There’s a popular textbook term in collegiate economics called the Pareto point. Roughly speaking, it’s the optimal point on the said Pareto curve (on an X-Y axis), where the quantity allocated by the owner & recipient (of resources) efficiently meet. There is zero wastage. In the sense that if you go any further north or south of this point, it would be a win-lose, or lose-win for either party. If I had to explain this through visuals, it would have to be the incredible negotiation sequence in Kanu Behl’s film Agra. Wherein there’s a guy, with a house to sell to a developer, who can then take over the property, keep a floor or two/few, along with cash, and construct them a five-storeyed building in return. This brilliant give-and-take ‘bakchodi’ with multiple cash + floor permutation, combination lasts for over 14 minutes for what’s a two-hour long film! Is Behl’s Agra about a property deal? No. Also, yes, for how most conflicts can, after all, be reduced to the elemental level of jar (wealth), joru (women), zameen (land/property) — or, sex and money, if you may. During teenage, when I had the latter moment of epiphany about the world, I’d regularly pull out the morning newspaper — at the time, when they were consumed universally enough to be called a daily — and manage to slot all local/national headlines, within a degree or two of separation, as either the ‘sex problem’, or the ‘money problem’! With his latest film — that premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section (2023), set to open in Indian theatres, Nov 14 — writer-director Behl, of course, takes a more angular look at life, as is, in a small town, within a fractured family — centred on a lonely, introverted, wholly horned-out bloke named Guru (magnificent Mohit Agarwal), perennially on sex-chat/porn, when he isn’t grappling with mom, dad, cousin, dad’s mistress…. Guru’s ‘ASL’? Age: 24. Sex: Male. Location: Agra. What about the film’s DNA? Column👇🏽(link in bio).