Director: Parth Saurabh
Writer: Parth Saurabh, Abhinav Jha
Cast: Abhinav Jha, Tanaya Khan Jha, Dheeraj Kumar
Streaming on: Mubi
When a couple elopes in a movie, their love becomes a story. And this story is often immortalised by the tragedy that awaits them. The romance is fuelled by a sense of shared rebellion. It shines until there’s someone to defy — society, family, bigotry, history. But what if there’s nothing left to fight? What happens when escaping is no longer the language of those who run? By unfolding in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic — at a time when the world itself is a slow-burning tragedy — Parth Saurabh’s Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar (“both sides of the pond”) reveals a young couple struggling to retain the relevance of their love story. Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha) and Sumit (Abhinav Jha) are back in the place they eloped from two years ago. It’s supposed to be temporary. Their accommodation reflects the distance between expectations and reality: A mansion that’s now a dilapidated boys’ hostel. Priyanka urges Sumit to find a job so that they can get back on their feet — the feet that had once helped them to flee life in pursuit of a grand narrative. Except, nobody is chasing them anymore.
Return to the Hometown
The beauty of Saurabh’s film is that it stays rooted in the emotional ambiguity between remission and relapse; adolescence and adulthood; a pitstop and a return. As in Sairat (2016), the newness of a big city might have sustained the pressure to be together. But it’s the familiarity of a hometown that creates the pressure to be themselves. The obligation to justify their love as an act of resistance starts to fade. Slowly but steadily, both Sumit and Priyanka get restored to their default setting; to the individuals they were before they turned plural. Romance was the parachute that helped them jump, but now that they’re back, the parachute has nowhere to go; it is bereft of use and identity. Given the way Bihar’s Darbhanga is shot — like it’s being discovered and rediscovered at once; like a memory flouting its own stillness — the film implies that post-lockdown nostalgia plays a role. Like millions of people around the globe, the couple, too, is on a subliminal quest to capture the Old Normal.
The past, once their enemy, is now comforting and rose-tinted, as a result of which their head seeks the halo of pre-pandemic life. Not unlike a boarding-school student visiting home for the holidays, Sumit is lulled back to his loafer days. He makes up for lost time by wasting it, drinking and smoking and bantering with childhood friend Nihal (Dheeraj Kumar), under the pretext of finding work. He behaves like he expects life to continue after this unscheduled break. Money is dire, and yet he revels in the illusion of being the breadwinner. Priyanka, too, looks longingly at a college across the street every morning. She wants to study again, and tries reconnecting with her estranged parents. It’s like the town magically taps into the teenager in her, regardless of what transpired in between. The Darbhanga she returns to looks more vulnerable — and therefore more inviting — than the one she left.