Between Beauty and Brutality
Professor of religious studies, Fred Clothey, when speaking of how Britain framed India in their imagination at the dawn of the colonial empire, spoke of a few phases through which they waded. The first was a romantic exotism. The second was “pejorative putdown”. There was a discreteness with which Europe was looking at India, as categories that don’t necessarily leak, but as blanketed ideas. That to look at something with such a clinical, archeological distance is to be unable to see it in its complexity, to frame this-and as either-or.
Beauty in Jatla’s film is outside of the world the characters inhabit materially, because he does not care, nor is interested in looking at their world itself as a source of beauty, something bleeding through the cracks. These distinctions make the film wobble around, between beauty and brutality, as separate ideas, sealed in a palatable, worn-out narrative shape. The beauty is painstakingly created, apparent, and the seams of beauty and un-beauty, too clear. When you see the beautiful, the surreal, the densely hued saris, you can feel the intervention of the director, the intentional swerving he is doing from traditional narratives of village poverty. The film never plays as a cohesive object.
Further, the film’s frustrations build. The dialogue between Saharsh’s parents, Bhagole (Lawrence Francis) and Prabhata (Prabhata) lean so heavily on telling, not showing — a conservative dictum, to be fair — that it collapses onto it, hoping that the postured longing in the inert gaze would speak what the dialogues cannot, and will not. That both Prabhata and Francis are theatre actors is discernible because theatre actors are used to summoning a whole world into a moment with the power of words and throw of voice, and for the longest time, watching them summon theatre without Jatla using the cinematic toolkit at his disposal to translate theatre to cinema, is to endure a film that is looking elsewhere for things that are right in front of it.
Film Companion’s coverage of the Berlinale was made possible by the support of Goethe Mumbai