'Harishchandrachi Factory' (Movie Review)

Cast: Nandu Madhav, Vibhawari Despande

Director: Paresh Mokashi

This is the film that went all the way to Oscar-land and came back empty-handed. But whose loss is it anyway?

Writer-director Paresh Mokashi's tender-sweet film about the founding father of Indian cinema Dadasaheb's Phalke's struggle to make the country's first feature film is not short of a miracle. It alchemises the pain, humiliation and compromises of a struggling artiste into something extraordinarily funny, satirical and self-mocking.

While retaining the inherent warmth, sensitivity and dignity of the protagonist's uphill task of proving to his family, friends and neighbours that Phalke is no lunatic, the film chronicles the early years in the long and chequered history of cinema in India with a crisp and curvaceous comprehensiveness.

Making a life so consumed by a new art form interesting and compelling could not be an easy task. Mokashi's Phalke could easily have become a portrait of an obstinate and obsessive man who thought the moving images on screen could actually add up to make some collective sense.

Cannily, Mokashi spends a substantial amount of playing-time looking at Phalke's domestic life. The easy and affable atmosphere in the pioneering filmmaker's home explains why and how the audacious genius was able to do what he did.

Phalke's relationship with his children is that of a progressive pally father at a time when the cane did all the talking with kids. Only a man who treats his family as his allies could dare to venture into an unknown vocation like filmmaking.

It's Phalke's relationship with his spunky wife Saraswati (played with uninhibited starkness and gusto by Vaibhavari Deshpande) that gives to the bio-pic the distinctive colour of a love story.

Phalke's wife is shown to be supremely supportive of her husband's outrageous experimentation with moving pictures. She willingly, if not gladly, pawns her jewellery, furniture and finally home and sits in on his editing when he makes his film while he attempts some seriously clumsy cooking.

Truly an early feminist, Saraswati Phalke's bonding with her husband is the fulcrum of the narrative.

The director recreates the era (1914) not through an extravagance of extraneous props and piles of in-your-face periodicity, but with understated nuances and gestures. Sights and sounds suggest an indelible link between Phalke's obsession for cinema with the progressive and liberal middle-class Marathi milieu.

Interestingly, Phalke, as portrayed by accomplished theatre actor Nandu Madhav, is often captured in the mood that Charlie Chaplin patented. Director Mokashi lets Madhav be. The actor interprets Phalke in a spirit of freewheeling spontaneity. Madhav's Phalke is a driven and passionate soul consumed by the thought of making a feature film but able to see the amusing picture he portrays to those around him through his single-minded determination to make a film on Raja Harishchandra's journey from royalty to penury.

Phalke's own journey did not quite take him to the dog house. This film finds enormous hope and inspiration in a life that defined Indian cinema. Paresh Mokashi scatters Phalke's journey from a wannabe dreamer to a trained London-returned filmmaker with dollops of comic-strip witticism and wisdom.

The well-known search for a heroine to play Harishchandra's wife is here detailed in savagely satirical sequences. Eventually we see Phalke's whole house turned into a theatre of the absurd with wannabe actors rehearsing their lines in every nook and cranny.

"Harishchandrachi Factory" is in Marathi. It could be in any language or no spoken language at all and it would be just as warm, funny and welcoming. This film does to the father of Indian cinema what Richard Attenborough's epic did to the father of the nation. The film humanises the mythic figure without peeling away the layers of luminous inner life that always defines extraordinary lives.

Indo-Asian News Service