A still from Amar Colony. (courtesy: YouTube)
Cast: Sangeeta Agrawal, Usha Chauhan, Nimisha Nair
Director: Siddharth Chauhan
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
The thwarted urges, secret desires and persistent paranoias of three Shimla women constitute the crux of writer-director Siddharth Chauhan's first narrative feature Amar Colony, a meticulously crafted film that uses austere means to present a raft of fishbowl vignettes of people stuck in what feels like an unending furrow.
The trio, a pregnant young woman among them, resides in a building in the Himachal Pradesh hill town and struggles to rise above the drudgery of their lives and dream of liberation in the face of blocks that weigh heavy on their minds.
Produced by Nisheeth Kumar's Indie Film Collective in collaboration with Arifur Rahman and Bijon Imtiaz's Bangladeshi outfit, Goopy Bagha Productions, Amar Colony premiered on Thursday at the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is the only Indian title in the First Feature Competition section of the festival that winds up on Sunday.
Amar Colony, filmed entirely in Shimla and areas around it, examines the upshots of loneliness and alienation of individuals trapped in an emotional and spatial limbo that appears to get worse as their circumstances take an absurdist turn.
Meera (Nimisha Nair), married to a man who is never by her side, is confined to the little dwelling unit that the couple has recently moved into. Now eight months into her pregnancy, she seeks escape from her dreary existence by way of adventurous and hopeful liaisons in quest of love. She is fixated on tomatoes.
The ageing Durga (Usha Chauhan), who owns these cramped homes, is a devotee of Lord Hanuman, whose picture has pride of place on her worship shelf on the wall of a bedroom that she shares with her shopkeeper-husband from whom she has grown palpably distant. She aspires to attain immortality. She actually believes that she is getting younger.
The widowed and wheelchair-bound Devki (Sangeeta Agrawal) lives with her son in another part of the building and keeps a watch on a caged pigeon that fills a void in her life in a way that the impatient boy cannot comprehend.
The men of Amar Colony, who complicate the conundrums that the women have to negotiate, have their own share of concealments. The widow's son Mohit, the boyish waste collector Krishna and Durga's husband, who owns a store selling women's undergarments, all grapple with pent-up passions. Also in the story is an inquisitive schoolboy, Durga's orphaned grandson.
From a boy not yet in his teens to a grandfather with a weak heart and strong fetishes, the men aren't the ones calling the shots. Dangling between the tentative and the transgressive, they provoke as well as smother the yearnings of the three women.
Shot by Modhura Palit and edited by Paresh Kamdar, Amar Colony opens with a series of ten shots that play out over about two and a half minutes before the title appears on the screen. These shots, all bar one are completely static, convey the desolation that the innards of the decrepit building breeds.
A view of two burning pyres is followed by a shot of a number of mourners eating in absolute silence in a cramped room. The camera does a semi-circular pan, revealing in carefully chiselled capsules the inner (as well as the outer) world of the characters that the audience is going to subsequently see at length.
No words are spoken and no information is offered but the muted and loaded-with-meaning prelude is profoundly eloquent. It tells us a great deal about the people who live inside this structure that has seen better days. What these shots do is not only set the tone for what is to follow but also provide a quick demonstration of the film's minimalist methods.
In this introductory bunch of visuals, shots of a winding staircase and corridors that link the various spaces within the building to each other and to the exit points are interspersed with a frame each of Devki, Durga and Meera, whose names - and this isn't without significance - are of religious provenance.
Devki sits on her wheelchair, her back to the camera, staring at the white pigeon. Durga is perched on her bed, which is separated from that of her husband by the length of a wall divided by her prayer space. And the lonesome Meera stands on a balcony gaping at the darkness that is broken only by Shimla's flickering lights in the distance. Outside and below - not that the camera shows us what lies there - the world is going by unmindful of her plight.
These string of images ends with an evocative and expressionist night time view of the facade of the building, with a full moon hanging over it and pointing to the influence that it might have on the residents who, as the waste collector tells Meera, the only new tenant here, have lived in the rundown building forever.
Intimations of eternity, tomatoes, a sacred thread, a mace that is at most times only an umbrella and a mannequin that serve more than just the purpose of displaying articles of scanty clothing together create an atmosphere that is as real as it is chimerical. The mysteries of the mundane are heightened by surreal strokes, among which are dreamlike insertions that show Meera in the guise of Radha, Lord Krishna's consort and a goddess of love.
In the restricted spaces that the women occupy, the distances between the denizens are unbridgeable. Repressed passions and suppressed emotions compel the women of Amar Colony to resort to measures that border on the despairing and underline their fears and frustrations.
A delicately structured film about elusive, even illusive, emancipation, about relationships stymied, about hope coming up against the sobering realities of life and about loss and longing, Amar Colony heralds the advent of a filmmaker endowed with the ability to see beyond the surface of things and illuminate what lies beneath.
Among the most remarkable aspects of Amar Colony is the way the director allows the actors to simply live the parts that the play instead of trying to 'act' and posture. The non-acting enhances the palpability of the vivid vignettes that make up this splendid cinematic fresco even when the film occasionally launches into flights of the imagination that might appear self-conscious to some.
Amar Colony, with its muted colours, subdued tones, episodic structure and stylistic consistency, is a hypnotic film that is firm in a deliberate rhythm that reflects the interrupted, if not entirely broken, nature of the lives that it showcases with great sensitivity and commendable integrity of purpose.