Flights of freedom

Udaan captures the subtleties of a father-son estrangement

Trust Anurag Kashyap to break the mould and come up with a movie that challenges the norms of conventional cinema. Be it Dev.D or No Smoking, Kashyap is known to stick to what he wants to show rather than what people want to see.

With Udaan, which released this Friday, he dons the producer’s hat and lets director Vikramaditya Motwane spin a story about a boy (Rajat Barmecha) and his tyrannical father (Ronit Roy). The film deserves all the praise that it has received at home and at Cannes this year, where it was nominated in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ category. Like many of Kashyap’s movies, Udaan is a poignant and unsettling film. It is a mature tale, realistically told about the difficulties of a father-son relationship. Unlike in the usual Bollywood films where the lives of teens revolve around romance or finding girlfriends, the teenager here deals with existential angst.

Rohan — played sensitively by Barmecha — and his three friends get expelled from boarding school for sneaking out of hostel to watch an X-rated film. He is sent home, but will his reunion with his draconian father (Roy) after eight long years be a happy event, or will it be the final straw in their fractured relationship? At home Rohan finds a stranger, his six-year-old stepbrother Arjun (Aayan Boradia) — of whose existence Rohan hadn’t been aware until then. Arjun is at first ousted from his room after the older brother returns to reclaim his lost space, but gradually a bond develops between the two.

From one caged world, the boarding school, Rohan enters another — one where his father rules with an iron hand. No one argues with ‘sir’ — no gentle ‘Papa’ for strict father — whose wishes prevail in his sons’ lives. It’s a suffocating world of social expectations, of little boys being made to fit into stereotypical notions of being ‘male’. In one of the many scenes of confrontation, his father tells Rohan that he is a ‘ladki’ because of his regular, almost feminine features and that he lacks the courage to tell the truth — but can the father himself bear the truth?

Rohan finds solace and encouragement with Uncle Jimmy (Ram Kapoor). The childless Jimmy had treasured Rohan’s childhood memories in a photo scrapbook that Rohan finds and flips through. The scene is reminiscent of young Jugal Hansraj looking at his dead mother’s photographs in Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom (1983), another film that dealt with an estranged father and son.

Both Roy and Kapoor are stupendous as the stern father and the nice uncle, respectively. But the real scene-stealers are the boys Barmecha and Boradia. Roy’s cold, middle-class obsession with securing a future for his son, and Barmecha’s confusions as a teenager wanting to break free, will be quite familiar to viewers.

Motwane lives up to the faith that Kashyap showed in him. The promising director tells a simple story, simply — a difficult art. The scenes shot in Shimla and Jamshedpur use a blue filter, indicative of the boy’s state of gloom and disarray while giving the film an edgy feel reflective of New Wave cinema. The contemporary and psychedelic feel of Amit Trivedi’s music complements the film’s realistic setting. However, unlike Trivedi’s earlier compositions for Dev.D, none of these songs is catchy.

It’s a film parents as well as children will enjoy.