Village Rockstars film review: Striking the right chords

When Rima Das started shooting for Village Rockstars, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, she had no idea where the script was going or how it would get there. That shows in the film — and not in a bad way. This is a film that meanders along at the pace of life in rural Assam, where it is set.
 
Villagers work in the fields, animals graze, women do housework and bring home provisions; families gather at village fairs, listening to music and eating snacks; and children go to school and then hang out with friends to play, climb trees, fight, fish in ponds, hear elders tell stories from the epics or sometimes do nothing at all. And the camera lingers over everyone and everything — from the golden light and emerald green fields to torrential rain and floodwater — capturing vignettes from the daily lives of the film’s characters instead of scripted scenes.
 
Slowly, the outlines of a story emerge. Dhunu, a tomboyish 10-year-old who lives in the village with her widowed mother and elder brother, is fascinated by the rural music bands that play at festivals and dreams of owning her own guitar and forming a band with friends. The children even go to a nearby town and check out a shop that repairs and services guitars. Given her family’s poverty, however, Dhunu’s seems an impossible dream. For the time being, the children content themselves with carving out guitars from Styrofoam.
 
Inspired by a story from the Mahabharata, and on the advice of a village elder, Dhunu starts doing odd jobs around the village to earn money, including climbing trees to pluck fruit, for which she is roundly ticked off by a band of interfering womenfolk. Dhunu’s quietly labouring mother turns out to be her rock. Even as she scolds her daughter for causing her trouble, she points out to the neighbouring women that nobody had shown up to help when her husband had died in a flood. The scenes where she watches over and caresses Dhunu while she sleeps, teaches her how to swim, and scolds her for trying to earn money — “Don’t I feed you?” — are some of the most moving moments of the film, along with the equally tender moments between Dhunu and her beloved goat, Munu.
 

Das, who single-handedly produced, wrote, directed and shot the film, neither glorifies nor exploits the villagers’ poverty. Instead, the film shows, in quite a matter-of-fact manner, the simple joys and challenges in the children’s lives. What’s remarkable is that the cast members are not even professional actors. Many are residents of Das’s native village, and some, including Bhanita Das who plays Dhunu, are her relatives. Dhunu, who turned out to be the central character in Village Rockstars, was not even in the script initially. In an interview in Toronto, Das said, “I just casually started shooting with the children. She (Bhanita) was always around and she was always doing the same things the boys liked doing. She was kind of a restless, free spirit. She reminded me of my childhood. When I saw that, I said to myself, ‘Why not have a girl in this gang?’”
 
Bhanita turns in a delightful performance, as she climbs trees with abandon, confidently rows a canoe through a flood, bosses over her band of friends — all boys — and shows a steely determination as she pursues her dream. She is irrepressible even in the scenes where Dhunu gets her first period and an army of village women arrives at her home to carry out the ceremonies associated with the occasion.
 
Dhunu has been tucking away her earnings in a safe spot carved out at home. But when her mother loses the crop in their tiny field in that year’s flood, the little girl generously offers up her meagre savings. Her mother doesn’t say much, but when you see the widowed woman in the last scene, slowly walking towards her village, her face expressionless, but carrying the musical instrument her daughter longs for, it leaves you with a profound sense of happiness and respect for the dignity of their simple lives. They are indeed village rockstars.