“I don’t understand a thing,” says the young heroine of Kiss Wagon, “everyone feels so weird.” Audiences for this sense-scrambling Indian animated epic will know exactly how she feels. But the film’s highly original visual aesthetic is so dazzling that narrative incoherence is only a minor irritant, not a fatal flaw. Deploying 2D shadowplay silhouette characters over an ever-changing, multi-layered collage backdrop, Murali blends digital graphics and hand-drawn animation with live-action footage to create a marathon musical sci-fi fantasy thriller of great imagination and hallucinatory beauty.
More impressively, Murali and his creative partner Greeshma Ramachandran appear to have painstakingly created this entire three-hour epic in their home studio during Covid lockdown as a DIY project, sharing most of the key technical roles and character voices between them. A world premiere at Rotterdam Film Festival, where it has just won the Special Jury Award and the FIPRESCI prize, Kiss Wagon is a monumental labour of love that demands patience and indulgence. Loopy and repetitive, the storytelling elements could comfortably have been much shorter and sharper. Even so, this is a ravishing exercise in style and technique which should appeal to connoisseurs of cutting-edge animation and Indian art-house cinema.
The full plot of Kiss Wagon is too dense, diffuse and frankly nonsensical to summarise here. But a few basics: the setting is a mythical nation where a shadowy military-industrial-religious elite are using bogus spiritual faith to control the population, passing off natural phenomena like “space clouds” as grand divine interventions, and promoting the dutiful worship of a Jesus-like deity called Eebah at vast rave-style concert events. In an inspired use of visual metaphor, one key effect of this oppressive fake religion is to drain the universe of colour. Hence the vast majority of Murali’s film is shot in elegant monochrome, but bookended by vivid polychromatic sequences.
Meanwhile, a clandestine resistance movement to is fighting back against the regime in subtle ways, spreading dissent via underground film clubs, hacking the government’s computer systems, disarming their weapons of mass delusion. An unlikely player in this civil disobedience plot is Isla (voiced by Ramachandran), a young woman who runs her own parcel delivery business. Tasked with delivering a “kiss” to an important client, a crucial step in this shadow civil war, Isla suddenly finds herself out of her depth, co-opted as a rebel icon and targeted by armed government agents.
An orphan with a murky back story, Isla is apparently apolitical, asexual, and too focussed on her work to engage with deeper social issues. But close encounters with mysterious figures from her past lead her to shock revelations, including her connections to powerful government insiders, queer love stories, drugs, murder and more. As plans to stage a major religious celebration draw near, Isla’s kiss delivery business becomes part of a bold plot to disrupt the ceremony and expose the sham.
Also in this maximalist tangle of subplots are UFOs, abusive priests, a monstrously ugly child hidden from society, a divine musical symphony with brainwashing powers, and meta references to a film-within-a-film version of Kiss Wagon. At one point Murali includes an arch disclaimer, fleetingly glimpsed on a cinema wall: “all characters and events you see are real, any similarity to an actual film or its characters preserved or lost is purely intentional.”
How much of this densely woven allegory will engage a general audience, and how much will remain part of Murali’s impenetrable private mythology, is open to question. The director clearly set our to critique religious indoctrination, which will arguably have more bite in an Indian context than in more secular countries, but he also proudly champions style over substance, technique over narrative, so his intentions with Kiss Wagon appear to be more aesthetic than intellectual.
Whatever his motives, on a purely visual level, Kiss Wagon is exquisitely composed and endlessly compelling, bombarding viewers with fast-moving Pop Art montages of high-resolution images that blossom and dissolve in seconds: stormclouds, oceans, hammers, bubbles, fireworks, vintage film projectors, electronic brain scans, scrolling computer code and more, often overlaid with artfully grungy textures, glitchy video crackle, rewind and fast-forward effects. Sound design is also a rich part of the mix while an eclectic musical score, co-written by Ramachandran and Murali, covers a broad spectrum from heavy metal to jazz, orchestral pieces to pop ballads. Plenty of high quality ingredients even if the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming across three hours, draining and exhilarating in equal measure.
Director, producer, editing, sound design: Midhun Murali
Screenwriters, music: Midhun Murali, Greeshma Ramachandran
Cast: Greeshma Ramachandran, Jicky Paul, Midhun Murali
Producer: Murali Damodharan
Production company: DMP (India)
World sales: Krishnendu Kalesh Presents (India)
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In Malayalam, English
176 minutes
