Syrup that doesn’t Nourish
Jerry, Not on Top.
The pieces in this film-commentary series were originally written in between September 2013 and November 2014.
‘So – you like adventure and stuff, like, paragliding and all?’
The pathologically well-scrubbed frames of writer-director Hem Raj BC’s Jerryy will perhaps appeal to teenagers, but the manner in which it leaves out any context or intrusion of the real is jarring to any mature viewer. But again, I have my doubts anyone past a certain age will watch Jerryy. I am all for keeping one’s youthfulness, but it is just plain idiotic to cling on to stubborn immaturity.
BC, whose previous feature Hostel also enjoyed success, has been faithful to the familiar, tested formula: a few clean young faces, just the hint of sexual awakening, a lot of dumb, unthreatening lines spoken without conviction. Jokes derived from elsewhere, so that there is no threat of original wit. Every frame lit to excess, lit to its aesthetic decay, so that darkness has nowhere to sit, literally and metaphorically. I waited for there to be a work of some sort – sitting with my little notepad, worried that I had nothing to comment on. By the end, there was one observation that seemed worth thinking about:
In a scene filmed in a meadow somewhere in Mustang, locals gather to drink yak blood. This is a well-known ritual of blood-letting and blood-drinking. (Although the argument is something akin to saying – go, drink a glass of a Pashupati sadhu’s blood and you’ll get stoned. But because the Thakalis are a small but vocal minority, their manners get elevated to wisdom, while healers among women get called witches.) In Jerryy, the camera favors the bunch of bratty Kathmandu kids – it watches the disgust and horror on the faces of the city kids more than it watches the yaks being punctured or the locals participating in their timeless rituals.
Jerryy is blind to what is just outside its frames. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the writer-director duo – along with four other ‘associate directors’ who surely had creative input – insist upon an unnatural cleanness of what gets shown onscreen. Three friends – Jerry, Eric and Sunny – go to Pokhara. But we don’t see anyone from Pokhara in a meaningful context. Jerry then travels to the Mustang area with a bunch of his friend Poggy’s friends – and again, the locals are absent, except to serve a Thakali meal once (platitudes about how Thakali food is the best!), and to strategically leave a motorbike for Jerry to steal when he wants to impress Akansha, the girl given the task of reforming this twat of a teenager. The director(s?) seem to want to produce a work so cut-off from its context that it would be utterly unthreatening to its audience. But, doesn’t that also mean it’ll end up becoming impossible to relate with it?
These kids are from the upper echelons on Kathmandu society – their parents pepper their lines with stilted, stuffy English. The only times where any other person is shown is in a menial and peripheral capacity – an old maid helping the brat pack his suitcase, a gardener watering flowers in the background. If Jerryy is to be taken as representative of how a certain group of Kathmandu natives see the rest of the country or even the rest of the city, it is really a pity. But I am not worried that such is the case – it is simply that the director is incapable of situating his story, so he doesn’t know how to bring meaning to his minor characters. Neither of Jerry’s two best friends, or anyone else who forms the group of tourists gallivanting in Mustang, has a meaningful presence in the movie. Jerry has a weepy little second half, and Akansha has a pouty little second half accordingly. But the rest of the gamut has no other purpose in that world except to decorate Jerry’s forgettable existence.
I believe I have mentioned here before the distinction between top-down intervention – the notion of deus ex machina in theatre known since the time of the Hellenic dramaturges – and the bottom-up construction. If, in Jerryy, the eponymous character’s asthma gets worse because he goes to a cold place, that can be an example of a conceit being built upwards. But, if he out of the blue gets a cardiac condition not necessarily related to his pulmonary condition, then that is top-down intervention. If a coincidence sets the story in motion at the beginning, that is fine: Jerry running into an old friend, Poggy, for instance, and then playing his tricks to get into bed with one of her friends. But if the movie ends with a coincidence! That’s just lazy. There’s an obscure college in Europe that the girl wants to get into, and hasn’t been able to, but suddenly, an official from the college happens to be at the gallery opening of the mediocre photographer Akanska, and fulfils her dream. I mean – kill me already! Solving a narrative through a coincidence takes agency away from the character(s). The only reason we build up a character is to watch how they will react in situations where the emotional or moral or intellectual stakes are the highest. To give coincidence primacy where the forward thrust should have come from the strength slowly put into a character is to hack oneself at the knees as a filmmaker.
This movie seems to me a dumbed-down fare for the +2 crowd. If, by the time a teenager is ready to take up nominal responsibilities as an adult, we insist upon treating them as if they are incapable of intelligent or complex conversations, we end up with a bunch of brainless twats – like Jerry and his friends in Jerry. But, who is to blame for this? Parents, of course – if you have a child studying in a college that makes its students wear a uniform, understand this: YOU, as the parent, are the moron. You haven’t been able to find the courage to accept that your child has grown up into an adult. That is why you insist upon controlling every aspect of her life, and since you aren’t intelligent enough to have a discussion or debate with your child, you push that responsibility to the college principal and his sociopathic ‘discipline in-charge’. Your child goes to college in an atmosphere of terror, and doesn’t grow the confidence to question authority – yours, or the college principal’s. To escape this frustration, she goes to the theatre to watch an inane, brainless fare like Jerry.
And then the professional bully – the petty police officer around the corner from a cinema – arrests her for bunking class and going to the cinema in her school uniform.
Y’all deserve each other.
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Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Narayan Wagle’s Koreana - Coffee Guff into English.
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Absolutely enjoyed reading it! There is a case to be made about Anmol KC’s filmography and how it is often an extension of character like Jerry and also Hem Raj BC’s obsession with bourgeois characters/ last names. Lol