Young Praveen Morchhale evidently wrote an original screenplay for his debut film that was pegged on the tenuous relationships of the typical family as larger family structures of traditional rural India are dismantled into smaller nuclear families in their urban contexts. The sweet grandparent and grandchild relationship gets diluted by distance and economic constraints in the modern developing India. Morchhale’s debut film achieves what it set out to achieve—to underscore the importance of the larger Indian family.
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| Love through sweets |
The film is a tale of two school kids who decide to visit
their ailing grandmother in Goa without the knowledge of their parents who live
in a modest apartment in Mumbai. It is a road movie with a difference. The kids
get on trains without tickets and get off trains without any plan of their next
mode of transport to their destination. Director Morchhale is not interested in
pre-occupying the viewer with details such as their likely encounter with the
ticket inspector—he is interested in moving forward with the journey to Goa,
train or no train. Conversations are minimal, but interactions aplenty. In
fact, the film is unusually populated with key characters who cannot speak or
hear, a clever ruse of the screenplay writer and director to add economy and
impact to the film’s narrative or perhaps to indicate that one would not listen to those voices if they could be heard.
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| Seeking love when parents don't have time for them |
But more than that, Morchhale achieved another feat: his
script is a rare testament to the unbridled hospitality of the rural and small
town India towards strangers put in contrast to the unmindful and hurried world
of the emerging urban India. Parents in the big cities have little time for their children, urban
families traveling in cars buy roasted corncobs from rural roadside vendors but forget to
pay for their order, and harried city police station officers have little concern
for mothers who are worried about their missing children because they have been
unaccounted for a mere few hours. All this is presented without the script appearing
to be a sermon on the eroding values of developing India. Morchhale’s film
reminds one of the Algerian filmmaker Amor Hakkar’s lovely 2008 road film La
maison jaune/The yellow house, which had, like Barefoot to Goa, reinforced the contrasting worlds of the uncorrupted and considerate
world of rural Algeria with the corruption of the richer townsfolk in
that country. In Barefoot to Goa, too, there are glimpses of negative
elements in society: shoes of the kids being stolen at the entry point of a
temple forcing them to travel barefoot and corruption of the police who demand bribes and free meals, which is contrasted
with the innocence of children who free pigeons caught by a benefactor who had
given them a free ride on his motorbike without realizing the economic loss their well-intentioned action would cause to
their benefactor.
This critic appreciates cinematic works that are based on
original screenplays a lot more than adapted screenplays. Barefoot to Goa demonstrates
the new generation of Indian filmmakers’ attempt at brevity of detail without
compromising on quality of the narrative. The film is able to convey the tale
without the crutch of the spoken word in many scenes—the spoken lines are
minimized. When the children speak, their words are the bare minimal quantum
needed to move the story forward. The end of the film breathes a freshness
rarely encountered in Indian cinema—it tells a story without spoon-feeding the
audience with a little help from clever editing and intelligent photography. Barefoot to Goa is not the best of world
cinema but is definitely a breath of fresh air for Indian cinema, struggling to
survive in a cinematic whirlpool where world cinema is progressing by leaps and
bounds.
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| Dictating a letter to a letter-writer through silence |
Barefoot to Goa can be described as a children’s film
as the main characters that drive the film are two school kids. Yet the film
grapples with issues that are larger than those of small school kids—it deals
with family relationships (loss of ties with parents after marriage, lack of
empathy towards the old, the bonds of small townsfolk, the valuation of a
parent’s role by those who miss out on a loving, caring parent). Sweets
prepared by a caring grandmother might be devalued by an irate daughter-in-law but
they signify a bonding that economic progress cannot obliterate. The sweets (Indian
ladoos) are a prop that raises the film from a mere children’s film to a
film that reflects on the values of family bonding that go beyond the nuclear
family.
Apart from writing a commendable script, director
Morchhale’s direction of the two children played by Prakar and Saara Nahar is
commendable as they portrayed body movements that were real and believable
without resorting to bouts of tears and merriment. Similarly the role of the
mother and irate daughter-in-law (Purva Parag) was brief yet credible. The film
might not have had the same impact were it not for the role of the editor (Ujwal
Chandra) and the sound editor (Bibek Basumatary). The importance of Barefoot to
Goa is in the way the story is presented rather than the tale itself. It is
a breath of fresh air for Indian cinema accomplishing much more than it intended.
P.S. The film has been entered in
competition in the Celebrate Age section at the Mumbai international film festival, 2013. Amor Hakkar's Algerian /French film La Maison Jaune/The Yellow House (2008) was reviewed earlier on this blog.
Barefoot to Goa - Film Trailer with english Subtitle. from Praveen Morchhale on Vimeo.
