In Eeb Allay Ooo! (respective vocal sounds made by langurs, humans, and monkeys), the sister of the lead character is happy that her brother (Shardul Bharadwaj) has landed a government job with help from her security guard husband. She doesn't care about how much it pays, and knows and is ignoring or cannot relate with her brother's apprehension with the nature of the contractual job which is to effectively scare off monkeys from the local streets of tony neighbourhoods of New Delhi and their official, governmental properties. As a professional monkey repeller, even having received basic but useless training from a fellow worker (played by a real monkey repeller), he struggles both at the job as well at understanding the idea of using vocal sounds to deter cunning, undisciplined, and sometimes scheming monkeys from occupying the streets and disturbing human activities. Although he comes off as a dimwit with a few tricks up his sleeve, he is unable to materialize in his job, giving us viewers a vantage look at rising unemployment in India due to lack of jobs, abundance of unskilled, unemployable individuals, and poverty.
Director Prateek Vats carves a realistic picture with his protagonist, a college dropout, who has trouble with authority as well as with the idea of an unconventional job that he didn't even know existed. But then this original drama with sporadic spurts of comedy, also notes the otherwise secure and conventional job of his brother-in-law. He is a security worker at an establishment, but when he is handed a firearm for better self defence, superstition and baser fear comes out of nowhere to clip his arms and income. Vats sheds light at the undesired situation this family quickly falls in even though there are "thousands of job vacancies ready to be filled" according to an online platform.
The mockery that the protagonist endures as well as the encounter with corrupt authority, garnished with animal rights, blind faith advocates who think monkeys are avatars of a popular monkey god, and self-righteous mobsters masquerading as animal rights activists with an assumed power of marauding human rights come together to make Eeb Allay Ooo! a satire of our times. It has some great writing and photography, which further edify its original content that is so rare in Indian cinema. Bharadwaj's performance sticks out as the highlight of the film which tends to go haywire in the middle and takes the easy way out with an open ending. But for its urgent description of the sorry state of employment in India, its associated elements, and borderline poverty make it a film worth catching. TN.
(Watched and reviewed at the We Are One Global Film Festival on YouTube. Curated by the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)
