Small-town India: G Kutta Se, Angamaly Diaries and A Death in the Gunj
Massey's disposition of someone being consumed by his unending torment is perfect
 "A Death in the Gunj")
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A still from A Death in the Gunj
The media keeps peddling numbers that two-thirds of the people lining the pockets of corporations and e-commerce giants come from sleepy towns but Bollywood keeps treating them shoddily on screen. I happened to watch three movies in the recent past that were quite disparate thematically but they had one common thread that was given proper respect: ethos of small town India.
G Kutta Se: Rahul Dahiya’s grittily made Haryanvi movie is about three girls who get caught in the antediluvian vortex of supposed family honour. Shot entirely with new cast and a sensibility that would make Jean-Pierre Melville proud, Dahiya made a movie that will resonate hard with the viewer.
Most of the movie is set in the boonies of Haryana where two girls, one in early teens and another in adolescence, face retribution from their families for acting on their sexual impulses. There’s a heart rending, thought-provoking sequence where a girl is murdered by her family and the pet dog dies in a parallel moment. The follow up scene is of the girl and the dog being burnt in the same pyre. The movie is a scathing indictment on the kind of medieval mindset that still besets the country’s growth: that boys are far more desirable than girls as progeny. The movie’s dialogue does get stilted at times but it sends out an important message to these needlessly macho men to work less on their biceps and more on their intuition.
Angamaly Diaries: This delicious Malayalam movie with the pork industry backdrop in a town close to Kochi might just be this year’s best Indian movie.
Told partly in flashback, the movie starts with a beautiful bar fight, almost like a Caravaggio painting, among two rival gangs, one of them led by the movie’s protagonist.
The post-interval portions get a tad jarring but the beautiful pas de deux between Prashant Pillai’s fresh background score and the irrefutable sublimity of the acting talent (a whopping 85 newcomers) ensures the pace doesn’t dip too much. Antony Varghese as Vincent Pepe, the protagonist, is an assured debut since very long. Lijo Jose Pellissery’s direction and Chemban Vinod Jose’s script is rooted and very aware. It might look like an amalgamation of the schlock of Kammatipadam and Premam but the story’s subtle gravity soars in its own way once the characters and the conflict is established.
Girish Gangadharan’s cinematography and Shameer Mohammed’s editing creates a force field around each scene, even in the most mundane instances. The interval and the climactic scenes are a minor piece of art considering they are such long takes but never seem gimmicky.
G Kutta Se: Rahul Dahiya’s grittily made Haryanvi movie is about three girls who get caught in the antediluvian vortex of supposed family honour. Shot entirely with new cast and a sensibility that would make Jean-Pierre Melville proud, Dahiya made a movie that will resonate hard with the viewer.
Most of the movie is set in the boonies of Haryana where two girls, one in early teens and another in adolescence, face retribution from their families for acting on their sexual impulses. There’s a heart rending, thought-provoking sequence where a girl is murdered by her family and the pet dog dies in a parallel moment. The follow up scene is of the girl and the dog being burnt in the same pyre. The movie is a scathing indictment on the kind of medieval mindset that still besets the country’s growth: that boys are far more desirable than girls as progeny. The movie’s dialogue does get stilted at times but it sends out an important message to these needlessly macho men to work less on their biceps and more on their intuition.
Angamaly Diaries: This delicious Malayalam movie with the pork industry backdrop in a town close to Kochi might just be this year’s best Indian movie.
Told partly in flashback, the movie starts with a beautiful bar fight, almost like a Caravaggio painting, among two rival gangs, one of them led by the movie’s protagonist.
The post-interval portions get a tad jarring but the beautiful pas de deux between Prashant Pillai’s fresh background score and the irrefutable sublimity of the acting talent (a whopping 85 newcomers) ensures the pace doesn’t dip too much. Antony Varghese as Vincent Pepe, the protagonist, is an assured debut since very long. Lijo Jose Pellissery’s direction and Chemban Vinod Jose’s script is rooted and very aware. It might look like an amalgamation of the schlock of Kammatipadam and Premam but the story’s subtle gravity soars in its own way once the characters and the conflict is established.
Girish Gangadharan’s cinematography and Shameer Mohammed’s editing creates a force field around each scene, even in the most mundane instances. The interval and the climactic scenes are a minor piece of art considering they are such long takes but never seem gimmicky.
A still from A Death in the Gunj