Filmi Geek

Kaphal - Wild Berries (2013)

Dir. Batul Mukhtiar

The boundaries of the "children's movie" genre are not always that sharp.  Animated tales of talking animals or talking toys, stuffed with silly but innocent humor, are unambiguously children's movies, even if they feature snarky asides or subtexts that only adults appreciate.  Movies about children are often, but not always, also movies for children.  (Is Beasts of the Southern Wild a children's movie?)

Batul Mukhtiar's Kaphal - Wild Berries is a movie about children, and about other things as well.  And it is certainly a children's movie, but it is certainly more than that as well.  Set in a remote mountain village and featuring an outcast hermit whom the village children find creepy and supernatural, it invites - and merits - comparison to Vishal Bharadwaj's The Blue Umbrella and Makdee.  And like these two movies, Kaphal trandscends its children's movie classification.  It does so with a rich, multilayered narrative; Kaphal's deceptively simple story reaches wide-ranging themes.

The Uttarakhand village of Kaphal is a village without young men.  All the village's working-age men migrate to the city to find work to support their families, left behind and waiting for them.  In exploring this not-uncommon reality of rural India, Kaphal reveals its ripples and reverberations through the entire village and beyond.  The boys Makar (Harish Rana) and Kamru (Pawan Negi) boast of their absent father, puffed with both admiration and expectation.  When Kailash (Subrat Dutta) finally does return, the boys' reverence for the Kailash of their imaginations is broken, in need of repairs like the beloved remote-control helicopter that the boys chase down switchbacked mountain trails.  These themes - absence transforming love almost into legend, the inevitable disappointment of reality - can resonate for kids and grownups alike. 

Kailash's own experience adds a subtler, more mature layer to Kaphal's story.  Kailash returns home to find that in the village there is literally nothing for him to do.  His children don't behave the way he expects them to.  And the village hums along without its able-bodied men; all the necessary work is done by those left behind.  Kaphal examines with delicacy the effect of this kind of helplessness on Kailash's sense of power, of what it is to be a man and a father.  Kaphal also takes on the closed-circuit tendencies of village communities, when the children go searching in the wilderness for Pagli Dadi (Sunita Rajwar), long exiled from the village on superstitions of witchcraft.  It is the open minds of the children that begins to bring Pagli Dadi back into the community fold.

As lush as Kaphal's themes - I haven't even touched on all of them - is the movie's canvas.  Gorgeously shot by Vivek Shah in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand, Kaphal presents a village so vibrant you can almost smell the mossy rocks and mountain earth. Mukhtiar selected local kids for the film, and their native agility as they scramble across steep stony slopes is thoroughly immersive.  The natural ease of the children makes them readily relatable to kids and thoroughly charming to adults, as Kaphal works its narrative magic on several levels at once.

Kaphal has been featured in several film festivals.  If you have the chance to see this touching, funny, memorable film, do yourself a favor and don't miss it.  Check the movie's blog for news.

 

Dedh Ishqiya (2014)

डेढ़ इश्क़िया

Dir. Abhishek Chaubey

There is a moment in Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya where Khalu (Naseeruddin Shah) almost breaks the fourth wall.  It's when Khalu's hapless, impulsive nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi) tries to pull him into a rigged kidnapping plot.  The expression on Khalu's face seems to say, "Seriously, another sham kidnapping? Didn't you see the first movie?"

An almost definitional element of the archetype of the lovable criminal is that he must be dumb as a box of hair.  Here, as in Ishqiya, Khalu has slightly more sense than his half-cocked nephew, but even so, he doesn't seem to have fully learned from his mistakes.  A con that begins for Khalu as a pretense of intellect, breeding, and charm once again becomes a fantasy so seductive to him that he starts to con himself.  Mysterious, beautiful, sad-eyed women are still not what they appear. There is a reason this movie is called Ishqiya one-and-a-half, and not Ishqiya 2 - it's not enough of a departure from the first chapter to merit an entire unit increment.

That's not a bad thing, though, especially when it's part of the point.  The two movies together become a sort of song cycle that conveys something about Khalu and Babban's characters that either alone does not:  There is a mythological cyclicality to their story, a quality of inevitability.  Their weakness for romance, the tenderness that foils their plans again and again, is what makes them terrible crooks, but it is also what redeems them, what makes them the good guys and makes villains out of guys like the leering, preening, greedy Jaan Muhammad (Vijay Raaz). 

I've come pretty far into this review without talking about the things you likely expected me to lead with.  Dedh Ishqiya is in some ways a movie I have waited all my life for, with its powerful middle-aged heroine and arguably lesbian relationship.  And yet when I sat down to write about the movie, these elements didn't resolve in the foreground.  They are not what Dedh Ishqiya is about.  Madhuri Dixit is marvelous as Begum Para, grave and beautiful, wearing her sadness like a chunari, but she is incidental.  Her backstory is filled in sketchily at best, and mostly through hasty exposition at the film's conclusion.  Her sorrows are cartoon outlines.  The script doesn't reveal why she gave up dance, only that she did.  What we learn of her husband's antics is trite, and fails to explain the evident thoroughness of her wounds. Begum Para is a prop, just as her mushaira is a plot contrivance.  Both exist to generate a story about Khalu.  

Begum Para's relationship with Muniya (Huma Qureshi) is deliberately ambiguous.  Enough - or little enough - is shown to maintain plausible deniability about whether the relationship is sexual; we are free to interpret it however we like.  Begum Para herself acknowledges that the relationship is ambiguous to its core - sister, friend, soulmate.  She does not say lover.  The ambiguity does not make the relationship fundamentally unsatisfying.  To the contrary, it is pleasing that these two women go to such great lengths to preserve a connection that only they understand, one that is not taxonomized or laid bare to the judgments and assessments of the male gaze. 

On balance, of course, Dedh Ishqiya is a fantastically entertaining movie, every bit as wry, silly, smart, sweet, and visually supple as its predecessor, with a generous helping of poetry and of course, Madhuri dancing a mujra.   It meets the high expectations I and many others had for it.  There's not much more one can ask from a movie.