Suni Shankar | Next Scene / 2020

just beyond the script 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suni Shankar (screenwriter and director) Next Scene / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

We’ve all heard of “couch casting,” when a director chooses his cast members of the basis on how willing they are to have sex with him previous to his hiring them. Or at least, he suggests that he might hire them if they are willing to check out his couch.

     Pakistani director Sunil Shanker, however, takes this one step further in the almost comic, but also quite troubling work, Next Scene in which the story involves a young man Sami (Ali Junejo) who is having difficulties with his wife (Meher Jaffri) due to his questioning of his sexuality. We observe the first scene of the drama, where is wife returns home to find her husband Sami wrestling on the floor with a dummy. He attempts to make up a story about how the activity is a test to keep his wits sharp, but she seems to recognize it immediately as representing some other struggle, another being with whom he is wrestling for his very identity. The acting seems to be quite convincing.

  Yet the director (Sunil Shanker himself) steps in to point out, speaking primarily to the male figure, that something is missing in the scene, vaguely discussing issues of “retreat” and “advance.” Neither of the actors quite understands what he is suggesting, but fortunately the director is interrupted by a telephone call from his wife who wants to report some family event concerning one of his children. He attempts to explain that he is working on the movie and can’t talk to her now, signing off with a quick “I love you.”

      We watch next a later scene wherein Sami’s wife finally begins to suspect, given his lack of attention to her, that he actually is gay, accusing him of becoming what they have evidently been working to prevent. Again, the acting seems quite satisfactory, but once more the director intervenes, positioning himself between the two on them on the couch, suggesting they need “to experience it,” that they need to find the “perfect connection,” “one of the most wonderful things in life.” “Sometimes it’s okay to be. It’s all about letting go,” he says in English as opposed to Urdu with which the characters alternate in their conversations both on and off the screen.

     Clearly, he seems to be talking about something he himself is undergoing as opposed to the actors in relation to the script. And in the next scene, performed with him and Ali in bed, he appears to attempting to actualize his previous directions about advancing and trying to find the perfect connection by making love to the character Sami. Evidently, the scene is about Sami having made the decision to engage in gay sex, the other character being played by the director himself. He leans over the man with whom he has apparently just engaged in sex, and comments, presumably from the script, that he is in love with him. But then he repeats Sami’s name several more times, beginning to shift into an even more intimate moment that is apparently off script, Ali insisting that he needs a five-minute break.

      Off the set with the female character, Sami declares he’s not doing the “next scene.” We don’t know the sexuality of the actor, but we do most definitely know that the director has at several points crossed over between the fiction of the story and his personal feelings to make it impossible for his actor to continue in his performative role. To do so would be to enter into a reality into which he—unlike the character he plays—is definitely not ready or willing to proceed, to take the final step just beyond the script and make what the director describes as “the perfect connection”

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).