Kani, so not from a cookie-cutter

Kani Kusruti in stills from All We Imagine As Light

Somewhere mid-way through Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls (2024; Prime Video), I wasn't sure what to make of the movie.

In the sense that there's a daughter (Preeti Panigrahi), in high school, and her mom (Kani Kusruti). Between them is the daughter's classmate/boyfriend (Kesav Binoy Kiran).

At a curious moment, the mother, Anila, asks the boy to share bed with her, over his night of a stay-over. The daughter seems more pissed than perplexed.

Over a sequence that reminded me, in another context, of the unexpectedly raunchy dance, in Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mamá También (2001) - the mother, daughter, boyfriend start jiving in the living room.

This is the scene, that Kani recalls to me, she had auditioned for the picture. What happens next?

Girls Will Be Girls

Sorry, I wanna know - did mom and boy have sex, ever? "No! She wouldn't. It's just the attention/validation that Anila is seeking," Kani clarifies. And she's certain that her interpretation matches the writer-director's.

Besides loneliness and desire, Girls Will Be Girls is remarkably a film about both mother and daughter coming of age. The lens is so strongly feminine that I had to get a female friend to watch and narrate its impact - to check whether that changes, depending on gender.

Yes, movies have primordially been a heteronormative male medium. My first instinct is to imagine the mid-aged, married Anila emerging as a Mrs Robinson kinda figure from The Graduate (1967), seducing the befuddled, besotted boy.

What you see instead are Kani's eyes that confuse you more than they reveal mild seduction, let alone lust. Also, those eyes! "Resting eyes are just that - they can be an advantage and disadvantage," Kani laughs.

She finds her face "nihilistic," and has since she was 10. In a way that the "sulking face" exudes there is "no meaning to life; it's melancholic," she self-assesses.

I think you could look through those eyes, and her face, naturally merging with a crowd. And yet, they feel luminescent, when lit up, of course.

Which, in my opinion, was indelibly the striking movie/poster image of 2024: Kani in Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) - in a blue saree for Nurse Prabha's uniform, leaning on the pole of a train compartment, in Mumbai; the city itself framed in the colour of the monsoon-tarpaulin blue.

This was captured, by accident, of course, during the filming of stock-sequences of the two nurses, Prabha and Anu (Divya Prabha), ferrying back and forth from work, on the Mumbai local, around 5.30 am. Kani had no idea it would make for such a defining shot.

A general perception might be that AWIAL - that won Grand Prix, post its premiere in Cannes; and far too many global nominations/awards since - is a breakout film for Malayalam actor Kani, who now calls Goa her home.

In terms of instant acclaim, that's likely to be Sajin Baabu's Biriyaani (2020), which won her Best Actress, Kerala State Film Award that, in Malayalam cinema, is deemed at par, if not higher than National Awards.

Dark, disturbing Biriyaani begins and ends with the deadest sex scene on screen, with Kani's perennially quiet character, in bed with her husband, sucking the love out of lovemaking.

Kani reveals she actually finds such silent sequences much easier to pull off. As with those surreal moments in AWIAL, where Nurse Prabha seemingly makes love to a rice-cooker her husband gifts from Germany.

She performed a "two-minute piece for the scene, letting Payal [the director] choose the interpretative action from it." She says, "It's actually delivering dialogues, in the right way, that is the most underrated about an actor's job."

By training, Kani is a stage-actor, having formally learnt a particular form, namely, Jacques Lecoq's school of physical theatre, from Paris.

It's pure happenstance, or dumb luck, as she puts it, that so much of the work on screen she auditioned for, and landed, got bunched together, and released in 2024 - two Netflix shows Poacher, Killer Soup, also Maharani (2021, '24, on Sony LIV). Besides, of course, AWIAL, and Girls Will Be Girls. The latter won big at 2024 Sundance.

Having seen so much of her, in such quick succession, knowing so little about the actual person, behind those varied characters - thought it made sense to call up Kani, and just say (a longish) hi!

Somehow, in conversation, Kani reminds me of Tabu - who equally makes light of her heavy roles; attributing it to how film, after all, is the auteur/director's medium.

She viscerally engages you with charming banter, instead: quick with the giggle, hardly making an event of herself, keeping that mystique alive.

Like Tabu, she would've preferred to go with a mononym, Kani, as her name for screen, or life, in general. Because that's what the parents named her.

She says, "My father is an extreme rationalist; my mother, an agnostic. They never married. They've always been in a live-in relationship, which was radical for its time. They didn't give me a surname. I got stuck with K.

At around 15-17, applying for passport, I had to explain/expand K. They suggested Kundamandi, that's a trouble-maker, or Kalli, a liar!"

Kani picked Kusruti for her last name. It means mischievous in Malayalam.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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