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What I truly enjoyed about the anthology are the people in these stories and their incredible faith in life. That unbeatable human spirit truly makes the film stand out.
(From left) Ryanna Skye Lawson, Setara Amiri, Arushi Sharma, Arka Das in the anthoogy, My Melbourne
U/A: Drama, comedy
Dir: Imtiaz Ali, Arif Ali, Rima Das, Kabir Khan, Rahul Vora, Onir
Cast: Arushi Sharma, Kat Stewart, Ryanna Skye Lawson, Arka Das, Setara Amiri, Jackson Gallagher
Rating: 3/5
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You’ll always have a favourite film in an anthology. There is always a tendency to latch onto a story that appeals to you. Kabir Khan’s Setara was the one for me. It’s probably because over the past two years I have gone to bed every night thinking of the women in Taliban-led Afghanistan. Every shred of agency has been robbed away from them, while the world has silently watched it happen and done nothing about it. An even darker thought passes my mind a lot and I am going to simply toss to you, dear readers—this could happen to us too. Khan’s short took my mind away from these thoughts (fit for a dystopian world) to the world of 16-year-old Setara Amiri. She is a cricketer living in Melbourne with her family after they fled from Afghanistan. The innocence in her performance gives hope. Khan reminds us, perhaps, if she can reconstruct her life, then you can too. Setara’s mother, once a judge in Afghanistan, feels the pinch of being othered in a land that isn’t hers. The pain of being displaced and finding yourself in the debris of broken dreams is captured beautifully. I will take the hope it offers, especially when there’s so little of it in the world.
In Onir’s Nandini, I was struck by the way grief is addressed. Coming-to-terms with losing a parent is hard. It’s a void that never goes away. But for Onir’s protagonist, played beautifully by Arka Das, it’s the beginning of mending severed ties with his father. Much like mothers and daughters, fathers and sons have a complicated relationship. In this case, the father had disowned the son for being queer. Now, the two are left without the glue of the woman in their lives. They are shattered. Clinging to the memories of her and weeping into her sarees to sooth themselves, they must find a way to reconcile. Onir handles the story delicately, bringing out the complexity of their hearts in simple words. It moves slowly, simmering with emotions, only to make you realise that it takes very little to mend parent-child relationships. A simple pat on the back, holding of hands is enough to bring it back to the beginning.
Imtiaz Ali and Arif Ali’s Jules is about self-exploration. Despite a nuanced performance by Arushi Sharma as Sakshi, the film feels undercooked. She is a young Punjabi , who moves to an unfamiliar city, with an inattentive, borderline abusive husband in tow. We go through her monotonous days, long shots of her struggling to cook meat as a vegetarian and her half-baked chats with her husband who is evidently exhausting to be around. She finds her self-worth because of a homeless woman, Jules, who teaches her what it means to be liberated. This is Imtiaz’s trademark, but this time the film doesn’t quite come together. Perhaps I needed to know more about Sakshi to care about her arc.
That brings me to Rima Das’ Emma. Here, we are told the story of an ace dancer who is losing her ability to hear. Das portrays her mental battle as she grapples with the uncertainty of her future. Ryanna Skye Lawson is pitch-perfect. When her character meets Nathan Borg, a successful deaf dancer, it inspires her to not give up on herself just yet.
What I truly enjoyed about the anthology are the people in these stories and their incredible faith in life. That unbeatable human spirit truly makes the film stand out. Despite living in a world that bombards us with content, I rarely come across something that feels assuring or affirming. While I love a story that blows my mind, every now and then it’s nice to watch a film that soothes you. This is that film!
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