THE MONKEY ON HIS BACK

Prateek Vats’s debut fiction film shows that monkey business is hard work

Prateek Vats’s debut fiction feature, which has now won acclaim at the recently-concluded Pingyao festival and the Golden Gateway Award at the Mumbai film festival, begins with a group of young men practising a somewhat riveting chant ‘Eeb Allay Ooo’, also the film’s title. We are informed that ‘Eeb’ is langur, ‘Allay’ means man and ‘Ooo’ is monkey. This is what a group of men in Delhi, trying to repel monkeys, are heard saying. The terrific Shardul Bhardwaj plays a rookie repeller whose fear of monkeys makes him struggle at work. Eeb Allay Ooo!, however, is not just a fascinating Man Vs Wild episode that unfolds in Lutyens’ Delhi. It is also an exploration of the lives of people who barely survive on the capital’s fringes.

“The sanitised worldview of a city disturbs me,” says Vats, who was born and raised in Delhi. “Delhi is a migrant, working-class city. People in the mainstream fascinate me.” A direction graduate from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Vats first gained recognition for his documentary, A Very Old Man with Enormous

Wings, an affecting portrait of India’s first Mr Universe winner, Manohar Aich, in his twilight years. Though Vats considered the documentary route for Eeb Allay Ooo! as well, he eventually settled on fiction. “I realised it was losing the point and becoming very topical rather than trying to get the essence of the absurdity of the situation,” says Vats. Instead, he used the docudrama approach, which elevates the film. Real locations and the presence of non-actors like Mahinder, a monkey repeller from the Nirman and Vigyan Bhavan area, also make the film compelling.

Having studied at Kirori Mal College in the North Delhi campus, Vats is all too familiar with the monkey menace in the city’s Ridge area. “It’s a Sisyphean task,” he says. “You feed them because you see them as Gods and, simultaneously, you don’t want them to trouble you.” In the film, the protagonist finds himself in a rabbit hole of dichotomies and resorts to desperate measures to hold on to his job. It opened up the prospect of what Vats feels is his primary job as a filmmaker: to ask questions. “How is one supposed to do this job? Who is supposed to scare whom? Who needs to be kept away? Who is the monkey here?” Vats doesn’t give any answers. He instead leaves his viewers to mull them. ■

—Suhani Singh

It’s a docudrama, enhanced by the roles of non-actors like Mahinder, a real life ‘monkey repeller’