by Rwita Dutta
“Faltu Lok” received the Best Short Film award in the recently concluded Ottawa Indian Film Festival, 2021. The Jury has unanimously appreciated the work. They found the film to be quite cinematic and real. It's always a pleasure to analyse the text of a debut film. Be it a short fiction or a long feature film, any new director deserves our undivided attention.
Urban poor is that unwanted demographic community in a rapidly developing city that their existence, agony, pain and sufferings seem to be something invisible. They never feature in the dominant discourse of human history. They cannot represent themselves, simply because they are not equipped enough. They need to be represented. This reminds me the famous essay of the Marxist-Feminist-Deconstructionist, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak “Can the subaltern speak”??
In an age of identity politics, a lower-class taxi driver in a city like Kolkata is definitely a force to reckon with as a politically driven part of an interest group, but as an individual, his subjectivities have no value. Apparently, it's the mundane story of Babu (played by Sandip Bhattacharya), his wife Jhumu (played by Supriti Bhadra) and his only daughter Pinki (Sharmistha Roy) and their unceremonious life.
From the very outset, we can feel that something is not really right in their household. The dingy house, the pale ambience presupposes a grim narrative. Babu confronts his young daughter in the midst of her sleeping hour, awakens his wife who curses him incessantly. He repeats his words and we understand something ominous is brewing in the air.
Eventually, we get to know that Pinki is pregnant and any unwed motherhood is a scandalous issue in Indian society. The parents initially try to marry her off, but that seems to be a distant dream. Babu meets the local political party leader to solve his issue. The political society and the civil society intersect in a developing country like India, politics penetrates everything and everywhere. The state even invades our closely guarded privacy. We are probably partially responsible for our predicament. Nobody could have solved his problem. His ineffectuality triggers off a macabre violence in him. He is the faltu lok, blamed and accused by everybody who fails to take action for the injustice done to his daughter. But Pinki, on the other hand, has no guilt about her transgression; she actually enjoys her chance encounter with sexuality. She is more suppressed at home by her father. She decorates herself to have a rendezvous only to be thwarted by her father. She despises him.
On the other hand, Babu is stuck into this unending labyrinth of grief, deceit and violence in a dystopic universe. His gruesome activity with the riders of his taxi compels us to question his and our sanity. Are we becoming too cynical, too inhuman? Why are we so desperate to humiliate each other? The kind of insensibility we espouse questions our entire sensibility.
As a debut director, Antara shows a lot of possibilities. She has not only woven the narrative in an austere manner – her camera is mostly static in the first half of this 30 minutes film – it moves along with the psychological trajectory of the protagonist. Her film could have been bleak but the incorporation of the very last shot is at least hopeful.
The grey interior of Babu's dilapidated houses, claustrophobic indoor setting and the caustic interpersonal relationships among the characters is indeed bleak and derided that seriously needed an overhauling. This film is a perfect representation of the contemporary time when we are all stuck within the double edged pungent atmosphere. In this period of utmost hopelessness, Faltu Lok mirrors our society and mocks us.
As a female filmmaker, Antara, interestingly, did not choose to create a rom-com or women-oriented subject that is quite expected from the women filmmakers worldwide. Her politics seem to be more intricate. With an enviable theatre background (she is a formidable actress and theatre director from Kolkata) she effervescently dabbles into the other medium quite diligently without being theatrical. That deserves a thundering applaud. Her deliverance did not entail the gender specific vision; rather it surpasses her socially prescribed role performance and she gleefully invites us to dissect a most visceral part of human existence in the present reality. It's an irresistible, tense world created with a lot of grit. Her disenchantment with humanity however portrays the harsh reality around us which we choose to ignore. But it's a Hobbesian world at loose and she is brave enough to tell that in our face. Her approach towards the gritty subject is never overtly dramatic, rather at times, it is so placid that evokes a creepy feeling in us.
The loss of love, integrity and ethical overtures along with dreadful innermost violence in human beings makes the world uninhabitable. The authenticity of the intention of the Director is present throughout the film. Fortunately, in the last scene, the Director allows us to breathe and sustain ourselves at least in her cinematic domain.
Faltu Lok is doing its festival tour and will release in the OTT platform eventually while the director is getting ready for her second script.
