`Photograph`
directed by Ritesh Batra had its London premiere on Saturday 29 June as the
closing night gala event of the 2019 London Indian Film Festival. I was drawn
to it because of Batra`s previous success with `The Lunchbox` (reviewed on this
blog at http://ramnikshah.blogspot.com/2014/04/) which had brought him universal
acclaim. Since then he has consolidated his fame internationally with films
such as `Our Souls at Night`, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, and `The
Sense of an Ending` (based on a novel by Julian Barnes, which I had lauded in
my 2011 Annual Review at http://ramnikshah.blogspot.com/2011/) also with top British actors. So his
directorial credentials are well established. For `Photograph` he
returned to his Indian roots and a desi tale and landscape in every
sense. I however found it disappointing.
According
to the programme notes, what Batra wanted was to move away from the typical
Bollywood fare of “plucky heroines who defy tradition and family” while being
“mindlessly pursued” by presumably vacuous men and who indulge in their youthful
shenanigans with “a goofy group of friends”, to create “an independent
arthouse film” depicting “a very real story about people living in Mumbai of
today”. So what is it about?
The
photograph of the title is the result of a chance encounter between “Rafi, a
Muslim villager living in the city trying to scratch out a living as a street
photographer” and “Miloni, a shy and traditionally raised middle-class
Mumbaikar”. That happens when Miloni is dreamily walking through the
crowds around the Gateway of India, having apparently disembarked from a ferry,
and Rafi accosts her with his pitch to have her picture taken. She
reluctantly agrees; he takes a succession of shots as professional
photographers do and while he is busy processing them she decamps and so he is
literally left holding the photograph!
Then we
learn about their back stories. She appears to be in her early 20s, a
graduate student doing a training course for the chartered accountancy
profession, who lives at home with her family – parents and a younger brother –
and a live-in cook servant. He on the other hand has no domestic life as
such, living as he does in a communal setting with a group of single men, all
from the same ethnic/religious background. But he does have a close
relationship with his grandmother, back in their distant ancestral village, who
had brought him and his siblings up after their parents early demise and who
continues to remain a strong, even controlling, influence, constantly urging
him to find someone to marry. Most of his daily conversations with his
after-work companions, as well as phone/text exchanges with his grandmother,
revolve around his marriage prospects, with much leg-pulling and banter.
Left
holding the unclaimed photograph of Miloni, he decides to use it to tell his
grandmother and his friends that she is the one whom he has chosen to marry and
from there on the story takes on a surreal dimension as he builds an imaginary
scenario and persuades Miloni (when they subsequently meet again, more about
which later) to go along with that.
Miloni is
indeed the proverbial dutiful, docile daughter who does what she is told or
expected to do. Very early on we see her trying on an item of clothing in
a fashion store and to accept it without question when suggested by an
elder. The few home scenes are mostly of the family at the dinner table,
with very few close-ups. Miloni remains largely silent or monosyllabic when
asked some question by her father. At one point, her little sibling even
makes a witty remark, but the mother rarely features in any of their interactions.
And the daily evening ritual ends with Miloni seen diligently engrossed in her
`home work`, fussed over like an adolescent by the diligent cook maid.
As in `The
Lunchbox` and `Our Soles at Night`, and even `The Sense of an Ending`, so in
`Photograph` the underlying theme is of how the fate of two strangers, from
entirely different backgrounds, whose paths are otherwise unlikely to cross,
becomes intertwined by fortuitous circumstances which propel them towards a
meeting of minds. There is nothing wrong
with that hallowed formula Here the narrative is driven by the poetry of
imagination rather than anything else, for in the real world such a construct
would be fraught with imponderables.
Is
`Photograph` then “a very real story about people living in Mumbai today”? In these days of the digital camera,
smartphones and selfies, all of which are found in abundance in India, and in
particular in the megacity metropolis of Mumbai, do street photographers ply
their trade in the way we see in the film?
Maybe they do but would a young woman of Miloni`s education and social
status have got caught up in a commercial photo-op like that? We know that she did, for reasons of her own
inner insecurity. Fair enough, but then
she ran off and in getting to the sequel to it there is no footage of her
reflecting on what had happened.Indeed,
throughout she is presented as a silent brooding introvert, whose private thoughts
and feelings are shrouded in a mist of mystery.
And Batra
also seems to have made a deliberate decision to underplay what would
cinematically have been a dramatic moment of the two of them meeting
again. In fact that part and what would
have passed between them is glossed over completely, for what we see when they
are next shown together is him briefing her about the imminent arrival on the
scene of his grandmother and what she should be told about how they met. As to why Miloni is so willing to play along
with the deception, again we are left to guess.
And then
the pace of the movie gathers momentum.
We see a lot more of the grandmother with Rafi alone and with him and
Miloni, eating out, shopping and talking over several days. She even
presses Miloni to accept a gift, as a token of what she thinks is going to be
her and Rafi`s union. On one of their
outings together, Miloni`s family maid sees her with Rafi posing for a
photograph on a beach. At home, during
their post-dinner nightly routine, Miloni tells the maid Rafi was not her
boyfriend; the maid is sympathetic and assures her the secret was safe with
her. And as an aside, Miloni expresses a
desire to visit the maid`s home village to see how her folks live, to the
latter`s obvious delight. That is not the only glimpse we get of her mental
state. Another is when, while she and
Rafi are out and about late one evening on a bus, we see her reaching out to
him and the two of them sit together gingerly touching hands. The grandmother eventually susses out that
Miloni is not what she has been made out to be and tells Rafi what she thinks
of it.
How was it
that a `traditionally raised middle-class` Mumbai girl could spend so much time
away from home, other than at college, stretching into evenings, without being
asked about what she might have been doing and where? Unlike Rafi, she did not have any friends of
her age. What she told the maid about Rafi not being her boyfriend hardly
counted as sharing confidences with someone of her own ilk. She had no social
life; she was a loner – and essentially lonesome and possibly bored. That explained why she got drawn into a
contrived situation with Rafi, despite everything that set them apart. He was noticeably older, more mature and
worldly, though inexperienced in male-female dynamics. The programme notes mentioned “differences in
their religious, economic and cultural backgrounds, and even skin colour”! Desi
Indian preoccupation with colour notwithstanding, as far as I was concerned they
both had the same shade of light brown complexion on the cinema screen! And then there were the classroom scenes of
accountancy students during lectures.
These were simply unbelievable. Even our ten year olds would not be
subjected to the kind of didactic teaching and discipline, not to mention meek
passivity with which it was received, that we saw there.
To be
fair, the whole match-making episode and the predatory lecturer`s crude attempt
to woo Miloni were a realistic representation of true-life situations, but
these were outweighed by the other factors.
The movie could have been better served by spirited performances of the
two principal characters. Their deadpan acting and lack of animation generally
did nothing to convey the nuances and subtleties of their emotions and did not
engage the viewer. This could be
because, according to the film`s credits, there was no singular script writer,
only a script supervisor, and that might have affected the direction.
All of
this marred what would otherwise have been a classic tale of two young or
relatively young people bravely moving away from the limitations of their
society`s norms and their own constricted lives to experience the stirrings of
romance. True, this is not a Bollywood style
extravaganza, but even for an independent arthouse film there is something to
be said for verisimilitude. Chance
encounters between unlikely people happen all the time in all societies and are
the stuff of creative fiction in literature and other forms of art. In this film however while we could
understand why Rafi fell for her, it was difficult to figure out what she saw
in him, given all the basic differences between them? But that of course was the essence of the
artistic conundrum.
RAMNIK
SHAH
© 2019
England, Surrey
