In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything about contemporary life — from the way we work, study, and socialise to virtually every aspect of how we live now. And yet, six years later, the pandemic is surprisingly absent from popular media, especially cinema. I always wondered why, until I watched Sheetal Menon’s ‘Duet’, now streaming on YouTube and Spotify (the music streaming platform’s first foray into short-form cinema). The wounds it left are still open and raw; we are still living in its aftermath.

Menon’s sophomore directorial effort — based on a screenplay co-written with Arpita Chatterjee (Three of Us, 2022) — follows Mihir (Sidhant Gupta), a pianist, grappling with the death of his estranged brother Kavish during the isolation of the pandemic before he finds some solace in music. It is a premise that could easily have tipped into melodramatic sentimentality. But Menon manages to find the film’s emotional core in the intimacy of its central conceit. There is no conventional conversation between the brothers, no opportunity for an eventual reconciliation or the clean closure that death so often demands of fictional narratives. There is only music: an exchange without words, connecting two people separated by the uncrossable chasm of death.

“I never really saw him (Mihir) as a tortured artist,” Menon said when I asked her about the challenges of writing a character like Mihir without reducing them to the tortured artist archetype. “I saw him as a person who has unexpectedly lost his estranged brother, is carrying an enormous amount of guilt, and has slowly shut himself away from everything. I didn’t want to romanticise what he was going through, or make his despair beautiful because he happens to be a musician. I wanted the pain and isolation to feel real.”

The sparseness of the film made that challenging, she added. “There is so little dialogue, so I had to trust the silences, his everyday routine, the spaces he inhabits, the sound. And that also meant asking a lot from my actor, Sidhant. I knew how deep into the darkness I wanted the character to go, but ultimately that emotion had to come through my actor. There were times when I was genuinely afraid of how much I was asking him to access.”

“The unexpected moment of connection through music,” Menon said, “that was really what I wanted to hold on to, not the romantic idea of suffering creating art, but the very human need to feel connected to someone when you are at your most isolated.”

“Sheetal and I collaborated before on the short film ‘Siblings’, and we set out knowing the film would hardly have any dialogue,” Arpita Chatterjee added. “In such a film, the writing is about discovering the protagonist’s mental landscape and what he is negotiating internally and how he’s engaging with his environment because of that. The film is an attempt to understand the impact of the isolation and loss during COVID and capture a moment in time that impacted the whole world.”

We often think of grief as something that must eventually be overcome, but ‘Duet’ is more interested in what happens when it cannot. Mihir is not only unable but seemingly incapable of moving on from his brother’s death. His grief is complicated by guilt over both drifting apart and surviving. The film’s pandemic setting consequently gives his loneliness, grief, and guilt a greater resonance. His private grief exists within a rupture when isolation and separation were universal conditions; when distance from family, friends, and the ordinariness of life was unavoidable.

At its core, ‘Duet’ is a film about the radical act of finding the will to outlive suicidal despair through the creative act — in Mihir’s case, his music, the only means of communication he still has access to during the lockdown. This is precisely the kind of character Sidhant Gupta seems to thrive in. He seems to have developed a penchant for playing complicated men who tend to suppress their emotions and end up alienating parts of themselves in the process. His portrayal of Mihir as a broken man trying his best to cling to life through his art is an echo of his earlier portrayal of the complicated, conflicted Jay Khanna, torn between his love for cinema and the woman he loves (Wamiqa Gabbi’s Niloufer), in Vikramaditya Motwane’s ‘Jubilee’ (2023), and as Jawaharlal Nehru in ‘Freedom at Midnight’ (2024).

“It’s always the journey of the character that pulls me to begin with," Gupta said when I asked why he gravitates towards these characters. “And once I take up a role, then all the elements in me that you refer to as alienating parts come into play.”

While Gupta’s visceral portrayal of the grief-stricken and guilt-riddled Mihir is central to the film’s interiority, Moinak Bose’s sound design and Sid Acharya’s score — featuring original compositions by Eric Christian and Ben Crosland, with violin performed by Tineke de Jong — are just as crucial to building its atmospheric world. ‘Duet’ is a portrait of profound grief; it is also a portrait of the artist as a grieving man and how, in times of great despair, art is often the only way we can connect with others.

Watch the film here:

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