While Dhanush’s Tamil Raayan is a pointless orgy of violence and selfindulgence new director Mithilesh Edavalath’s Roopanthara gives us hope for cinema, and mankind. Its healing touch spreads across almost every frame, nurturing a narrative of compassion and humanism.
There is a moment where a young idealistic cop folds his hand to ask forgiveness from a monstrously wronged woman. Hold that moment in your heart.
In a bizarrely brilliant depictions of human deprivation, a goon played with a superb lack of inhibition by Raj B Shetty, lies on the floor of a room with his finger stuck in a dead man’s mouth. The sequence could have been savagely funny were it not so poignant.
Roopanthara (which means transformation) offers no easy solutions to the human conundrum. By far the most life-defining, soul-healing film in recent years, it is an astonishing segmented narrative miracle, spiralling through a maze of emotional and physical violence without lurching into overstatement.
It is very difficult to believe Mithilesh Edavalath’s Roopanthara is the director’s first feature film. The selfassured episodic view of life as an opportunity to make this world a better place, knocks the breath out of the viewer.
Where did this come from?! The haunting parable on the homicide of humanitarianism has a transformative tempestuousness to its telling of the tormented tale. And yet Mithilesh is not in this for the drama. He ploughs into the theme of moral corrosion in the hope of a harvest. And he emerges the best film farmer in recent years.
There are several stories swarming in the scenario, each claiming a place in your heart without clamouring for attention. There is a beggarwoman(Lekha Naidu)—not too many of the characters are called out by their names, or did I miss the wood for the forest?—who is taken to the police station for kidnapping a child, just because the child’s skin colour is different from the beggar woman’s.
“Someone with fair skin must have dragged her behind a bus, and that’s it,” a middle level cop tell the shocked junior cop(Bharat G B) who becomes the voice of the conscience in the film. How he risks his job to rescue the beggarwoman and her child is stuff that great epics are made of.
Neither the conscientious cop nor the film’s writer-director Mithilesh Edavalath aspire to epic to climb epic heights. Like the cop, the film works because it is doing its job.
When was the last time you saw a film that made you think deep and hard on what makes a human being’s existence meaningful? What kind of world have we built where basic rights are denied to the powerless?
One such elderly couple from the village ,played with effortless ease by Somashekar Bolegaon(who passed away during the film’s making) and Hanumakka, trundle to the city, only to find themselves mowed down by the lack of healthcare for the poor.
Elsewhere a disturbed boy(Anjan Bharadwaj), subjected to years of domestic violence, plots a terrible vengeance on mankind. This is a world waiting for its Godot, threshing wildly into universe for answers to their prayers.
Not that the work is flawless, God forbid! Some minor glitches like a doll substituting for a child at a crucial juncture, and one major flaw—relating the stories in a flashback from a dystopian future, why why why????!!!—do not take away from the restorative power of this film.
Every word, every gesture, even a pair of chappals and an empty bottle on the floor speak to us. Ignore them at your own risk.
