Rating: ****
Among the directorial debut that one has seen in recent times, Gaurav Madan’s Barah x Barah, an elegiac meditative melancholic excursion into mortality and beyond, stands out.
It is the kind of cinema that doesn’t always get an audience, but must.
The film had its premiere at International Film Festival Of Kerala and the international premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival.At both, Barah x Barah was received with overwhelming warmth.
The Czech literary genius Milan Kundera once wrote about the unbearable lightness of being.Barah x Barah goes the other way. With the waves of the Ganga river in Varanasi splashing gently into lives on the brink , this masterpiece reminds us that life is , after all, a breath away from death. The closest I’ve come to experiencing death so closely on screen was in debutant Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Mukti Bhawan which also swept us into a world where death is not the end but a release into a realm of imperishable freedom.
Barah x Barah is a remarkably tender subtle and unostentatious debut by director Gaurav Madan who has some striking short-films to his credit before this impressive feature film. It captures the essence, the nullity of existence in mundane images and dialogues . The characters, their homes , lives and words have an assuaging lifelike feel and texture, as if the director forgot to yell ‘cut’ and the actors continued to live the lives assigned to them by the script.
There is a listless continuity to the lives led by the characters.No fancy music , no lingering lenses define these lives. They are who they are.And we the audience almost feel like intruders in these lives defined primarily by the undulating holy waters right outside the window.
The ghat is the reinforcing leitmotif. The look and texture of authenticity do not leap at us in any self-congratulatory motions. The director never lets the narrative forget PM Narendra Modi’s ubiquitous presence. His voice floats out at us from blaring television sets and politics never far away from the characters’ range of topics, though the hero Sooraj(Gyanendra Tripathi) is outwardly apolitical and wholly taken up with the task of making a living for his family: an ailing father(brilliantly played by Harish Khanna the protagonist of Pavan Kaul’s pretentious directorial debut Tathagata), a silently supportive wife Meena(Bhumika Dubey, so natural she makes the camera seem like an intruder) and their little son. Gyanendra Tripathi’s Sooraj never acts; he reacts to the tired world around him.
Later this small silently struggling family is joined by Sooraj’s sister Mansi(Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, so quietly effective!) who has moved to Delhi, a betrayal for which the father has never quite forgiven her.
None of this is spoken. Most Hindi films make the mistake of overstating their case. Not this one. As in most middleclass families very little emotional energy is expressed. Everything is to be understood. Sooraj non-intellectual unprofitable gaze at the corpses he photographs is punctuated once in while by his wife’s pertinent chiding.
Sooraj is a loyal loving appreciative husband who admits he married a ‘superwoman’. The film tilts its pugdee at all those faceless people in bustling towns who toil from morning to night without any hope or expectation of a reward.
Making a film as noiselessly brilliant as Barah x Barah is just as thankless. Those who are in it are not doing it for the fame .There is an uncelebrated tragedy at the heart of lives lived on the edge.Gaurav Madan’s slim flab-free noiseless film understands the human tragedy of obscurity.
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