A Short Note on Achal Mishra’s “Gamak Ghar”

[Contains spoilers.]

For a feature film debut, twenty-three-year-old Achal Mishra’s serene “Gamak Ghar” grapples with a formidable subject: home. Over three time periods—we open in 1998, return in 2010, and finally close in 2019—we examine the slow death of an ancestral house in Bihar’s Madhopura. As its inhabitants age, so does the house. On a strictly conceptual level, “Gamak Ghar” is magic: a story, our story, told in 90 concise minutes, leaving us with an ache in our hearts, a priceless offering. On a narrative level, however, there is something lacking, something that could truss the three parts up. Mishra’s primary focus here is mood and detail; there is an artfulness in his approach. When we open in 1998, the house brims with life. Children play in a courtyard in which a tulsi plant occupies the centre; men sit in the verandah playing cards; women gossip away in the bedroom. A newborn rests in a cradle, the apple of everyone’s eye. Everyone’s content. Every word exchanged quivers with feeling. Laughter is easy to come by. Mangoes are picked directly from trees. It’s a world that once existed but no longer does, and this recreation does it justice.

Snatching these moments from the characters is cinematographer Anand Bansal, whose work in “Gamak Ghar” warrants the highest praise. Each frame is is a painting unto itself, using colours and light intelligently, lending the film the wistful mood it strives for. Avni Goyal’s excellent production design deserves a mention as well, capturing the passage of time so skilfully that I wondered at one point whether the film was actually filmed over a period of twenty years.

When the family regroups in 2010, the walls have begun crumbling and the people have grown distant. Dinner is had in near silence, we get clumps of stilted conversation, and instant noodles is the kids’ choice of snack. The house is surrounded by taller, firmer, newer buildings. The emphasis on detail is as fascinating as it is exhausting, for we are always left observing from a distance, barred from engaging with the characters. There is a beautiful extended scene in which the matriarch, the one to whom the house was bequeathed, leaves it for the last time, to be with her son in the city. The camera is stationed a little further away, refusing to invade the moment. I wished with all my heart that it did. I wished with all my heart to share it with her.

The third part, taking place in 2019, is bereft of dialogue. The rotting house, neglected and forgotten, is now manned by an old watchman. It will be destroyed soon to make way for a grander structure, and only one member of the family shows up to supervise its demolition. By leaving a lot unspoken, Mishra prods us to confront who we have become. The house that accommodated innumerable memories, now rubble and dust. A brilliant shot of the family member taking the picture of the deceased family patriarch off a wall, maker and destroyer as seen through the half-broken roof, pops up near the end. It’s a deeply poignant image. One wishes “Gamak Ghar” found more like it.

[Not For Reproduction]

A Short Note on Arun Karthick’s “Nasir”

[Contains spoilers.]

At 85 minutes, one wouldn’t have imagined Arun Karthick’s remarkable second feature, “Nasir,” an adaptation of the short story, “A Clerk’s Story” by Dilip Kumar, to move along leisurely. A day in the life of Nasir, a Muslim garment store attendant, it’s a deeply intimate, lyrical portrait of a man who has long stopped living for himself. Capturing the rhythms of an everyday existence adeptly from the first frame, Karthick approaches “Nasir” with thought and sensitivity, choosing to observe than comment. We get long-shots and close-ups on the minutiae of Nasir’s life: counting money, standing in a queue for water, sipping on tea, waiting on his colleague, smoking a beedi. Karthick is unyielding—there’s a reason why “Nasir” is sketched so carefully. We aren’t supposed to understand him; we are supposed to be him.

There is ample skill on display here. Nasir resides in a mostly Muslim neighbourhood of Coimbatore. As he makes his way out of its sinuous lanes with his wife, the sound of prayer grows dimmer and is finally replaced by the babel of the world we now live in, where demagogues scream into microphones and hate is freely distributed over loudspeakers. The two worlds have co-existed peacefully till now, but by the end, one will have violently infiltrated the other. Nasir has inured himself to ignore the growing anti-Muslim sentiment that surrounds him; even as his colleague casually exchanges nasty remarks with a friend on the phone, Nasir’s face does not register even the faintest of flickers.

There is inexpressible pain here. Nasir’s mother has cancer, he has a mentally challenged adopted son, debt, an ordinary job. And yet, for someone has every reason to complain, he seldom does. He pulls two women shopping for saris into conversation with the warmth of a son. He pours himself into his poetry, expresses how much he loves his wife through a handwritten letter to her. We listen to its contents over a series of extended shots, each word bringing the man we have been watching throughout into sharper focus. There is a simplicity about him, about the way he does everything he is asked to, about the way he maintains the innocence of his minuscule world.

Films about communal violence often linger on the suddenness of it, and the emptiness. But it’s terrifying just how quickly we move on. “Nasir” is no different. In retrospect, the signs were all there: the provocations over loudspeakers grow increasingly vile. Karthick sets us up for tragedy with the flair of an old-timer. In the final shot, Nasir is sprawled out uglily on the ground in an alley of his neighbourhood. In the poetic opening shot, we see him sleeping in a foetal position. A streetlamp imparts light through a window. In both images we see his silhouette. A life has been cruelly snuffed out by a hollow act of violence. The world we see it as just another person dying. But we won’t; we will mourn it. Karthick’s triumph lies therein.

[Not For Reproduction]