At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should one stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their insights into the creative process and a film’s back-story – are often invigorating; but as a critic who is still trying to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, hearing the crew speak about their intentions can create white noise, or sway one’s feelings.
However, I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening talk – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was genuinely engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about touched on and confirmed my own feelings. For instance, I was unsurprised to hear that the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa has a deep interest not just in Partition – the specific event that sundered a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)
The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. “Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife is disturbed, but the family mostly continues as if nothing is amiss; others – distant relatives, elders in the community – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on, and there are elements of magical realism in this part of the story. Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good “son” – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl, the conflicts escalate.
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This is a lush, stately paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped with the Punjabi dialogues). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert, but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house; the very air here is thick and oppressive and you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. For all the vividness of the images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject.
