Director: Anup Singh
Writer: Anup Singh
Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Irrfan Khan, Waheeda Rehman, Shashank Arora
Much of The Song of Scorpions – Anup Singh’s Rajasthani-Hindi film that had its world premiere at the 2017 Locarno International Film Festival – is shot like a beautiful myth. It features the legend of a ‘scorpion singer’ in the Thar desert, a tribal woman who sings to counter the poison of deadly scorpion bites. An early sequence ends with this fabled figure, Nooran (Golshifteh Farahani), crooning for a man writhing in pain at night. She appears like a priest in search of the right moon-to-star ratio to do the last rites. A bonfire casts flickers of coy light onto the faces of the surrounding villagers – people who had arrived with the solemnity of an impending funeral, but people who are now spellbound by a voice that deafened death with a life-affirming melody. The folkloric vibe is further cemented by the presence of the late Irrfan Khan as Aadam, a camel trader besotted by the scorpion singer; three years after Khan’s passing, this is his final theatrical release in India. The cinematography (by Pietro Zuercher and Carlotta Holy-Steinemann) frames Rajasthan as a shape-shifting fairyland, turning tranquility into a secret language and making the sand dunes resemble contours of a scarred body. In other words, The Song of Scorpions is steeped in the language of literary fancy and fiction. It’s not supposed to feel actual.
Some might even call it the ‘exotic Western gaze’ and ‘poverty porn’. But the sluggish, quasi-arthouse mood is more than embellishment here. While it’s not the easiest to sit through, what it does is lull the viewer into a make-believe world, where every character and frame seem to be on parole from a famous painting. This tone is important – the lulling must happen – because the film ultimately thrives on a dissonance between treatment and theme. Nooran’s fabled existence is, slowly but steadily, pushed into the realms of life and gender brutality. In the beginning, Nooran is very aesthetically ostracized from a community that resents her independence and mystery. Her grandmother, Zubeida (Waheeda Rehman), is a veteran of the craft, and trains Nooran by making her sing to the dunes in the moonlight. Aadam pursues her playfully, even getting thrashed by the locals for being too forceful with his flirting.
But as the film wears on, the fantasy of it all is punctured by pockets of jarring reality. Every now and then, a motorbike or jeep appears to wrench the viewer out of the film’s purported timelessness. It’s like watching a beast rearing its head through the rotting flesh of beauty. The penny drops when one night, Nooran gets betrayed by the darkness. The illusion is shattered, her grandmother disappears, and Nooran is left to grieve the death of her former self. The fiction consciously succumbs to the whims of fact. She loses her singing voice, and locks herself away from the stigmatic whispers of the village. At her lowest, Aadam reappears and offers to marry her, like a Knight in Rustic Armour. With nothing left to lose or gain – after being reduced to yet another Indian woman who must process obligation as love – Nooran agrees. Aadam, a widower with a daughter, hopes to nurse her back to the magical confines of lore. He hopes to heal her and rediscover the voice that might restore her reputation as a healer. In a way, he is willing the film to remember the folktale it was; only this time, he wants to be the teller.