The Wooden Cage

DIRECTOR’S INTENTION for 'THE WOODEN CAGE'

A couple and a dreamy hill station, a perfect recipe for a romantic drama but instead we set out for a journey where the duo takes a dip into their souls to detangle their notions of love, cohabitation and co-dependency creating an unearthly revelation. As stated by Albert Camus, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” – Many a times we hover around an important issue and build stories around it to avoid a direct confrontation. Raunaq devices a ploy of casting Gargi in a stage play to engage with her creatively, hoping to address his feeling of paralysis in the relation. ‘Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.’ - The film shows how truth can be hurtful and at times violating, completely altering one’s noble intentions and brings forth a different mindscape. Small totems like an unending bottle of wine constantly consumed by Gargi, a bruise inside Raunaq’s mouth and the mysterious forest along with the advent of a tea garden worker, Rukh play important roles in representing their eternal crisis. Believing in destiny and a deterministic approach where every event has a reason behind it, people intend to conjure theories behind an occurring. I intend to show that the magic-realism built by the characters to suffice for their versions of the rationale behind their experiences as an attempt to disapprove the unpredictability of life, falls short. Acknowledging absurdity and coming to terms with it seems to be the only mindful way to live. I intend to explore existentialism through the perspective of a contemporary Bengali middle class mentality which uses the stage play as an alternative space where this couple, without failing, communicates their views of each other.
The film intends to dissect the couple both as a collective and as individuals, their behaviours, aspirations and insecurities through the words they speak, the silences they decide to practise and the individual sufferings that they endure during the journey of this film. Here the forest of Ryshap acts as an enabler of crisis and chaos and slowly its role is slowly morphed with time through the events of Gargi getting lost in the jungle, the advent of the quirky character Rukh from the forest and the forest’s appearance in Raunaq’s nightmare. As the film draws to an end, their intentions in life go down the road of despair giving them realizations of who they were, are and what should they do to move forward in life. The film also sets up a usual trope of making both the character be painted with grey shades and breaks them apart through a dramatic climax before the film ends. The sudden stillness after that might invoke hope in viewers that things would turn all well eventually which is deliberately denied to the viewers through an anti-climactic ending to the story. It depends on the viewers to decide what the outcome of the film is and what happens to the couple and the individuals. Franz Kafka said ‘You are free and that is why you are lost’- I intend to unravel the couple’s progress from being stuck to the point of being lost as they become free of expectations from each other.