Twins from a Temple Town

My Mirror column for 8 May 2016:

Two recent Marathi films use a very similar set of ingredients to create different portraits of Pandharpur.

Films with a sense of place are always a joy. I recently watched two Marathi films — Ringan and Elizabeth Ekadashi — set in the pilgrim town of Pandharpur. Like much recent Marathi cinema, following in the footsteps of Iranian cinema in particular and neo-realist cinema in general, both featured child actors in central roles. 

Elizabeth Ekadashi, directed by Paresh Mokashi (whose earlier Harishchandrachi Factory was India's entry to the Oscars that year), was 2014's National Award winner for Best Children's Film. The plot combines a children's adventure story with a heartwarming moral lesson: a schoolgoing brother-sister pair from Pandharpur (Shrirang Mahajan and Sayali Bhandarkavathekar) decide to set up a stall during Ashadhi Ekadashi (the height of pilgrim season). Their plan is to earn a bit of money, defying their single mother's strict instructions — but only to help her repay a debt. 

Elizabeth Ekadashi opens with the ritual bathing of the idol in a Pandharpur temple, intercut with the equally tender bathing of a bicycle. The bicycle, it turns out, is called Elizabeth — the children's most treasured possession, not just because it reminds them of their late father, from whom it was a gift, but because it allows them access to the town in a way they could not have had without it. Mokashi's film uses the children's natural energy to help develop a lively sense of space —mapping the back terrace of their neighbour's house which offers them a secret escape route, following the kids as they sprint through the web of narrow lanes, allowing us to experience the swelling crowds and festive madness through their dazzled eyes, all the while emphasising the smallness of a town in which a child can barely avoid being recognized. 

That town, as the film shows irrefutably, is pivoted around the temple to Lord Vitthala, an avatar of Vishnu. Yet apart from naming his child-hero Dnyanesh, after the thirteenth century saint associated with Pandharpur, Mokashi steers largely clear of the religious aspect of his locale. Dnyanesh, in fact, sings kirtans in praise of science, anointing Newton and Einstein as gods. 

Makarand Mane's debut feature Ringan (The Quest), which is this year's National Award winner for Best Marathi film, is very different in its emphasis. A farmer, aging before his time, makes the journey to Pandharpur with his little boy because three successive years of drought have driven them to bankruptcy. The premise itself suggests the hope of divine intervention. "The one we're going to visit now, he will certainly help us," says the farmer to his tired, irritable son, who just wants to turn around and go back home. 

But their time in Pandharpur starts badly. In a plot twist clearly inspired by De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, a man steals the scooter, cellphone and money that are literally the duo's last possessions. The police are unhelpful, and father and son end up in the beggars' queue outside the temple. Here Mane's film, in contrast to Mokashi's, directly raises the question of belief, by placing the distressed farmer in conversation first with a spiritual figure on the ghats, and then in a bitter monologue addressed to a old stone statue of Vitthala that he finds lying on the street. 

Mane's ethical landscape is a little too heavily underlined, but his canvas is painted with a deliberate beauty. As long as things are going badly, the camera pans the dusty browns of Maharashtra's drought-ridden regions, coming to rest on the rough stone walls, the drab khaki uniforms, crusty ground and dry bhakri. A change is his characters' fortunes is visually marked by colour - literally heaps of gulaal: scarlet, pink, vermilion - and by the soothing, quenching sight of water. 

Ringan's silent moments are affecting, but its overarching message is cloying. Bicycle Thieves inspires the climax, too — the poor man pushed to the brink of disaster being tempted into abandoning his honesty, and his tragic fall from good faith being witnessed by his little son. There is little newness here, but Mane achieves something special with his actors — the lined face of Shashank Shende, which relaxes into a grin only when he sees one on the face of the adorable curly-haired Abdu (Sahil Joshi). 

There is a bicycle in Ringan, too — a gift to little Abdu from his father. As in Elizabeth Ekadashi, the bicycle allows the child to explore the town, and us to see it through his bewildered eyes. 

Children and bicycles, an adult with an unpaid debt, a posse of pilgrims and the temptation of easy money — the building blocks of Mokashi and Mane's films are strikingly similar. Even the sex workers of Pandharpur appear in both, seen through the eyes of children. If Mokashi makes a gently subversive joke about the way they're usually treated, Mane creates a more convoluted plot-line that involves Abdu's uncomprehending quest for his dead mother. That, too, is the quest of the film's title. I only wish its resolution had been less mawkish.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 May 2016.

Picture This: The Wide-Eyed Angle

My BLink column this month: 

What is it about seeing through the child’s eye that makes for such sensitive films? Recent Marathi cinema, like de Sica and Ray, seems to have taken childhood as its favoured locale.

This past week, I finally watched Killa, one of those Marathi films that won a loyal viewership last year. I wasn’t disappointed. Avinash Arun’s coming-of-age tale is full of understated charm. For one, it is beautifully shot, capturing the magic of a Konkan seaside village, without ever making it seem too unbelievably lush. Torrential monsoon rain punctuates the film, producing both momentousness and foreboding whilst steering clear of both the high drama and romance that rain now signals in popular Indian cinema. Alongside the ruined fort of the film’s title, the rough palm-fringed beach with its few fishing boats and a vast calm sea stretching into the distance, the rain is also integral to creating Killa’s exceptionally vivid sense of place.

It helps that we’re seeing this world through a fresh pair of eyes: those of an 11-year-old called Chinmay (Chinu for short), who has just moved to the village. Chinu is a city boy from Pune, and even as he finds his new schoolwork unchallenging and his new classmates rough and unimpressive, we watch him delight in the undeniable quiet beauty of his altered surroundings: the forded stream, the mincing walk of crabs on the beach. Arun zooms in on those small things that seemed so large when we were kids: a gift, a letter, a promise, a visit. Here, too, place and time are made constantly relevant, positioning the film within a precise pre-liberalisation social geography — the cycle that impresses the boys is from Mumbai, the new-fangled pencil box is from Dubai, while the simple Konkani fare seems rustic to the Pune-bred boy.

What is it about seeing through the child’s eye that makes for such sensitive, observant cinema? Richard Tapper, in a 2002 book on the ‘new Iranian cinema’, makes the interesting observation that “children liberate plots by introducing non-essential actions — generally loafing around on a street or in a rural area”.

The Iranians, of course, specialise in translating the harsh, unseeing reality of the adult universe into a cinematic world where children can, for once, be the pivot of events. Over the last two decades, several talented Iranian directors, like Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven and The Colour of Paradise), Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon), Abbas Kiarostami (Where is My Friend’s Home?) and Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple), have chosen to focus on children’s worlds, working in the gentle Neorealist style associated with Vittoro de Sica’s Italian classic, Bicycle Thieves. Certainly, Bicycle Thieves is a model for a fluid, more spontaneous cinema, for a camera genuinely interested in its surroundings. The French film critic Andre Bazin had noted early on that Ladri de Biciclette was the quintessential Neorealist film because “not one scene [is] shot in the studio, everything is shot in the streets”. There were no highly paid professional actors, no real ‘plot’, no expensively produced setting. “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, there is no more cinema,” wrote Bazin.

Indian cinema had Satyajit Ray, who famously stated his artistic debt to Bicycle Thieves, and placed children at the heart of his own first feature. Though Ray’s film most certainly had a plot, based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel, he did cast non-professional actors — and the brother-sister pair Apu and Durga, lithe of limb and fleet of foot, were what made Pather Panchali unforgettable. As they stole fruit from neighbours, ran after the sweet-seller, listened for the train and got memorably drenched in a downpour, they produced a startlingly lovely visual and aural record of life in the Bengali village. And yet Ray’s coming-of-age tale was hardly romantic: the rural idyll killed off one child; the stricken family was forced to migrate to the city.

Recent Marathi cinema, following de Sica and Ray in its understated realism, seems also to have taken childhood as its favoured locale. Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni’s Vihir (The Well, 2009) turned the lively friendship between two adolescent boys as a take-off point for a meditation on identity, life and death. Rajesh Pinjani’s moving Baboo Band Baaja (2011), set in a family of traditional musicians who must play at the houses of village grandees, made its child protagonist the subject of a painful tussle between his aspirational mother and his less hopeful father. The shackles of caste were very much the unstated subject here. Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry (2013) spoke more clearly and stridently of the same issue, with the school and the village forming the grim setting for a layered, heartbreaking film about the humiliations of caste and the dreams of transcending it. Manjule has spoken openly of the film’s autobiographical origins. Sujay Dahake’s Shala (School, 2011), about adolescent romance and yearnings across the boundaries of class, reveals the clearly nostalgic gaze of the young filmmaker.

On the heels of Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan (2010) also came a few small-budget Hindi films reminiscing about ’80s childhoods: Shashi Sudigala’s Cycle Kick (2011) made a cycle the pivot of a tale about two not-well-off brothers — it even gets stolen, a la Bicycle Thieves — while Sanjivan Lal’s refreshing Bubble Gum (2011) dealt with the dynamics of an ’80s housing colony.

But for some reason, Marathi filmmakers appear to be the ones overwhelmingly interested in childhood. And these coming-of-age narratives seem, more often than not, to be adaptations of their own experience.

Perhaps what is surprising is not that there are so many such films, but that there aren’t more of them. After all, even if the necessary 15-minute bachpan sequence has practically disappeared from our popular films, memories of childhood are the most cinematic thing we all have in our heads.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.