The Tuvalet Bash

After receiving zero birthday wishes across his social media platforms, a young man ruminates on what he calls this ‘shitty life’.

Kshitiz (Sharma) is finding growing up in the real world to be far more disappointing than he ever envisaged. Every day seems like every other and there doesn’t seem to be anything special about any of them. Even today, his birthday, is going along like any other day, and he still has to overcome the constant battles which make up his daily life. Nobody seems interested in wishing him a happy birthday, even across the platforms which are supposed to prompt your friends to do exactly that, and Kshitiz is feeling especially dumped upon by the daily grind of the outside world.

As he wakes up on this special day, Kshitiz is rudely disturbed from slumber by his roommate’s ridiculously loud alarm. Having to get out of bed to switch it off himself, as his roommate really doesn’t seem to care, he then waxes lyrical about just how ‘shitty’ this life is for him. In what then appears to be a pretty on-the-nose thematic visual, Kshitiz spends most of the rest of the nine-minute film in the cubicle of a public toilet, complete with all the disgusting accoutrements which you would expect from such a space.

Kshitiz then spends his time, sitting on the pan, checking his social media, and despairing over the emptiness of recognition in his life. This is shown to us somewhat haphazardly in quick cuts and fast edits of random things which don’t necessarily link together. It seems as though these are supposed to be snapshots of what Kshitiz’s regular life might entail, but narratively everything is so messed up and banged together all over the shop that none of it really makes much sense. Images of Kshitiz supposedly with some of his pals are intermingled with wider shots of campus grounds and social environments where people gather, while over the top he continues his monologue from the crapper about how ‘shitty’ his life is.

Overall, The Tuvalet Bash is a narrative mess, with images coming at you thick and fast which don’t really give anything to the main story. There’s a sense of arthouse direction going on, where that narrative is hijacked by the imagery, and the sound design plays a bigger role in establishing the narrative than anything in the dialogue or characterisation manages to do. There’s a certain energy and immediacy to the film which pushes it through its nine-minute runtime, but underneath that there’s really nothing else going on. Whatever it is that Kshitiz is trying to say about life, it gets lost in amongst the frantic visuals and the chopped-up ideas, meaning that the viewer comes out the other side wondering what on earth it was all supposed to be about.