At the perspective pith of Photo (Kannada, 2023) is an evocative parable of humanism and human foibles. Set in the time of, and shot during, the sudden and unexpected imposition of the nationwide lockdown, it is an ironic, touching tale of a boy in a village who wishes to go and take an up, close and personal view of the State’s seat of power, the magnificent and monumental Vidhana Soudha.
What’s so special one may ask? Especially, the city bred young and the fortunate denizens privileged to have found a home in the sprawling metropolis. After all, they pass by it almost every day in the course of reaching their respective destinations, without as much as a whit of a glance at it, given that it is registered in their psyche and collective memory. For the boy, a visit to the Vidhana Soudha, whose almost life size picture hangs in his classroom, is the equivalent of visiting and soaking in the beauty of that marvelous monument of love, the Taj Mahal in Agra. The film also makes a point about peer pressure/envy: since every other home in the neighbourhood proudly displays a family photo taken at the Vidhana Soudha, the boy too desires to possess one with his father and him in front of it.
Debutant film maker Utsav Gonwar’s locked-down-in-the-pandemic experiment exhibits several thematic tracks. One, of a village boy and his dream, which has a political context. Two, of how skewed development has turned a placid, peaceful city into a monstrous, noisy and noxious metropolis with no soul. And three, of the mass exodus of rural folk to the big cities in search of the elusive El Dorado. Unlike Diwa Shah’s Bahadur – The Brave (Hindi-Nepali, 2023), made in the same genre but which sticks to the core subject of the struggles of the migrant labourers and how they come to terms with their rootless situation, Gonwar’s film is out and out political.
Using a cherubic boy with a curiosity chiseled chimera as the central character, Gonwar dons the hat of a political crusader and takes the audience on a neorealist realty-reality tour of a city with its locked in migrants with nowhere to either go or stay. The seat of power, Vidhana Soudha, itself provides on a platter the pivot to project a searing, searching and reflective prognosis on the absence of political will, and effective governance, to extend the fruits of economic growth and development to the lesser privileged and marginalised sections of society. Gonwar takes up cudgels with the government at the centre, and parodies the janta curfew that was announced in the course of the pandemic.
He focusses his lens on the ‘Government’s Work is God’s Work’ wordings inscribed on the entablature of the stately legislature structure, to drive in the point of the absolute power that the State holds over its powerless migrant population. The camerawork is mostly minimalist and static, despite its eponymous title. However, the long, panoramic, sweeping shots capturing the arid landscape bring back memories of another significant film. Whereas in P. Vinothraj’s Pebbles (Tamil, 2021), the son maintained a reasonable distance from his easily irritable dad, in Photo, the son trudges alongside his migrant labourer dad and sometimes sits on his shoulder as the two make their way in the scorching heat towards the faraway cocoon of safety and semblance of reality called home.
The film tells the tale of domineering and disciplinarian no-nonsense, hide bound patriarch Madhusudhan Aachar, played by Ashok, who never really gets into the skin and psyche of his character. While the narrative ostensibly revolves around him, it inevitably pivots toward Suma, a 10th-grade graduate whose singular focus on matrimony is portrayed with a comedic undertone. Unfortunately, the film’s attempt to extract humor from familial dynamics lacks the necessary emotional depth to actively involve the audience in its proceedings. Every frame attempt to tease out as much mindless mirth in the goings-on between the panoply of characters of the large family that constitutes Aachar and Co. Their quirks, quibbles and idiosyncrasies, notwithstanding, the facetious film is rendered into a discomfiting and disquiet affair to indulgently wallow in.
Instead of an enterprising ensemble that dissects and deliberates on the age gone by, and providing a reflective mirror on how traditions and social etiquettes had a deleterious effect on the young ones in discipline-driven patriarchal households of the past, with men and women strenuously striving to confirm to traditional expectations, the filmmaker rather lampoons these very aspects to keep audiences’ rib tickling non-stop at the awkwardness of Aachar household inhabitant. And the characters are reduced to caricatures devoid of naturalism, and come across as cardboard cut outs.
Brushing aside any aspersions being cast on dear Sony says the man’s aunt, a nun, “Sony is bit over friendly with children” assertively dismissive of sister Rani’s misgivings about Sony’s trespasses stating “you had your share of silliness” vainly observing “everybody makes mistakes.”
To a question by a victim that there is a lot of hypocrisy within the church, with its tendency to siding with the predator, the Pope concedes the problem is serious. More so, “cases involving the churches worse because people are destroyed exactly where they should be care for. The abuser destroys the child. If you are a church person hypocrisy and double living are horrible,” laments the Pope, unable to provide an assuring answer to the young man.
The purpose of the volume supposedly is to “meet the criterion of becoming a reference text for students of film studies in universities.” Unfortunately, one has to disagree with this presupposition. The majority of the articles are nothing more than eulogistic, effusive pieces simply singing paeans about the women directors featured.
As the characters enter and exit the ‘theatre of performance’ in the dark, desolate, old mansion, with the metaphorically-erected figurine of Goddess Durga (Mahishasur Marddini) prepared for the following day’s festivity looming large over them, their performances come across as robotic. Each of the characters, including the lead actress Rituparna Sengupta, simply mouths a prepared text, in turns, and go about their assigned roles in a rote fashion. Saswata Chatterjee as a werewolf in a politician’s garb is loud. The overall acting is wooden.
The book explores and extrapolates through arguments and illustrations, “the way to understand Indian cinema, since that would help distinguish it from cinema outside of India,” with specific and contextual examples of popular films by noted Indian filmmakers from all over India, down the ages. The author enumerates that unlike what is understood in the Western context of philosophy “in terms of professional intellectual pursuit that can, be set aside at the end of the working day,” in Indian films, the term is more directly “associated with one’s personal destiny,” and “as an attempt to understand the true nature of reality in terms of an inner or spiritual quest.”
Often frowned upon for his over self-indulgence with aesthetics of film making and acting, and an unabashed pursuer of commercial dynamics, despite clinging on to his ideal idea of cinema, Kamal Haasan has never been wanting when it came to meld commerce with craft for the greater good of cinema. He is a radical experimenter always willing to take that leap of faith to sharpen audiences’ cinematic sensibilities with subtleness and complexity rather than relying on dead pot commercial cauldrons.
Such was his steadfast opinion and antipathy towards cinema that he was rather reluctant in meeting up with one of the greatest comedians of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin, whom he simply dismissed as “a buffoon”. The two, though, met on September 22, 1931 during Gandhi’s visit to England for the Round Table Conference.
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 1965, provides enough personal viewpoints held by Gandhiji on cinema. In a letter to Helene Haussding, he writes, “I know that overwork and terrific strain are just as apprehensible, even though they may be in a good cause, as a drinking-bout or visiting cinemas. The results of both are the same.”