, it explores the idea of sensuality, physicality and intimacy and the volatile textures of desire. It is unafraid of this journey, and unafraid to tread the dark realm of the senses. ‘I do deliberately seek the unusual. There is so much competition that I have to think of something different, a different way of saying and seeing things,’ he says when we speak over the phone. Our conversation is split up over two days, over scratchy Internet connectivity, over an actors’ workshop in Guwahati for the next film he is producing, and over unexpected visits to the hospital to meet an ailing relative.

In a promotional video for the film, Anurag Kashyap, Bollywood’s darling and misfit, who also officially presented