In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything — 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 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 fiction. There is only music: an exchange without words, connecting two people separated by the uncrossable chasm of death.

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. 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’.

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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