Not just a kiddie flick

MARQUEE

, Vishal Bhardwaj has shown an acute cinematic sense, especially in the realms of shot composition and the use of colour and music.

These qualities are equally on view in The Blue Umbrella, made in 2005 but only just commercially released. I've seen it described as a "children's movie", but this is slightly misleading: though the film is based on a gentle Ruskin Bond story, Bhardwaj's treatment owes an equal debt to the creepy stories told by the Brothers Grimm, an effect that's underlined by Pankaj Kapur's superb performance as a very Himachali Big Bad Wolf.

The story is about how a vivid blue umbrella affects the lives of people in a quiet hillside village. A young girl named Biniya gets it from a group of tourists in exchange for a lucky charm, and she carries the umbrella around with her everywhere, mesmerising the rest of the villagers, who have never seen anything like it.

Kapur plays Nandkishor, a covetous, honey-tongued shopkeeper who is feared by children because of his habit of selling goods supposedly on loan but holding on to treasured items as collateral and never returning them.

He tries to wheedle Biniya's new possession out of her by using such enticements as a year's supply of toffees and biscuits, but when she refuses, he resolves to have it anyway.

The film is a bit uneven and could certainly have been trimmed down, but parts are brilliant. Especially notable is the way Bhardwaj subtly changes the tone and mood of the story, with the gradual movement from a bright, sunshiney world to a dark, nightmarish one.

With the umbrella, Biniya's world is happy and secure "" she poses with it for tourist photographs and there is even a surreal moment when she turns into a swashbuckling heroine figure, saving her pehlwaan brother from a deadly cobra.

But once the umbrella goes missing she enters a twilight zone full of shadowy figures. Even the once-friendly faces from the village can no longer be trusted "" everyone seems to be gloating at her misfortune, for the umbrella had become a catalyst for envy and discontent.

But the loss also awakens a new maturity in Biniya. Some of her later scenes show an intensity that belies her age: we see that she's learnt something about how the world works, and about the perils of getting too attached to something. (It's worth recalling here that the Red Riding Hood story is sometimes seen as an allegory for a young girl's sexual awakening, though I doubt Bhardwaj "" or Ruskin Bond "" would have had this in mind!)

Towards the end of the film, when Nandkishor has become an outcast, it's fitting that the first person to reach out to him is the girl he stole from, who knows firsthand about the lure of the blue umbrella.

The predatory aspects of Kapur's performance reminded me of another character that is a stand-in for the Big Bad Wolf, from a 50-year-old film: Robert Mitchum's Preacher in The Night of the Hunter.

Like Nandkishor, Preacher was menacing and comic at the same time: there's a scene where he trips and falls, arms outstretched, while chasing his stepchildren into a basement, and the image of his shadow on the wall makes him look like a grotesque cartoon villain.

Similarly, Nandkishor is a composite of many classic characters from the more stygian fairy tales.

The Blue Umbrella is a fine depiction of the loss of innocence: of idyllic lives being thrown into disarray by the introduction of an alien object; of emotions like envy being introduced into a garden of Eden.

While we could certainly do with good children's films of the more conventional variety, it's worth celebrating Bhardwaj's achievement (both here and in his earlier Makdee) of bringing alive the darker shades of childhood.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)