Nearly eight years after Tumbbad, Rahi Anil Barve is back with a film that may not be as outstanding as his first film, but it is no less original. Top-lined by Jaaved Jaffery, Mayasabha possesses tremendous visual vigour and a distinctive narrative pace and rhythm.
It draws much its power from its uncompromising spirit and crackling energy, enhanced significantly by the actors and the unpredictability of the flow of the tale. It is campy. It is artful. It is pure cinematic insouciance.
Barve's second film has made its way to the multiplexes after a long, agonising struggle. The release ends a sequence of false starts, stalled projects, aborted plans and under-acknowledged credit for Tumbbad, which heralded the director's advent as an exceptional storyteller.
In Mayasabha, like he did in Tumbbad, Barve tackles the themes of greed, deception, paranoia and enfeebling human foibles and failings in his signature idiosyncratic style that is equal parts perplexing and fascinating, disorienting and hypnotic.
The film goes increasingly off-the-wall as the tale unfolds around a quartet of characters engaged in mind games that assume tangible forms, alternating between mental manipulation and physical violence, between aggressive assertion and meek submission.
Both tactile and kinetic, Mayasabha is an intriguing roll of the dice that yields haunting, if not delicate, results. It adopts surprising methods to narrate the tale of a seriously flawed man who has much to brush under the carpet.
The film plays out over one day in a single location - a ramshackle movie theatre resembling a subterranean realm where tension, deception and lies reign supreme - and involves only four characters who are given to excesses and entanglements that throw them all into a befuddling tailspin.
The once-thriving theatre has fallen through the cracks of time. It now exists suspended in a hazy void where illusion and hyper-reality flow into each other, obviating easy comprehension.
Jaaved Jaffery - it is as clear as daylight, when nothing else in the film is, that he is acutely aware that this is material where half measures will not do - plunges headlong into his role and does not hold back.
Jaffery plays eccentric movie producer Parmeshwar Khanna, whose halcyon days are long gone. He lives in a tragic bubble of power and control in his dim and dank lair, a space inhabited only by him and his son, Vasushen (Mohammad Samad), a boy he loves to hate.
Parmeshwar, a renunciate whose ways are as mysterious as the theatre that is his home, has reason to detest Vasu, who, as a defence mechanism, has created his own little 'cosmos' in a corner of the forgotten picture house.
The boy, a cherubic presence completely out of place in this chamber of despair, lives in perpetual terror. He dons a helmet when his father raves and rants, which is a frequent occurrence.
The rundown theatre, apart from being a metaphor for the sorry state of Parmeshwar's heart, mind and life, has 40 kilograms of gold hidden somewhere in its innards. The treasure trove is a pointer to the man's choppy past - a twisted story of love lost, relationships sullied and ambitions thwarted.
The fact that there is far more to Parmeshwar's deeds - the film opens with a sequence in which he sprays DDT whipping up a cloud of billowy smoke that courses through the interiors of the theatre - than meets the eye come to light soon enough.
Every nook and cranny of the theatre that gives the film its title reeks of the past but Barve's deft screenplay employs no flashbacks to peel back the layers that, like the heavy patina of dust that has settled on things here over the years, clings to everything.
Nothing in Parmeshwar's den is what it seems. Everything is behind a fog of confusion. The man is desperate to shield his secrets from the world.
But his closely-guarded den faces a real danger when his son - he, too, has his reasons to try and rock the boat violently - invites a pair of siblings, Zeenat (Veena Jamkar) and Ravrana (Deepak) Damle), over for a 'party' at the theatre that nobody has ever visited for years.
In this freakish domain gripped as much by melancholy as menace, a giant fumigating device that sprays DDT (perhaps to dispel the stench of death and despair that hangs over the place) and an unusable commode covered with plants are only two of numerous oddities.
The props that constitute the world that Barve and his production designers (Surendra Prajapati and Preetam Rai) conjure up do much more than just constituting the film's backdrop.
The sharply etched supporting characters retain their enigma all through and the actors miss no opportunity to deepen the riddles that are strewn across the film.
Mayasabha is nothing like anything that Hindi movie audiences have seen before. This outre allegory employs wild and weird means to reveal dimensions of four individuals whose impulses and actions rarely conform to established norms of human behaviour.
The methods that the film employs are never merely for effect - they adroitly augment the impact of a plot that is frequently beyond bonkers.
The darkness of the universe that Parmeshwar Khanna inhabits is captured with all its stark shadows and rough and muted shades by cinematographers Kuldeep Mamania and Nuthan Nagaraj (both of whom worked with Pankaj Kumar on Tumbbad and Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider).
Sagar Desai's background score shores up the crescendos and decrescendos with measured and effective musical interventions.
If you care for cinema that does not look to guide audiences into their comfort zones and does not shy away from risks, Mayasabha is the film that you must vote for with your feet. Help it go the distance.
Mayasabha is a miasmic movie experience that takes its time to reveal its hand fully. Once it does, it sucks you in. And it lingers long after it has run its course.