Patang has its moments, but just so

By Utpal Borpujari

The best thing about Patang, written-directed-edited by Prashant Bhargava, is its nuanced visualisation of Ahmedabad, specifically the old city, during the period of the kite festival (Uttarayan) when it is at its colourful and festive best. Shanker Raman, who superbly captured the landscape and mood of Ladakh in Shivaji Chandrabhushan’s Frozen, weaves a series of evocative images of the crowded part of the city where lanes emerge onto dilapidated Havelis with intricate doorways and crafted windows framing myriad faces peeping out of them.

Patang, actually, is more about imagery than intricate storytelling; and Bhargava adopts an almost documentary-like approach while capturing the sights and sounds of the city, his editing and Raman’s camera complementing each other smoothly, except for a few portions where this cinema verite approach looks a bit forced.

As a narrative, Patang’s storyline does not have anything complex. It’s rather a simple story of a man, Jayesh (played by a sometimes wooden Mukund Shukla) visiting his home after a gap of several years – and with a task in mind. Jayesh is a man who has made it in life after having shifted base to New Delhi, leaving his family home in old Ahmedabad which he now wants to sell off. He is accompanied by his daughter-with-a-hint-of-rebelliousness Priya (a perky Sugandha Garg). But his mother refuses to sign the legal papers, and his nephew, the wedding band-singer Chakku (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, in one more effortlessly-superb performance) angrily confronts him. Amidst all this, Jayesh’s widowed sister-in-law and Chakku’s mother (Seema Biswas, a fine portrayal as always) is the almost silent spectator, who seems to know that familial bonds are too strong to be broken by such occasional skirmishes.

The inter-personal relationships of the characters in Patang unfold leisurely, weaved near-seamlessly with the city’s gearing up for the kite festival. Sometimes, it seems Bhargava, who grew up in the USA, is more intent on documenting the city’s feverish celebration of the kite festival than creating more layers to the storyline. There are a few side-strands to the story, such as Priya’s flirtatious relationship with neighbourhood youngster Bobby (Aakash Maherya) and Chakku’s friendship with a few street kids, are interestingly developed, but at the same time, there are unexplained introduction to a few strands that never appear again, for example, Chakku’s young friend and kite shop boy Hamid’s one-scene interaction with his grandmother who refuses to let him into the house in the middle of the night because he has failed to bring in some promised money.

The film, which got a full house at the ongoing 12^th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival on Tuesday, falters when it dives into nostalgia. Bhargava, as someone born and brought up in the West, might have got unintentionally attracted to this pitfall as some of the dialogues mouthed by Jayesh’s character recalling his childhood and times spent in Ahmedabad before he chose to shift out sound almost banal and targeted at the audiences abroad. Luckily for him, he is able to stop just short of exoticizing his subject as the other characters do not fall into that trap.

Bhargava unfolds his storytelling in a leisurely manner, and is able to balance the mix of his narrative and documentation of the kite festival rather well, not stressing too overtly on kites being a metaphor for the wavering human mind as also relationships.Patang succeeds in letting the viewer soak in the atmosphere, but it somewhere falters in making an emotional connect to the extent it could or should have been able to. Perhaps, it would have been a better experience if Bhargava had chosen to tell the story a little more than letting the story unfurl on its own all the way. Patang has its moments, but just so.

(Published on http://www.dearcinema.com, 03-08-2012)

http://dearcinema.com/review/osians-cinefan-2012-review-prashant-bhargavas-patang/5938#.UFB5lbIge3Q

Drapchi: More Felt than Watched

By Utpal Borpujari

Drapchi. For the uninitiated, a lyrical-sounding word. But for those who have been inside it, Drapchi is one of the most-dreaded places on the earth. Drapchi is the name of Lhasa’s Prison No. 1, the largest in Tibet. Converted from a Tibetan military garrison into a prison following the 1959 Tibetan uprising (officially it was made into a prison in 1965) and the flight of the Dalai Lama to India, it is where most of the political prisoners of Tibet are incarcerated. Tibetan exile groups have often alleged brutal excesses committed by the Chinese jail personnel on the inmates.

But now, the word Drapchi has another meaning too. It is the name of a new movie directed by indie filmmaker Arvind Iyer, and starring famous Tibetan singer Namgyal Lhamo. The 77-minute movie is an interesting experiment at filmmaking. It uses the format of a docu-fiction, with the characters barely speaking to each other and the narrative taken forward by a gruff voice, a voice that the film’s end reveals to belong to a former espionage officer from another country. The officer is not identified in this fictional story where the real and the fictional merge seamlessly, but it is believed that he is a real-life Army man from a Western country who spent nearly a decade inside Drapchi after having been caught for alleged spying in Tibet.

It’s a film that has fictional characters who can be real Tibetan refugees fleeing their homeland. In fact, if one had not been told that the lead character of Yiga Gyalnang has been played by the Netherlands-based Lhamo, and had it not for portions where the characters briefly speak with one another, one could have easily termed this film as in intensely personal documentary where the protagonist symbolises the quiet suffering of thousands of Tibetans who trudge across the Himalayas to seek political refuge in another country.

Iyer, a noted designer who has worked with the likes of Santosh Sivan, has eschewed the path of a normal narrative in his first feature film. He has not even spelt out clearly that Yiga, a noted traditional Tibetan opera singer, is an escapee from Drapchi. These are information that one can either guess about or find indications about in the film. For Iyer the director, these things are not overtly important in the course of the narrative, as it is already quite well-known that the Tibetans who flee their homeland are almost always political refugees, victims of persecution in their homeland.

Rather, the film, with a quiet dignity that is carried on her shoulders by Lhamo, tries to explore the inner turmoil in all those Tibetans who leave their homeland knowing fully well that perhaps they would never see it again in their lifetime. The emotional turmoil in Yiga comes through in the film through Yiga’s melancholic demeanour, and through some superb compositions that form the background score.

The film opens at a point when Yiga and a few other Tibetans are walking across a bridge over the Kosi river in Nepal, the point where the 16-km no-man’s land between Tibet and Nepal ends. It is the same place where Yiga returns to from Kathmandu towards the end of the film, before she flies off to Europe to seek an unknown future as an important political refugee. Or is it her spirit that visits the place in her dream, yearning to return home? In the interregnum, Yiga has been befriended by a British rocker named Jack Cassady, played by Chris Constantinou, a relationship which does not follow the expected path of the two falling in love, and also by a young monk Tashi with whom she develops sort of a spiritual bonding. We hear the story of Yiga from the narrator mostly, but when it is time for the finale, one does not need words to understand the turmoil in Yiga’s mind as she longingly looks at the mountains across the bridge, where her homeland lies. She knows it is as elusive as the mountain goat whose brief glimpse she gets. She also knows she cannot return to that homeland again, unlike the pack of geese flying across the mountains for whom man-made political boundaries are meaningless. She philosophically accepts her fate and continues with her voice of protest through her powerful songs that make her popular in Europe.

Even though Lhamo herself had got her training in music at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamshala before migrating to Europe, one gets the feeling while watching Drapchi that Yiga is her alter ego. In fact, at many places during the course of the film, it is hard to separate the real from the reel. Iyer must be given credit for the courage shown in not treading the usual path of narrative storytelling. In the tradition of true indie filmmaking, he seeks to create a world of solitude, silence and sound of music in Drapchi. And he succeeds to a great extent in his effort. Yes, Drapchi is not your usual fare on the big screen. It is experimental, and unapologetically so. It’s not a film for everyone, but those who like moody, philosophical cinema, Drapchi, which was screened at the recent Stuttgart Indian Film Festival and will have its Indian premiere at the 12th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival in Delhi, offers several layers of thought pointers. To her credit, scriptwriter Pooja Ladha Surti, who wrote Sriram Raghavan’s Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddar and the recent Agent Vinod, has completely been able to leave her Bollywood baggage behind to create something that is beyond the ordinary. The film has some amazing cinematography by Trevor Tweeten, and for those who have heard and loved Lhamo’s music, it offers several treats in the background score. It is a film is more felt than watched.

(Published in http://www.dearcinema.com, 30-07-2012)

http://dearcinema.com/review/osians-cinefan-2012-review-arvind-iyers-drapchi/4402#.UBjuT2GICqM