The director of this movie reached out to me directly, which is cool, and I was so impressed with his hard work in tracking down a little bitty blog like mine, that I felt like I had to review it. But I am trying hard not to feel obligated to give it a good review, to still be honest about my reaction to the film. And also be honest about this not being a film I would normally watch, meaning I will not have as much detail and background for it as I do in the genres I am more familiar with.
This is a very hard genre to pull off successfully. The thing is, we all lead real lives, you know? So a film has to tell a real story in a way that makes us care more about these imaginary-but-acting-real characters than we do about our own real life concerns. Watching this movie, for instance, I kept being distracted from the slow grinding worries of intense rural poverty in Rajasthan because I was worried about if insurance was going to cover the repairs from my car accident. Real life concerns of struggling subsistance farmers > my car accident worries. But fake concerns of fake subsistance farmers < my car accident. On the other hand, fake concerns of fake characters in love as they hide from their disapproving family with lots of great songs and clever dialogue > my car accident.
The true classics of neorealism sweep you away, make you care about the story you are watching so much that it feels like it is really-real, not like you are watching the story of mundane real life concerns that have to compete with your own real life concerns, but like these real life concerns on screen are your own real life concerns, like you are living through what the characters are suffering. One of my friends from grad school was TAing a class and dreading seeing a Bicycle Thieves again. She’d seen it multiple times already, but every time she would literally get stomach cramps from anxiety. Out of all the films in the world from everywhere and every era, it was Bicycle Thieves, a simple story of a father and son trying to find a stolen bicycle, that she absolutely dreaded. Despite having seen it multiple times, it still drew her right in.
This movie has a classic neorealist kind of story. A father and son travel together to the city to sell a beloved family mule. This seemingly straight forward story has a twist at the end that echoes back through the rest of it, explaining why the father cared so much about making this trip memorable.
Neorealism is difficult genre, very high risk-high reward. This film is in many ways far far superior to the usual kind of film I review. For instance, there is a shot at the end that is a twist on the Sholay ferris wheel shot, in which you see two wheels in tandem, their frames swinging back and forth across each other in perfect clockwork, just like the painful movement of time is inevitably crushing and breaking apart the central family.
But it is still not good enough to fully succeed at this particular genre. At least, not for me, someone who doesn’t naturally give in to this kind of film. You can get away with lazy camera work, and lazy acting, if you have a sparkle of Star level charisma, some fancy fashion, peppy songs, and bright colors. And, of course, a completely unrealistic overly dramatic narrative. This film has really good camera work, and note perfect realistic performances. And yet without that extra perfect brilliance that the true classics of the genre bring, it just couldn’t grab me.
But that’s just me. If you are a neorealism fan, if you are looking for a film from India that is a little less about fantasy fulfillment and a little more about what real India is, or if you are simply hungry for some exquisite images on film and the kind of story that makes you gasp with beautiful pain at the end, this might be a movie for you.
And if you do like this film, let me recommend a few others that I liked which are a bit similar, there is also Dhadak, Koode, and the Hindi film neorealist classic, Do Bigha Zamin.
dontcallitbollywood 
Bhasmasur is a story from the Puranas (sorry, I can’t remember exactly which one right now). From your summary of the plot, I can’t really see how the title applies. Basically it’s about a rakshasa who asked for the power of being able to kill anyone by holding his hand over them, and then, when he misuses this power to cause havoc in the world (duh), Vishnu tricks him into killing himself (he’s invincible otherwise) by getting him to hold his hand over his own head. (You saw this story portrayed in a dance at the beginning of Maya Bazaar, if you remember.) Now that I’ve told you the story, can you make any sense of the title? I mean, interpreting it in the broadest sense as someone being destroyed because of his own hubris, I still don’t see it.
Have you seen Pather Panchali? Would you call that “neorealist?”
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It could maybe apply to the plot, I’m not sure. Partly because I struggled to follow the plot (I was torn between rewatching the film in order to not miss anything, and deciding that if the film didn’t grab my attention on the first watch it hadn’t earned me rewatching it) I’ll go ahead and spoil the broad outlines, so you can get a sense of it. SPOILERS the father takes his son to travel to the city and sell their mule. They travel through the desert, and eventually reach the city and sell the mule. The boy sadly says good-bye to it. And then they take the money and have one wonderful day at a fair. Before the father takes the son and hands him over to a child labor coordinator, the same man the father worked for. The father sadly walks away as the boy drives off in another direction on the back of a truck SPOILERS OVER
There is one moment in which the father steals food from a stall and later the stall owner steals from him, I suppose that could have a thematic meaning there too? But the larger sense was of people living on the edge of disaster with no real hope of crawling out. It didn’t feel so much like being destroyed by his own hubris as being inevitably destroyed.
Definitely would call Pather Panchali neorealist. Satyajit Ray was open about how Bicycle Thieves changed his life and influenced his vision for film.
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Very interesting. I will give it a watch!
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This sounds right up my alley. I’ll watch it too if I can find it.
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