Filmi Geek

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)

গুপী গাইন বাঘা বাইন

Dir. Satyajit Ray

I don't so much want to analyze this amazing film as revel in the sense of wonder it creates.  It is pure fantasy, what with its dancing ghosts, sinister magicians, an entire kingdom under enchantment that renders it subjects mute, and long-lost brother kings.  It is visually thrilling, imaginative, trippy, and delightful. All in support of a simple fable that transports you into a magical, musical world.

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne's two main characters, Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh), start the movie hapless and a little stupid, or at least cripplingly naive. Goopy, longing to move the hearts of others with his singing, and Bagha, with dreams of rousing people with his drumming, have each been run out of their respective villages for being absolutely awful musicians, and they seem a quintessential pair of slightly dim, easily duped folks, archetypal fools.  But by the end of the film they prove themselves strong-hearted and resourceful heroes.  They get some help, for sure, in the form of three wishes granted them by a ghost king.  But what they do with the power they are given is all them.  Their efforts win them the admiration of a king (Santosh Dutta), outsmart a villainous usurper (Jahor Roy), reunite long lost brothers, and avert a war, and through all this they never lose their sweet smiling innocence.  It's hard not to love them.

 
Goopy and Bagha in their default state: "Uh....";  the ghost king who takes pity on them. 

As charming as Goopy and Bagha are, though, I have to wonder how Ray, who can be so extraordinarily sensitive to the way women are bound and restricted in his society, could tell a story in which there are no women whatsoever, except until the final scene in which the kings' daughters are gifted to our young heroes as prizes for their noble efforts.  The omission is notable, and discomfiting.  It's just one film, just one story, but it is also a beloved film aimed in the direction of children, with its uncomplicated fable of a story and playfully silly visual design.  And the message little girls get with the pervasiveness and repetition of stories like these is that there is no place for them in the world at large, no need for them to travel to distant lands, no opportunity to influence world affairs, no role to play except to stand silent and bashful as their fathers hand them off to suitably big-hearted young men.  Stories like these reinforce and perpetuate the very cultures that create the caged and dissatisfied Charulatas, the othered and dehumanized Devis that Ray exposes with such a deft hand in many of his other works.   

 
The brother kings reunited; the usurper and his mischievous magician (with deely bobbers!).

But if I set that wart aside (how many films must one say this about, Indian or otherwise!) what a splendidly bubbling fountain of delights is Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.  There have been times when I have fallen prey to the cliché of describing a sweet gentle film as a confection. But Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is not so much a confection as it is the copious rain of mithai that Goopy cleverly conjures to distract the enemy soldiers while he spirits away their good but enchanted king.  As the men stuff their faces with these sweets from the sky, we too can stuff our eyeballs with the wonder that Ray conjures.  

The film's first twenty minutes look like any other Ray village tale - a young man in a dhoti-kurta ambles about a dusty, sun-baked countryside, a group of grizzled old fellows huddle in the shade of a pipal tree.  And then the ghost dance happens, imaginative and trippy with its thrumming drumbeat and its use of black art, masking, and negatives.  Graceful dancers slither across the screen, white figures whirling, only to be replaced by the toddling shadows of chubby panjandrums. By the time the ghost king himself appears, all fangs and fluorescent spots, we know we're not in Kansas any more.

 
More scenes from the ghosts' dance.

That is only the beginning of the magnificent visuals.  What is to follow is downright Seussian - curly slippers with grinning faces that are somehow both sinister and friendly; a king sporting a giant turban topped by a sort of chimney; a wizard (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) with mirrored sunglasses and deely-bobber antennae two feet long.  It is a most colorful display of visual magic, despite being rendered in black-and-white.  And speaking of not being in Kansas, like The Wizard of Oz, Goopy toggles from black-and-white to color at a key point in the story. But while the switch in that 1939 film signals the passage from reality into a magical hyper-reality, here it does something a little different, marking a new stage of life for Bagha and Goopy, an entirely new status.  And Bagha appears completely startled by it.    

 
Shoes given by the ghost king are not only enchanted but stylish; Goopy cleverly conjures a rain of pots of mithai to distract the enemy soldiers. 

When the ghost king grants Goopy and Bagha the power to mesmerize people with their music, the songs they sing are fun little narrative embellishments, describing the scene or the action.  The songs are as impish as the visuals. Indeed, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne exposes a playful side of Ray that doesn't surface in most of his socially significant dramas.  There are hints of it in the humor of Shatranj ke Khiladi, but that film was anchored in history and a sharp sociopolitical message. Goopy takes the realistic Awadhi court of Shatranj ke Khiladi through the looking glass, emerging in a dreamworld where dopes can become princes by clicking their heels and wishing for buckets full of mithai.  And its world is an utterly delightful place to visit. 

Baahubali (2015)

Dir. S.S. Rajamouli

When I first started watching Hindi movies, ten years ago, it took me a while to adjust to its storytelling idioms.  Its styles, archetypes, and antecedents were all unfamiliar to me.  With respect to the masala films of the 70s, some of which I watched quite early on in my studies, I have called this learning process "surrendering to the aesthetic."  But the process applies beyond masala, as the same narrative traditions that inform masala storytelling also influence other types of films.  

Obviously, Southern films draw on their own set of narrative traditions, their own idioms and archetypes. These are not entirely disjoint from those of Hindi films, but are nevertheless different. And I think at least a part of why the very evident craft of Baahubali is wasted on me is that I don't have sufficient familiarity with them to fully surrender to its aesthetic.  

I don't mean the visual aesthetic; the visuals of Baahubali are undeniably breathtaking, especially the towering and splendid waterfall scenes early on in the film.  The sweeping renderings of the palace complex where much of the film takes place are grand and impressive, of enormous scale and spectacle.  What takes adjustment for me is the narrative aesthetic of Baahubali, not the visual.  

The film's title character has two incarnations, both played by a curly-locked, barrel-chested, golden-smiled Prabhas: Shivu, a gentle giant of a young man who lives at the base of the waterfall and dreams of reaching its summit, and in flashback, as Shivu's biological father, a warrior prince of the mountain kingdom that Shivu eventually finds there.  In either avatar, Baahubali is a flawless superhero, spending most of the film Heroing Around Heroically.  

There is a gulf between the ordinary suspension of disbelief that movies require, and the complete dispensing with any nominal ties to physical reality that happens in a movie where a single man can support the weight of a hundred-foot-tall solid-gold statue.  Baahubali's demi-divine feats surely have a mythological resonance, drawn from classical epic episodes.  When Shivu, falling from a cliff, fires a precise, improbable arrow at a small stump of a tree, it recollects Arjun's feat of marksmanship at Draupadi's swayamvar.  Baahubali's superhuman strength recalls that of Bheema in the Mahabharata, or of Hanuman.  Perhaps it is this cultural fabric that lends appeal and entertainment value to a character like Baahubali and his extra-physical exploits, and makes them a hallmark of a certain South Indian cinematic style.

If all of this sounds very intellectual, it is.  There is yet a lot for me to learn from watching movies like Baahubali, but there is more of intellectual pleasure in it than emotional engagement. Superheroes bore me.  Baahubali is so powerful that nothing much challenges him. Throw one enemy or four or twenty at him, he will overcome them with identical violence.  And as if his physical strength isn't superhuman enough, he is so relentlessly good that he never makes mistakes, either tactically or morally.  His every decision is noble, his every word is truthful, his every obligation is honored. That the narrative centralizes on such a preternaturally gifted - and hence, to me, preternaturally dull - character just highlights the ways in which I do not have the right cultural calibration to be enthralled by a movie such as Baahubali.  

The warrior with whom Shivu falls in love, Avantika (Tamannah) begins with more narrative potential, but Baahubali, frustratingly, quashes it in short order.  Avantika is a serious badass; she lives with a band of rebel warriors, dedicated to rescuing the queen who has been held in captive humiliation for a quarter century by the usurper of Baahubali's throne. And while this mission drives Avantika, she also shows some hints of longing, or at least wondering, whether there is more to life.  The film assigns an infuriating interpretation to this longing:  As Shivu divines and then imposes on Avantika, all this fierce warrior girl really wants is to be pretty, adorn herself with makeup and jewelry, and twirl about in diaphanous skirts.  And as Shivu tears off Avantika's warrior clothes and decorates her to his liking, Avantika's indignation melts into desire, invoking that timeless idea that a woman's objection to being tossed about and disrobed is really just an invitation. 

This is not merely a matter of balancing Avantika's warrior impulse with something more socially feminine; rather, the film is rather literal in declaring the warrior persona a mask, and the soft-and-pretty persona Avantika's "true self", and the only expression of her womanhood that could truly satisfy her.  This disrespect for Avantika's drive culminates in Shivu's unilateral usurpation of her mission.  Though Shivu admits he knows nothing about the quest for which Avantika has trained her whole life, he announces that he will save the queen for her, and she need not worry her pretty little head about it any longer.  Shivu doesn't offer to join Avantika's quest; rather, he shoves her aside and takes her place in it.  In short, Avantika exists as a device, merely to give purpose to the hero's superhuman masculinity. It's Shivu's job to Be The Hero, and Avantika's job, as a woman, to supply him opportunities for heroism.  And so her own opportunity for heroism becomes his to claim away from her.  

It was somewhere around here that I tweeted, "This is all so wasted on me."  But I am not completely without capacity to be entertained by spectacle, and there are parts of the film that I do find quite enjoyable.  The early sequences with the backdrop of the massive waterfall are spectacular.  And the sequence in which the young barrel-chested hero hoists the shivlingam and trudges it across the rapids and down the slope is delightful. He does this to save his beloved mother a thousand and one treacherous trips to the Shiva shrine and back, as she prays for his safety.  Te sequence is, of course, an illustration of Shivu's superhuman strength - the shivlingam presumably weighs several tons. But it is also a clever way to show the young man's love for his mother, such a staple quality of Indian heroes that a new and sweet way to demonstrate it is always welcome.  More than that, it reveals a streak of playfulness and even irreverence in the strong-armed one, and is one of the more sparkling moments of character that he gets in the film, as contrasted with superheroic heroism.  

There are other characters who, unburdened by a shivlingam's weight in heroic requirements, get to have more character throughout, and these are enjoyable as well.  The bodyguard-armsmaster-slave Kattappa (Sathyaraj) is the film's most interesting character, with his ever-shifting obligations yet never-wavering loyalty. (That the film's cliffhanger centers on him may be enough for me to watch the sequel, despite being underwhelmed by this first installment.) He is introduced in a delightfully filmi encounter with a Pathan arms dealer, who, having challenged Kattappa to a duel and been defeated at it, becomes his friend for life, Sher Khan style.  

The other women who, like Avantika, provide heroic opportunities for our uber-man are also fun to watch, despite their ancillary standing.  The captive queen Devasena (Anushka) constantly sports a mad expression of defiance that is delightfully over-the-top.  And the previous queen Sivagami (Ramya Krishnan), the adoptive mother of the warrior-prince version of Baahubali, is magnificently fierce, making her statecraft decisions in a rational, considered manner, yet not shrinking from violence when it is necessary. When Sivagami draws a knife and cuts and armed man's throat with one hand while cradling a tiny baby with the other, it is every bit as improbable as any of Baahubali's feats.  Yet it is tremendously more satisfying, somehow, both for its emotion and for what it conveys about Sivagami, as a character and as an archetype. 

And so there are points of engagement for me that prick through the otherwise stifling fabric of this movie, woven as it is with a warp of Baahubali's relentless flawlessness and a weft of interminable melee and battle scenes.  (I feel caught up in one of Baahubali's clever tentcloth-and-catapult-stone contrivances, before he sets it on fire.)  I know this is the stuff of entertaining movies for lots of folks but I just find the endless fight scenes oppressive.  I can't bear the violence for its own sake, and the film makes a crucial error in failing to assign any narrative importance to the enemy, the Kalakeyas, apart from being convenient landing points for maces and spears.  Even leaving aside the racist caricatures that they embody, the Kalakeyas are an unforgivably lazy plot device, an enemy manufactured from air when the film wants to provide a large-scale battle, rather than a foe woven organically into the backstory.  In a film that wants to be an epic there is room to give the battle some emotional heft, to create an enemy that matters in some way, but Baahubali cannot be bothered with this, and it's both a wasted opportunity, and an insult to the audience.  

To pass the time in the insufferable final half hour of the film, I forced myself to ponder the impressive technical craft that must have gone in to creating these battle scenes.  They are surely a marvel, especially the sweeping long shots with tens of thousands of soldiers.  Narratively, though, they are unbearably dull.  The story screeches to a halt while swords clash, bones crunch, blood spurts. How many blackfaced enemy skulls must we watch getting clocked with maces, before we get the point?   

Given the huge success of Baahubali, the vast number of people of many perspectives and backgrounds who are enthralled by its scope and story, I do feel I've missed the boat, in that the best enjoyment I have got from it came not from watching it, but from pondering why it's so crushingly dull for me and so brilliantly compelling for others.  There are certain films I wouldn't watch if they weren't Indian, and Baahubali is one of these.  The corollary is that what interests me about Baahubali is primarily what is especially Indian about it.  And so I don't regret having seen it, for what it's given me to think about.      

OK Kanmani (2015)

Dir. Mani Ratnam

It's difficult not to compare this movie to Shuddh Desi Romance, as both take on the charged topic of a young couple living together without marriage.  The trouble is that it's not at all a fair fight; OK Kanmani bests Shuddh Desi Romance by a wide margin in just about every aspect.  Its characters are more rounded and likable; their background and motivations are fleshed out enough to provide some meaning to their resistance to marriage; their relationship to the world outside their relationship carries force and substance; the movie is more balanced in focus, showing us events sometimes from the young man's perspective, and sometimes from the young woman's.  It is so much a better movie than Shuddh Desi Romance that I'll stop comparing them right now, and focus instead only on OK Kanmani's own merits, which are plentiful.

To start with the basics, I've observed before that romance movies share a narrative challenge with sports movies:  You know how the story is going to end, so the movie had better make you care how it gets there.  In a romance, if you aren't invested in how the principals find their way to happily ever after, you have better ways to use your time than to watch the movie.  OK Kanmani's romance is gentle and sweet; the relationship grows delightfully and the lead pair's happiness is thoroughly engaging.  Tara (Nithya Menen), an apprentice architect, and Adi (Dulquer Salmaan), a video-game designer, are both averse to the idea of marriage.  Both are rising stars in their fields, and the prospect of career advancement abroad makes each of them reluctant to forge ties at home.  Too, Tara's parents' divorce has left her with a bitter view of marriage as only a source of anguish.  And so when Adi and Tara fall for each other they pledge to live in the moment, enjoying the time they have together before their respective ambitions take them to different continents.  

Their joy together is conveyed from many angles; Mani Ratnam presses into service every device imaginable, from cheerful song montages, to teasing banter and jokes played on one another, to stolen touches and kisses that project their unrestrainable desire.  The people around them perceive their joy as well and share in it; this is not the kind of relationship that isolates lovers in their own world, but one that their friends see and believe in.  Contrary to filmi convention, even their families support the match, though they adamantly want to see the couple married, not living together as lovers.

What starts to steer Tara's and Adi's minds toward the notion that commitment might not be so bad after all is perhaps the sweetest aspect of OK Kanmani:  The relationship of their landlord, Ganapathy (Prakash Raj) and his wife Bhavani (Leela Samson), a famous Carnatic singer now slipping into the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.  Ganapathy is a gruff, orderly man; when Adi moves in to Ganapathy's guest room, the older man squints at him skeptically and barks a list of rules.  But Ganapathy treats Bhavani with patient tenderness that all but awes Adi.  When Adi asks Ganapathy and Bhavani to let Tara move in with him, Ganapathy is, as you would expect, thoroughly opposed to such a relationship under his roof.  But just a few minutes watching Tara sing with Bhavani, watching the music bring the life back to his beloved wife's face, softens Ganapathy, and he lets the couple share the room. There is no limit to what he can tolerate to make Bhavani happy, and with each gesture of support that Adi witnesses, he is moved and inspired toward building that kind of bond with Tara.

Tara, too, has resistances to overcome before the pair can reach their happy ending, and the film doesn't short-change these; OK Kanmani is very much both Tara's and Adi's story, not just Adi's.  Tara is as moved by Ganapathy and Bhavani as Adi, but she is also increasingly aware of her own sense of loss as the time of her separation from Adi - he to the US, she to Paris - approaches.  In a pensive moment she tells Ganapathy that she feels both tremendous joy for what she has, and tremendous grief for what is coming to an end.  And while Adi hides his trepidation (sometimes effectively and sometimes less so) behind a facade of smirks and jokes, Tara grows increasingly vulnerable.   

All of this is rendered with both vividness and compassion; both the lead actors give performances that add dimension and resonance to the script.  Nithya Menen is especially grounded and effective; she brings to Tara a hugely appealing mixture of youth without ingenuousness, agency without rashness, confidence without swagger.  Tara is a refreshingly competent young woman, able to articulate her convictions and live by them, and also, when circumstances require, able to question them without a complete meltdown of character.  When Tara and Adi fall for each other, they do it with appealing symmetry; Adi's attraction to Tara is transparent, but Tara too is not afraid either to articulate her desire or to act on it.  Nor is she coy about her ambitions and what they mean for the relationship's long-term prospects.  Adi brings perhaps a touch less maturity to the table, but he is far from the overgrown horny man-child that one all too frequently sees in romance movies - and most importantly, he is sensitive enough to understand what the universe is trying to teach him through the example of Ganapathy and Bhavani.  

The result is an uncomplicated  and utterly delightful romance, not weighed down by lots of symbolism or a heavy-handed message or a politically significant backdrop.  It is nothing more - and nothing less - than an engaging and wonderful story about kind-hearted people finding their way toward happiness.    

Astitva (2000)

अस्तित्व

Dir. Mahesh Manjrekar

I give Astitva full marks for trying.  It is courageous in its determination to say things about female desire that are rarely said, not just in the movies but in societal discourse at large.  It offers a woman, Aditi (Tabu), neglected by her husband for months on end while he travels abroad for business.  Lonely and hungry for contact, Aditi gives in to many months of pent-up desire and sleeps with her music teach Malhar Kamat (Mohnish Bahl).  Many years later, Aditi's husband Shree (Sachin Khedkar) discovers this secret that Aditi has kept, and that their son Aniket (Sunil Barve) is Malhar Kamat's, not his.  Shree is mortified - his pride assaulted, he perceives his manhood called into question - and he scorns Aditi and and their marriage.

In Astitva, Aditi is the aggrieved party, by far the more sympathetic character. Her tryst with Malhar Kamat is presented as an understandable response to deep neglect by a deeply self-absorbed man, a moment of weakness which she powerfully regrets, and for which she atones with decades of silent and absolute devotion to her family.  Astitva does not judge Aditi for having sexual needs or for giving into them.  To the contrary, the film's very point is that women, just like men, experience sexual desire, but unlike men, are expected to subjugate that desire to satisfying the needs of men, securing their egos, and keeping them happy at any cost.

The film unequivocally takes Aditi's side. It does so by making Shree a cartoonishly self-absorbed jerk.  You can almost imagine how his mother must have doted on him; this is a man who was raised to believe the universe begins and ends with his needs and desires and comfort.  There is no doubt that such men exist, but it is narratively lazy for Shree to be quite so repugnant.  Astitva also stacks the deck in its portrayal of society at large, which is represented here by an old friend of Shree's, Ravi (Ravindra Mankani) and his progressive divorcee wife Meghna (Smita Jaykar). These two are relentlessly critical of Shree and supportive of Aditi, which is nice, but doesn't seem especially realistic.  Wouldn't the society that creates men like Shree be likely to support the worldview it inculcates in him?  There could have been someone in the film to take that point of view. 

Still, in Astitva's strong moments, it goes places that movies rarely - if ever - dare to go.  Aditi's final speech ticks off a list of talking points that become increasingly bold and shocking.  She observes that women have desires, same as men.  Shree has affairs with women while he is on the road, but expects complete fidelity from her, alone at home for long stretches.  So, she asks him in nearly these words, what is she supposed to do when she gets horny?  This is already a remarkable acknowledgement of female sexual desire, on par with the Shabana Azmi's speech at the climax of Fire.  Aditi goes further, though.  She upbraids Shree for satisfying his own needs without restraint and even without consent. "You have raped me many times," she says.  The idea that sex within a marriage can be rape is not universally accepted (particularly in India) now, a decade and a half later.  It is a very bold position for a movie to take. 

It is also Astitva at its best.  It takes until these final few minutes for Tabu to wake up from a lifeless, morose performance and finaly bring some energy to the role.  It is good, an intense and quiet sort of energy, and it is worthy of Tabu, but it comes at the end of a dull, unsubtle, largely artless film.  Despite its courageous and important ideas, Astitva's execution is terribly flawed.  The movie beats you about the head with the cudgel of Shree's sexism and egotism.  In one scene, Shree belittles Aditi in front of Ravi and Meghna, insists no woman in his family will ever work, and opens and reads a certified letter delivered for Aditi.  In the next scene, Meghna, alone with Ravi, exclaims that Shree is "a male chauvinist pig!"  Thank you, scriptwriters - I could not have figured that out on my own without Meghna to make it explicit.  And who says "male chauvinist pig" anyhow? 

It is a mystery why so many movies about social issues - and especially feminist ones - suffer from such ham-fisted execution.  From Amu to Lajja, Bawandar to Water, and even, I admit, my cherished Fire, many message films have had righteous intent but been badly miscalibrated.  Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal were able to construct delicate narratives,  conveying their messages in films like Charulata and Ankur through stories, emotions, and symbolism.   Astitiva, though, is stiflingly literal, and suffers from an aggravating excess of exposition.  Aditi's relationship with Malhar Kamat is shown in flashback songs and images, but these are narrated by Aditi in voiceover.  Instead of interpreting a narrative of loneliness and desire, we learn from Aditi's say-so that she felt lonely and desirous. Similarly, we know of Shree's affairs only because his friend mentions them; this, too, could have been shown instead of narrated.  In place of engaging narrative and characters, in place of subtlety and theme, we get bare exposition and bombastic dialogue.

Nor is there much in the way of visual symbolism or artistry.  The film is staged like a play, and not a very well-wrought one.  One notable exception is a song in which Aditi rolls around in the grass looking very amorous indeed (need it be said that Tabu does this staggeringly well?), and eventually gazes lustily at a hunky Mohnish Bahl, twirling in a rain-soaked white kurta; here, for once, we are invited to share an experience with a character, and are shown rather than told what she feels.  Too, the scene is a clever visual turn, upending the customary male-gaze centered rain scene.  

 

Uff.

Otherwise, though, visual presentation simply seems unimportant to Manjrekar.  There is not even an attempt to age the characters, though the film's present and flashback time frames are separated by 25 years.  So 50-year old Aditi is indistinguishable from 25-year-old Aditi, except perhaps for the addition of spectacles.  While it's true that the aging of characters is rarely convincing, the absence of even a nod in its direction is distracting;  Tabu plays the mother of an actor five years her senior (Barve) without so much as a dusting of grey in her hair.

And so, while the message of Astitva is important, refreshing, and brave, it is somewhat lost in the earnest unsubtlety and failure of cinematic craft.  I want to love Astitva for even acknowledging that women experience lust, so rare is this basic statement of female humanity.  But instead of being a compelling and provocative film, Astitva is an over-eager after school special, a Very Special Episode, but just not a very artful piece of cinema.       

Barnali (1963)

বর্ণালী

Dir. Ajoy Kar

Beth's thoughtful discussion of this tender Bengali film dwells mostly on its love story. You should go and read it, because on that subject I don't have a lot to add. As Beth notes, the romance is underscored by a social theme: The cravenness of rich people, and the nobility of poor.

The worst of the rich is embodied in our hero's uncle, who may as well twist his moustache. His rapaciousness is explicit, even in his own words; he as much as asks why he would invite someone to his daughter's wedding who could be of no use to him? And when he rates someone worthy, or potentially useful, he twists himself into knots to please them, feigning interest in their interests, kowtowing and scraping and brown-nosing like a seasoned pro. He is repulsive to watch.

Our hero himself, Ashesh (Soumitra Chatterjee) floats above this plane. While it is clear that Ashesh thinks his uncle's conduct wrong, for most of the film he fails to challenge it, following instead the least-resistance path of doing whatever his uncle asks. Ashesh certainly enjoys the privileges of his station and his wealth, but to his credit he does so without ostentation. He is matter-of-fact about his huge, marble-appointed home, his access to cars and servants. He takes things for granted that are hardly even dreamed of by the girl he falls for, Aloka (a radiantly young Sharmila Tagore), the daughter of a modest schoolteacher who lives with her modest family in a modest home. In one telling scene, Ashesh leaves Aloka alone in a richly decorated room of his sprawling mansion. Aloka grows increasingly alarmed at the perceived abandonment. Ashesh, on his return, is incomprehending of her anger; you don't think I'd leave you alone? he asks her. He tells her that the manservant was around, and the cook, and the driver, a bustling household full of people whom it would not occur to Aloka to turn to for help, who she might not even be aware are present.

But while Ashesh handles his wealth and privilege with a certain amount of nonchalance, while he is naïve and (at least early on) yielding to his uncle's authority, he is nevertheless a good guy, acting gently and without entitlement. Contrast with Ashesh's friend, a young scholar who breaks an engagement with Aloka without so much as telling her.  He does this because he has the opportunity to marry a girl with considerably more money and status, Ashesh's cousin, the daughter of Ashesh's awful uncle. Ashesh is disgusted with his friend's venal and cowardly betrayal of Aloka, enough so that it seems friendship-ending.  At this point in the film, though, Ashesh keeps his contempt to himself; while we have the sense he knows right from wrong, and has no intention of associating further with that friend, he is not yet ready to speak truth to power.

And so Aloka, serious and proud and alert, presents a contrast to the easy, comfortable wealth of Ashesh and his friends, and their sometimes reprehensible beahvior; Ashesh's conversations with Aloka begin to draw him down the path of standing up to both the petty and grievous wrongs he sees around him.  Aloka is bristly and challenges Ashesh's complacency in a way no one ever has before, and Ashesh is both moved and attracted by the challenge.  And Aloka's father provides the stark contrast to Ashesh's insufferable uncle. He is the picture of grace and humility, ready to think the best of people and give them second chances, but maintaining his moral standards throughout. And we presume it is the model of Aloka's father that finally inspires Ashesh to challenge his uncle's worldview to his face.

But we must presume, because for some reason this is not shown. Ashesh and his uncle take a car ride together, offscreen, and at the end of this ride the uncle has had a change of heart, offering sincere apologies to the humble and forgiving schoolteacher. Perhaps the message is that public shaming is not an effective tool of social change, but that the seeds of humanity must be sown in private, in one heart at a time.

   
Proto-Sharmila is so pretty.