TIFF 51: Full of sorrow and fury, “Elephants in the Fog” is a queer gem from Nepal

by Cláudio Alves

It starts at night, opening credits fading in and out over an abstract blackness that slowly gives way to something more discernible. Strange sounds seep from the dark, a cry that might be animal or human song. Gradually, it becomes some ritualistic beckoning for an elephant, somewhere in the forest. “Come to me,” a voice shouts into the nothing; lights slash across the empty screen, and a search party begins to make itself known in the frame. Such an opening could insinuate a film enmeshed in ancient mysteries to the point of alienation, removed from modernity and led by tradition into a magical place where the concerns of so-called “real life” matter little before the demands of ancient rite, folklore, and myth. 

But then it cuts to morning, and Elephants in the Fog suggests a narrative, thematic, and cinematic space that not only avoids these assumed extremes but also refutes the traditional vs modern binary this review’s first paragraph might have suggested. In the light of dawn, we meet our protagonist, Pirati, the matriarch of a Nepalese Kinnar community formed by those whom old tradition might recognize as a third-gendered other and less tradition-bound folk might call transgender, queer…

By the time the audience fully understands what was happening at the beginning, the intersection of rite and the material mundanity of our days, first-time feature writer-director Abinash Bikram Shah has already taught us how to appreciate the story unraveling before us. Every night, peasants call for the elephants out of tradition, yes, but mostly for the practical reality that the wild beasts would destroy their crops if left free to trample the fields. This is as much a part of the people’s routine as Pirati’s internal conflicts in her everyday life. She’s an old-fashioned Kinnar on the surface, approaching middle age and unable to make sense of the youth who rebel nst the constrictions of their community and yearn for greater freedoms. 

The Kinnar are refugees from common society, allowed to live among the people in their spiritual role – they participate in various rites, including the offering of wedding blessings – but kept segregated away from the normative folk. Pirati accepts it, passively, embodying a maternal role to her girls. Apsara, a younger member of the community who flirts with rickshaw drivers and makes a spectacle of herself by dancing in the middle of the street, is less acquiescent to these customs. Furthermore, she rejects notions of being third-gender, preferring to see herself as a woman. Pirati won’t dare do the same, even though she has a lover and dreams of escaping to start a new life elsewhere. 

Then, one night, Apsara disappears. In the foggy depths of the forest, where eyes painted on bark seem to project a divine gaze over mortal lives, some of her things are found. Children play with a ratty blonde wig, and Pirati stays still, knowing the horrible truth deep inside yet unwilling to accept it. Shah lingers on the leading lady, and Pushpa Thing Lama rewards the filmmaker with one of many moments when universes of meaning are communicated just by the way she holds herself, a coiled spring of energy and grief and despair and want, such want that could swallow the world with its coveting of a life she’s been denied. Apsara’s disappearance becomes the catalyst for the matriarch’s character study, leading Elephants in the Fog into a tonal and genre territory that, by itself, rejects the limits of convention. 

Reversing the opening’s transition from mysterious night rites to clear morning motions, the film allows its observational register to give in to a sinister crime story and inward-looking reflection, an investigation that’s also an autopsy of society at large and one woman’s contradictions. At one point, the Kinnar try to go deeper into the woods and are blocked by the farmers who claim the forest as theirs, as if the Kinnar were forbidden from perusing the wilderness that sits outside their confinement. Only a policewoman can repudiate the farmers, though Elephants in the Fog won’t commit to glamorizing the authorities. If anything, it casts them as criminally inactive or possibly responsible for whatever tragedy might have occurred with Apsara.

So, they go into the blue-green depths of the jungle, calling for their sister as the farmers call for the elephants at night. In the face of all this, the pressure of landowners to vacate the Kinnar from their abode and the farmers’ wives in their prejudiced rage, something shifts for Pirati. No more can she passively accept tradition or the expected recrimination that comes when her fellow Kinnar discover the affair she’s been conducting in direct violation of the vows of chastity she made. No more can Pirati agree that she is naught but an empty, broken thing if not fit to be of spiritual use to the religious affairs of the cis-straight majority. Finding what happened to Apsara is a journey of self-discovery, a search for truth in more ways than one.

There’s something of the neon noir about Elephants in the Fog’s incursions into nightlife and the dens of girls who, like so many trans women worldwide, have been pushed into sex work by marginalization. This contrasts sharply with the painterly pastoralism of the rural life Pirati is used to, highlighting the visual divergences and the fractious schisms within the social balance too obvious to ignore. Shah and DP Noé Bach, best known for French films such as Anaïs in Love and Wild Diamond, remain faithful to the aesthetics of social realism, though that doesn’t keep their leading lady’s subjectivity from manifesting through the film’s look. We are seeing the world through Pirati’s eyes, and what we find is a world divided, irreparably shattered. 

The soundtrack begins to foreground the forest as if the animals within were as restless as the people who live beside their beastly abode, a gentle cacophony that soon sours into an oppressive wall of sound falling onto these desperate women. Claps and human voices join lamenting strings in Frédéric Alvarez’s score, as if exteriorizing the Molotov cocktail of wrath and sorrow that explodes, fiery furious, inside Pirati. But there’s also guilt, the regrets of a mother who ignored the plea in her daughter’s rebellion. And it’s all in Lama’s performance, a feature debut as commendable as her director’s, born between the blaze of a burning home and tears of rejection, an incredible, ultimately vengeful, turn that recalls the “woman’s pictures” of Hollywood’s past, only in Nepalese and with a queer twist. As ever in Elephants in the Fog, past and present come to us intersected, tangled up, as inseparable as they are irreconcilable.

At Cannes, Elephants in the Fog won a Special Jury Prize from the Un Certain Regard jury. Now it plays in the Centerpiece section of TIFF, making its North American premiere. It might yet become Nepal’s official Oscar submission. Let’s wait and see.