My review of Abdul Rahman's 8th Street
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| The old man (Venkatesan) |
8th Street (2026/Abdul RAHMAN/India) 1h
Film review by Benoit Rouilly for Unspoken Cinema (containing spoilers voluntarily).
A clean, well directed piece by Abdul Rahman, who in just one contemplative hour and three cryptic chapters, evokes the devious outlines of five mysterious stories within four opaque characters… Some stories will remain unresolved as others stand open-ended. Everything takes place, practically in real time around 2am, in a single night-bar, named “8th Street”. A lovely place, with marble pedestal tables, wooden chairs and comfy booths. There are rounded corners to the door-frames like on a boat. Coffee bean wooden patterns form a see through ceiling. And a neo-classical sepia painting on the back wall, representing customers at coffee tables, completes the atmosphere.
The protagonist enters the bar last, a clean, well lighted place, and penetrates by the front door this “huis-clos” (=a single action takes place in a single space behind closed doors with a limited number of people) where three other persons await. It’s closing time; meaning they finished for the night, as well as the place is shutting down for good that night. An old man sits alone at table #3, always by the window, staring at the road; and two waiters rest in the kitchen. The older one (Nagaraj) comes out to take the newcomer’s order at table #1.
The first word only uttered at 6’30” shows the director’s confidence in his silent images and in his audience’s patience to discover, little by little, what is going on. The aforementioned atmosphere sets the inscrutable tone; the mysterious stories will unfold, one at the time, each associated with their character, as more mundane conversations are eavesdropped. The place, quite elegant on the outside, festers decrepitude: the protagonist has the shakes and limps, the older waiter coughs uncontrollably from an unknown illness, the old man is narcoleptic, the TV is glitched, the power generator is broken, the bar is shutting down… Nothing goes the way up. It's the end of a foregone era.
The first mystery, disclosed in few words at table #1, by the older waiter to our protagonist, is the one surrounding the old man sipping his whisky at table #3. As the narcoleptic's head hits the table, his neighbours can freely talk behind his back, two tables away. This is the part lifted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story: “A Clean, Well Lighted Place”. An obscure old man, deaf, enjoys every night at the same table in his favourite bar, drinking whisky after whisky. He doesn’t speak to anyone, he has no name. Hearsay wants him to be a millionaire at 80. He attempted to commit suicide, they say. But why? Nobody knows… And he refuses to leave until he’s well drunk as the bar closes. The borrowing of the original material stops here.
The second mystery concerns our protagonist’s past life. During the same conversation at table #1, he reveals he fled home in Kerala when he was 10. And the old man reminds him of his own father left behind. Thus a certain unrest when confronted with his presence. Another reveal, at table #5, gives away the story about his friend who committed suicide successfully 7 years before, which caused him to twitch every now and then ever since.
The third mystery is about our present protagonist, a man who enters the film without words and many troubling details. He parked his motorbike before limping to the bar. He seems overtly nervous and worried for some reason. As soon as he reaches inside, he gets rid of something from his pocket, discarded in the bin from a dark corner. And at the time of a bathroom break (another insulated conversation within the “huis-clos” setting), he dials a phone call to an even more mystifying personality who sent him a suspicious letter full of extraordinary revelations. We learn he’s been hired for a hit on the person of the old man without name.
The fourth mystery comes from a daytime flashback told at table #5 by the old waiter to the protagonist, about a former coworker, Selvaraj. This is the chapter called “The Flower And The Bird”. The coworker told him before getting fired: “Like a flower, like a bird, you must remain in total silence. Silence is the only way to truly find God.” The same Selvaraj once noticed silent customers “talking” to each other, beyond words. What better allegory could depict the body language of Contemplative Cinema characters quietly emoting without speech?
The fifth mystery inhabits the place itself, and more precisely, Nagaraj, the 40 years old coughing waiter. It is divulged by the two waiters around one of the tables outside on the terrace. They mention the elusive owner. Unexpectedly he wants to relocate this bar elsewhere. And the boss is wary of this undiagnosed illness… What will happen to them?
Five mysteries, four characters, one room. The “huis-clos” was never just a setting but the very mechanism by which each secret could surface, table by table, earshot by earshot.
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| The last customer (Babu Paramasivan) |
Abdul Rahman manages to divide the bar into nooks and crannies where private conversations can take place, alternating between who may talk and who could hear. The camera finds a spot at each numbered table. The frame panning in the main room, stasis in the restroom and still on the terrace. The mastery of this space, this time, and how to use them, in and around the characters, favours individual pairing and specific discourse, all the while painting a contemplative tableau assembled of few words and long pauses. Every corner has its own quality (of light, of width, of view), and the director matches it with a different mood. Even during a blackout, flashlight and candles alter the mood momentarily to best suit the occasion.
This debut feature finds itself at the crossroad of Hemingway’s short story and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), where the themes of death, assassination, suicide ethics and active euthanasia collide. The director absorbs these themes, conflates them and takes them apart to invest each of his protagonists with their own part of the full puzzle. It’s one of these after hours. Scarred characters roam the night and speak like they never talked before, sharing a deep dent of their lives to complete strangers… encountering long awaited respite, solace and catharsis.
It feels like Rahman has deconstructed the mystery genre to dilute it in the Modernist tradition. For each mystery brought forth, clues and memories are distilled, meanwhile the action remains opaque and unfinished, open-ended. The characters cross paths and share or mirror their story with one another, generating an array of secrets heightened by their subterranean interactions. Yet, in the Contemplative fashion, each person is alienated by the narrative. Each face is haloed by opacity because the camera dwells on the exterior of their mind. And we can barely trust the content of their speech. Each micro-action, conditioned by stretched out duration, develops at its own pace to better paint the everyday and the familiar.
Seems odd, kind of ironic, to send a half-hearted hitman after a harmless suicidal 80 years old elder (without an explanation). Killing the father, says Freud. An unknown, forsaken father who is let go for ever, eventually, once met again one last time. And the older waiter reiterates: “What’s left for him anyway? Just sitting there in silence, what’s the point of not dying?” I believe the silent father, like the silent Selvaraj, like the silent customers are all taking various allegorical shapes of Contemplative Cinema. And the clueless hitman, the coughing waiter likewise, both represent the perplexed audience (who identifies with this protagonist from the beginning) coming to terms with their denial of a slower cinema made of silence, contemplation, and mundane portrayals.
Just like in the filmmaker’s previous short film “I Reject The Invitation From God” (2019). There he refuted the untimely retirement of the Contemplative mode that defies the God of conventional cinema. These films invite an autobiographical reading and speculation. Some aspects of the author’s existence, under the cover of fictionalisation, might blend with his own struggle with faith in the prosaic medium as well as the choice between Good and Evil, up to, one surmises, the outreach to God himself. Silence is the only path, contemplation is the answer. Perhaps his films will become more and more silent until the proper quietude ultimately communicates what’s inside of him for the world to know…
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| Nagaraj (Vignesh) & director (Abdul Rahman) on set |
Watch 8th Street here
Read also at Unspoken Cinema, another film by Abdul Rahman:
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