16^th Third Eye Asian Film Festival: VI

Three Marathi films are the focus of today’s post: Nati Khel, Nadi Vahate and Copy. They were shown as part of a package at that consisted of as many as eight films, the maximum in any language from any Indian language. TEAFF is organised by the Asian Film Foundation and P.L. Deshpande Maharashtra Kala Academy, and co-organised by Prabhat Chitra Mandal and Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Chitrapat Mahamandal. It is supported by Department of Culture, Government of Maharashtra. Screenings are held at Ravindra Natya Mandir Mini Auditorium, Mumbai.

Continuing my coverage of TEAFF, here are reviews of two Marathi films I saw there. Another, titled Copy, will be covered in the next instalment, which will also focus on some other films that featured in the festival.

Nati Khel, 2017

Sadba and Parvi are chosen by the temple rituals to be the prime married couple to sit by the grand prayers adoring the Goddess. Sadba learns that, Parvi, is having an affair with his younger brother Mallappa. After the three of them narrate and explain each of their stories, the Panchayat (village council) gives an unusual verdict, one that surprises everybody, whereby Parvi must also marry the second brother, and live the life of a woman with two husbands. A majority of people oppose this marriage, while turning a blind eye towards men with multiple wives. Will an orthodox patriarchal society approve of Parvi having two husbands? How will an orthodox patriarchal villagers deal with a rebellious Parvi, with her two husbands? Nati Khel is based on real life incidents which formed the basis of the story, penned by Pune-ite Rajan Khan.

Khan was in the news a few months ago when miscreants, who were angry at his old novel, Halal, being released as a film now, attacked his office in Pune. The movie, Halal, is directed by Shivaji Lotan Patil, and has been screened in the Cannes film festival. Khan won some awards in India, for best story. Bhosle told the audience that the central idea of a woman forced to marry her brother-in-law while her husband was alive, was from Khan, but it was trans-lifted to a different geographical locale and a back-story was built around it. Mythological figure of the Mahabharata, Draupadi was married to five men. But a happily married woman in modern India being forced to marry her husband’s younger brother because they live together and he has been infatuated by her before she was married, is sure to lad itself in taboo territory.

Total anarchy prevails in this village. Government laws are just on paper. The Panchayat still passes verdicts like the chopping to pieces of a rapist by swords, and so the Parvi verdict is no surprise. In such a milieu, Bhonsle manages to grip you with a deeply rooted in earth tale that has a brutal but open ending. Why open? “In recent times, there have been several brutal murders of prominent rationalists and reformers, but the killers were never caught. This fact prompted me to leave the ending open.”

Nagpur-born Nagesh Bhosle has acted in theatre, International, Hindi, Marathi and Telugu films, and directed six Marathi films. In 2014, he founded Ajna Motion Picture Pvt Ltd, a film production house. Ajna's first film Panhala (2015), directed and produced by Nagesh, was critically acclaimed. In live interaction before and after the screening, it was clear that Nagesh had a decent grasp over Urdu pronunciation that could be the result of his association with “my great mentor and educator Urdu poet Turfa Qureshi”. His Hindi is good too. In the film, he plays the village council head who has two women--a legal wife and another kept woman. There is a scene in which he kicks the ‘other’ woman for trying to speak out in favour of Parvi. Though done suggestively, it had to be deleted at the insistence of the Central Board of Film Certification, which looks down very harshly on violence against women.

In the three lead parts are the Radha Kulkarni, Milind Shinde and Umesh Jagtap; Screenplay is by Umesh Padalkar, Arvind Jagtap, Sapan Saran and Nagesh Bhosle while the cinematographer and editor is Amarendra Bhosle. All have done justice to their responsibilities. Crispy 98 minutes in duration, it raises several issues of religion, functioning of village councils, anarchy and lack of police rule in parts of rural India, metaphysical-sublime love versus married-physical love, capital punishment in this age and era, gender equality and the status of women in rural India and more. Surely worth a watch.

Rating: ***

Nadi Vahate,2016

A full twenty years after he created tidal waves with the Oscar nominated and National Award-winning Shwaas, Sandeep Sawant, a psychology graduate and mainly documentary-maker till Shwaas, returns to cinema with Nadi Vahate (the River flows). Made in the Marathi language, it uses a realistic situation of ecological hara-kiri to highlight corruption and exploitation in the interiors of the Indian state. Nadi Vahate has been shot at Kudal, DohaMarg, Sawantwadi's base of Western Ghats (all in Sindhudurg) and in Goa's Walpai, Sakhali, Satteri. The film showcases how to save the river and how it can be used to change the landscape around it. The film was showcased at the NFDC Film Bazaar 2015.

Antee meanders through the lush green mountains and thick green forest, with a few villages scattered on the river's banks. A group of people from a village: Anagha, her mother, Guruji, Bhau, Prakash, Tukaram, Mangesh...do not want to take up conventional jobs. They are trying to earn their livelihood through farming, agriculture and allied businesses, having realised that efforts involving and built around Antee are the only way to become truly self sufficient. Appa Naik is an important person in the village. He is strongly active in local politics, but his heart beats for the glitz and glamour of the city. He wants his son, Akash, to get settled in Mumbai, while Akash is fed up of city jobs, having just quit one. One day, the unsuspecting villagers find out that Antee is going to be blocked and a huge tourism project is to be built at the dam.

As writer and director, Sandeep Sawant has picked a burning topic and filmed it realistically. Beautiful, lush-green locales (captured by Sanjay Memane, who was the cinematographer on Shwaas too) help impart a personification to Antee. The inherent charm of Shwaas, however, is missing. Characters appear stencilesque at first sight but soon you begin to realise that the conceived village-folk and the city baddie could not be much different in real-life. Rapid, jerky cutting (Niraj Voralia, another Shwaas carry-forward) notwithstanding, the film gives you the feel of a well-made documentary rather than a fiction drama. Performances are uniformly good and slice-of-life.

Poonam Shetgaonkar, Asha Shelar, Hridaynath Jadhav, Jayant Gadekar, Abhishek Aanand, Shivkumar Subramaniam, Gajanan Zarmekar, Mahadev Sawant, Vishnupad Barve and Bhushan Vikas form the cast. A surprise packet is Hindi film writer-actor Shivkumar Subramaniam as the project head, representing city money-bags. Sawant builds up suspense about him, only to have an understated confrontation when the time comes. To make him more credible, Sawant gets him to speaking a blend of Marathi, English and Hindi.

Three departments are headed by theatre veteran Neeraja Patwardhan, an M.A. in Drama from the Pune University: Production Design, Art Direction, Costume Design. Neeraja, who is married to Sandeep Sawant, is also the co-producer of the film, along with Sandeep. Nadi Vahate, an acceptable 115 minutes in duration, was released in India in September 2017, more than two years after it was completed. It won the Special Jury award for its director, Sandeep Sawant, at the Pune International Film Festival, in the Marathi Cinema Awards category.

Rating: ***