Director: Amol Gole
Writer: Sanjeev K. Jha
Cast: Akanksha Pingle, Smita Tambe, Nitin Bhajan, Divyesh Indulkar
My heart sinks when I see a film stuck in a bygone era by virtue of being a children’s film. Most Indian stories based on the young tend to use their demographic as an excuse to look hopelessly old. All the signs are there with Sumi, Amol Gole’s National-award winning Marathi movie about a 12-year-old village girl who dreams of owning a bicycle to commute to her faraway school. It has that dated Doordarshan (DD) tone – a hybrid of an Amar Chitra Katha visual aesthetic and casio-and-flute music aesthetic. The dialogue is simple to a fault. Every other scene fades to black. Kids sound older than their age because they’re written by adults. The treatment lacks personality; professional actors range from dishevelled to jaded in appearance to fit their rural roles, and everyone is forced to behave one shade sadder than they should be.
Yet, Sumi is slightly different from the thousand other cycle-centric children’s films out there. Which is to say: The filmmaking might be antiquated, but its storytelling isn’t. There are times when it plays on our notions of the genre. For instance, Sumi doesn’t open at the “beginning”. The titular character, Sumi (Akanksha Pingle), is already sulking because her father (Nitin Bhajan) – a modest stone quarry worker – can’t afford to continue paying for her education. She topped her seventh standard exams, and she’s clearly an enthusiastic student who’s had a taste of school life. Most movies might have shown us the moment she is denied her shot at a future. They might have established Sumi’s popularity in class, and all that she stands to lose, before her parents hit her with the bombshell. They might have even amplified the stakes of missing the academic year. But Sumi implies. None of the backstory is seen – the film opens with the girl morosely delivering lunch to her father at the quarry. She’s in a funk; all the drama is over. She is barely on talking terms with him.