India, 2022
Directed by Shishir Jha
With Jagarnath Baskey (the peasant), Mugli Baskey (the peasant’s wife)
This feature fully and proudly belongs to a fringe of the Indian cinema dealing with peoples and issues mass entertainment would carefully sidestep, or reconfigure, with realism, empathy and stylistic approaches that do not preclude quite expressive, elegant, even poetic images. Mixing in this case fiction and documentary, it explores the Santhal culture striving to survive in the state of Jharkhand where uranium mining, which started in the 1980s, has yield some wealth at a terrible environmental cost.
Yet the film shares one distinctive and popular element with the rest of the Indian movie industry, an element whose pervasive, hyperbolic presence can puzzle the Western audience – music, songs, dances.
Songs are often played, standing as a decisive part of the narration. Granted, this is not the contrived artistic flourishes of a Bollywood movie; it rather derives from the keen observation of the way Adivasi folks live – this is the film’s documentary aspect. They do not enliven, entertain, and enchant: more importantly, they enlighten. The soundtrack slowly and gracefully, invites the audience to discover and then to revel into the very specific culture at the core of the film’s thin but effective drama and now jeopardized by a greedy and destructive business. Rhythm and lyrics, as the seasons come and go and as people celebrate and remember, add up to a lengthy, simple, evocative performance that is both seductive and sorrowful, as a whole world, with its own, original, vision of cosmos, time, and life, flounders.
A first part is dominated by the brightness of the sun even as it hints at the growing troubles of the village and the tough life of the two lead characters (who are real villagers, in true neorealist fashion) aggrieved by the recent demise of their daughter, a tragedy the peasant tries to cope with in a down-to-earth way while his wife is hopelessly unable to accept. The camera has found somehow the right place, highlighting their plight but keeping some distance, conveying gritty realism but also a degree of sympathy that is not sentimental or formulaic. But it is even more interested in the daily chores of tilling the land and the regular gatherings of the community, for festivals and fairs, taking its time to record the beauty of the fields or the excitement of the villagers with long takes that could be a bit lengthy, emphasizing how nature blooms and people abide, even when they are faced with poignant tragedies and the relentless, ruthless advances of an economy now eager to clean the area from the people, probably for more mining and more factories.
Indeed, the fair the couple takes part in is to be the last held in the village and the sequence ends with the peasant and his wife having their picture taken against a garish, funny backdrop – the photograph appears right away but it is followed by many other photos, showing other people and crucially other periods: still images bearing testimony of a culture under threat, stopping for a moment the stream of moving images that depicts the faces of this threat, an epiphanic memento mori that neatly cuts the film in two.
The second part is far more concerned with dusk and night. As the sun sets, people chat and worry, the peasant ponders and moves: the film gets more explicit in its presentation of an environmental disaster (the waste from the uranium mining has been dumped in ponds, polluting the underground and more as floods, which are more numerous because of the global climate change, spread the foul water farther). But it also reveals how resolute, proud, defiant the tranquil, smiling peasant proves to be. Challenging the night and the vehicles of the corporations, wandering into a wild shot as a mysterious, magical, mesmerizing place more than ever (even compared to the film’s first scene which, through an exquisite cinematography and a persuasive narrator, centered around the legend about a banyan tree), the peasant gets the energy and the confidence to stay put. The fiction leads to a moving show of dignity and obstinacy, a clear statement about the individuals’ right to resist and to carry on with their work and worldviews in the face of a modernization going fast but astray and about the resilience of a territory that deserves to stay unscathed – a hopeful conclusion to a carefully crafted film by a young director who has been his own cinematographer and editor.