Prithvi Konanur’s Hadinelentu (English title: Seventeeners) is hardly meant to be a ‘funny’ film, but I’d like to enter the film through a sporadic moment of humour. Life, after all, can be absurdly comical, especially when viewed from a distance. Hari (Neeraj Matthew) and Deepa (Sherlyn Bhosale) are sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office at their junior college. A teacher, barking at students to go inside their class, comes across these two. “You two… sit apart,” he orders. It’s funny because the teacher is clearly unaware why Hari and Deepa are seated there.Students of the 12th grade, Hari and Deepa had let their raging passions take over, and filmed themselves having sex in an empty classroom of the college. The video surfaced on porn websites and was widely circulated. The principal is speaking to their parents, mulling over whether to expel them. Maybe, it’s a bit late to tell them to sit apart. Maybe, such moral policing and a widespread culture of sexual repression is what caused the youngsters to ‘transgress’ like this.Co-written by Konanur and Anupama Hegde (a lawyer by profession) – Hadinelentu: a composite word made from Hadinelu (‘17’ in Kannada) and Hadinentu (‘18’ in Kannada), tells the story of two teenagers on the cusp of teenage and adulthood, ‘caught in a compromised circumstance’. What appears to be a coming-of-age tale for the film’s two protagonists through a hellish year, reveals itself soon enough.As soon as the parents of the two teenagers reach the principal’s office, Hari’s parents – a middle-class couple – even though devastated by their son’s actions, face it with pragmatism. On the other hand, Deepa’s mother is a cook at the local government school, and has two elder sisters, both of whom are married. Deepa is the first from the family to have studied till the 12th grade. We begin to sense how the consequences for the same actions will turn out to be very different for Hari and Deepa. And a lot of that has to do with where they hail from in society.Konanur’s is a rare film that borrows generously from life, where the craft is nearly invisible – the performances feel naturalistic. Whether it’s the principal Badri (Ravi Hebballi) or vice principal Seetha (Rekha Kudligi), Hari’s parents or Deepa’s mother – none of it feels like “acting”. The courtroom scenes are shockingly straightforward, the dialogue embedded in a deluge of legalese, putting the audience in the same state of confusion as the characters, not able to decipher which way the judge might be leaning. Konanur keeps things tense, and yet never makes the mistake of drawing attention to himself with unnecessary flourishes.As the committee formed by the principal comes to a decision about the fate of the students, two things emerge. The committee appears to be biased against Deepa, given how she’s earlier been found to be guilty of misdemeanours. They’re willing to be kinder to Hari – who, we’re told, is good in academics and might hold the promise of a career abroad.When the sports coach Abdul (Lakshmi Narayana) asks the committee about Deepa’s caste, is when things start to unravel. Abdul contends that if he’s the only member of the committee belonging to a reserved category, then the optics of the decision to expel only Deepa could invite questions.One of the best things about Konanur’s film is how it doles out empathy for everyone. No one’s a single-characteristic ‘villain’, ‘hero’, ‘lover’, ‘teenager’, etc. Everyone has complexities, and strives to do what they consider is the ‘right’ thing. Informed by their own moral values, they take certain decisions, and somehow circumstances spiral out of control. Many critics and reviews have rightly drawn parallels between Konanur’s work [he also directed this year’s Pinki Elli? (Where is Pinki?)] and Asghar Farhadi’s films – where mundane details turn out to be the most emphatic reveals for the film. It’s a version of a domestic noir, where ordinary people, their conditioning, unreliable memory and moral uprightness become the ingredients for a thriller.For a spectacularly rooted cast, it’s only Jesse (Bhavani Prakash) who appears to be marginally larger-than-life. A pro-bono lawyer in touch with Deepa’s family, she bursts into the narrative as someone with a saviour complex. However, the film also cuts her down to size; her activism turning a college scandal into something murkier than anyone could have probably anticipated.In Hadinelentu, one can feel Konanur’s anger about society’s many injustices, but he never lets rage get the better of him. In one scene, Deepa’s mother is desperately pleading with Hari’s mother to ensure that her daughter does not land in more trouble. She offers to clean their house every day for the rest of her life. It’s a startling moment that lays bare the tragedy of a country like India: where a class of citizens willingly submits themselves to slavery, for survival.
