anchor: In search of emancipation
Kislay’s debut feature film Aise Heeprovides a window to the lives of people caged by the shackles of an existential angst
Dipankar Sarkar
“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Kislay’s debut feature filmAise Hee(Just like that)doesn’t just write those words but rather shows us as each forlorn character in the film tries to cope with his quiddity. The circumstances of the characters consume them as they ponder over their anxieties that come with their middle class existence. Their lives present us with a constant tussle between the spatial position of their inhabiting space as they silently witness the transition in the society.
Precise compositions, contemplative pacing, static camera angle, and elliptical narrative unfold one event after the other where the progression is used to evoke a sense of melancholy and poetry in everyday existence.
The young filmmaker deftly presents the internal and social battles of the characters sometimes with humour, other times with stark reality. Within its 120 minutes length, the film moves with the unforced, unhurried speed of a leaf on a stream. Nothing, or almost nothing, is dramatically underlined or shoved under the audience’s nose for inspection. The film appears as a poignant record of a hidden sorrow in the modern city of Allahabad, before the city’s name has changed.
The film opens with the death ritual ceremony of Mrs Sharma’s husband. The gathering of relatives accompanied by the activities and the procedures makes Mrs Sharma uncomfortable. She takes refuge inside the bathroom to ward herself off the chattering of mourners. Thereafter, she starts living on the floor above her family and treads the hitherto uncharted socially restricted territories of her life. Her nonchalant approach includes visiting shopping malls, parlours, eating ice creams, learning embroidery from a Muslim tailor in the neighbourhood. But soon her new-found freedom stirs a hornet’s nest of social restrictions and she has to take measures to ensure her émancipation.
At the same time, her son Virendra, an announcer with All India Radio, is passing through a phase of crisis in his professional life, her daughter-in-law Sonia seems trapped within the confines of household chores and her grandchildren Vinay displays his patriarchal streak over elder sister Vinni’s flamboyancies. All the primary characters in the film are struggling with one hurdle or the other and not simply the passive victims. Their stories are played out in a world that is a living, dynamic exemplar of the great truth that all flesh is grass and everything around us is impermanent and temporary.
Emotional mobility to a new direction help Mrs Sharma to persevere even though her family inexorably sinks away from her. It further reflects upon a keen sense of fragility of relationships and the impermanence of life as the city expands towards a new environment from which people cannot escape. The film in its final moment reflects our own experiences back onto us not solely because the ending’s emotional weight carries such an immense impact, but because we will know that we might have likely experienced what these characters have gone through, and didn’t know how to express it. The film grows on the viewers, subtly and over time. As with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it just like that.
The film won the Special Jury Mention at the Busan International Film Festival, Korea, 2019. At MAMI, it has won the Film Critics Guild Award and a special Jury Mentions as Best Female Actor for Mohini Sharma.
