BOMBAY ROSE(2021)
I have already made my readers aware of maverick Indian animation filmmaker Gitanjali Rao's underrated, still unsung genius in my essay on her brilliant short film PRINTED RAINBOW, published last year here in this collection itself. The discussion included her other shorts BLUE and ORANGE too ( the latter's sensual depiction of the pains and pleasures associated with urban desires with a beautiful jazz score is unforgettable)
So I was obviously on cloud nine to know that her almost twenty year journey in the field of rejuvenating the form culminated in Netflix acquiring rights to her first feature length work BOMBAY ROSE. I watched it yesterday and to say I was proud beyond words and awed by her evolving, empathetic storytelling would not be enough.
Her rootedness in the Indian ethos, in the way various classes and sensibilities become one whole homogeneous entity in this Bombay set tale is visually striking, representing the palette of life in its good, bad and ugly personal contours. It's a love story, a love letter and a tribute to human interaction. Something tells me it just wouldn't have felt this beautiful and heartwarming if it was a regular live action film. The little details and the tug and pull of emotions feel organic given the frame by frame, painterly essence adopted by Rao and her team.
Like little shafts of light falling through the canopy of evergreen trees on a road , in little squares and rectangles, the movement of the characters traced through eye view of a rose picked up by familiar hands, traversing familiar routes and then ending up on the grave. The evil man symbolized as a preying bird or the faces of two lovers melting in the pouring rain, reflected in a car window.
Or flights of fancy where the lead protagonist, a veritable have-not eking out a living by selling garlands, transforms into a princess of yore, with each shot replicating the iconic heritage of Mughal era paintings, especially the colours and images in the background down to the attires and locations. Pause a single shot among these and they resemble an actual painting from the era. You see, that is the eye for detail here that stands out. In a way, this merging of reality and imagination and differing classes inform us of the central character's imprisonment in a system where she cannot rise above her station in life. That reality is never cheated or put out of context here in BOMBAY ROSE.
The modest home of an elderly Catholic lady and the shabby, almost ramshackle quarters of the protagonist facing the sea offer the intimacy of these spaces as indicative of the interior worlds they carry. Every home or living space is all that and more, don't we agree? Especially poignant is the way nostalgia and memory is handled in the case of the senior prefects, like the protagonist's grandfather and his decades old repair shop, the Christian lady's home populated by knick knacks covering her profound journey through lonely, post-retirement years and her good friend's antiques shop bridging worlds of past and present. Memory is a feeling evoked here, an entity not to be lost. In the film's best touch, older buildings animatedly appear like creepers in sepia tones over the new ones as the lady takes a walk from home to the graveyard, signifying the passage of time. Like PRINTED RAINBOW, the director's beloved apex in form and content in the shorter mould, an affinity for cats, the wise and experienced members of our world and the colours of a location in its specificity join hands with a penchant for make believe in the face of alienation.
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