Movies to Watch: Eeb Allay Ooo

Last week saw the launch of the We are One, a online film festival on YouTube. Launched in partnership with 21 global film festivals and Tribeca Enterprises, the festival will have 100 films all available to stream for free on the We are One YouTube channel.

Among the various films, one film which has been receiving a lot of rave reviews is Prateek Vats “Eeb Allay Ooo”, a satirical commentary on a the state of the migrants who come to the city for work.

The film follows the life of Anjani, a migrant who comes from his hometown to Delhi in search of a job. He moves in with his sister and her husband and with the help of his brother in law, finds a job chasing monkeys off government buildings in Delhi.

On the first day of his job, Anjani is made to watch a documentary on monkeys where one of the lines says “Because they are treated as gods, they are given food, they are corrupted, they become bold, they start entering and then the gods become pests” bringing attention to why his job is important.

Of all the things that makes the job absurd, one of the things that Anjani also has to follow is a series of calls to scare the monkeys away. They are Eeb, Allay ,Ooo. He is taught my Mahinder, a man who claims to come from a long line of monkey chasers.

Eeb is the sound that langurs make, Oo is the sound that monkeys make, and Allay a human sound are the three calls that Anjani is asked to make while scaring off the monkeys. He is in charge of keeping the Hall of Science, The Hall of Development , the Hall of Industry and Rajpath free of monkeys.

What adds humor to the mix is Anjani’s inherent fear of monkeys and his inability to make loud noises. Every time he faces a monkey, his natural instinct is to run and not scare them away, making him significantly unhappy at his job. He also faces the problem of a rich seemingly upper class man who insists on feeding the monkeys as offering to the god Hanuman.

What Prateek Vats and writer Shubham are able to point out is the absurdity of the society that we all live in, where there is elevation of animal to god and human to animal. The place where Anjani works is called as Raisina Hill, a land which was ruled by monkeys a long time ago. Therefore as the location is sacred, the idea of trapping monkeys is rejected and the only acceptable method is chasing them away.

Facing pressure to perform at this job, Anjani resorts to other methods to drive the monkeys away. He tries to play the monkeys recordings of Mahinder making monkey sounds , he also puts photos of Langurs across various points

On the backdrop of the story, is also a harsh critique of the power politics that engages in spaces like this. Anjani’s boss Narayan belittles and threatens to fire him for engaging in creative methods, as it presents a bad image to those above him. Narayan in turn is lorded over by his boss, who wants to portray a good image of the city during the Republic Day celebrations where the guests include foreign dignitaries.

The film offers a sound criticism to the current government as well, but mainly focuses on the fear of unemployment which is at the core of the lives led by Anjani and also his brother in law who serves the night shift as a security guard. As Prateek Vats stated in an interview, the film is about people that are invisible to us.

The parallel story that goes on is of Anjani’s brother in law, who has to carry a gun around for his job, and despite his fear for them, he still does it as carrying the gun comes with a 1500 increase in salary.

The cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi manages to bring the sharp contrast to the wide spaces in which Anjani operates in as monkey chaser with the narrow quarters he lives in. The footage of the monkeys however, steals the show as they represent a story in itself.

What makes the film appear more authentic than ever, is Vats’s clever mix of locals and actors for different scenes. A theater of the absurd, Eeb Allay Ooo manages to address the state of affairs we see today in a raw and humorous manner and Vats manages to create a lasting impression on his first feature debut.