Cannes Diaries: Will Richa Chadha's Masaan win the top prize?

The Indo-French production received much applause at the 68th Cannes Film Festival.

Masaan (Fly Away Solo) is director Neeraj Ghaywan’s first feature film being premiered at the ongoing Cannes International Film Festival.

It is one of two Indian features in the Un Certain Regard section, second in prestige only to the exalted main Competition.

Masaan is an Indo-French production, Macassar Productions (France) and Sikhya Entertainment (India), distributed by Pathe.

A full house applauded long and hard at the final fade out.

The Cannes Film Festival clusters such debutants as a candidate group for the coveted Camera d’Or. This goes to the director of a first film adjudged best in this section taken together with The Director’s Fortnight and The Critics’ Week, other main sections that are no walk-over jousts in their own right.

Ghaywan is the hottest bet for the prize, going by the audience reactions.

• Click here to see more pictures of the Masaan team in Cannes

The film is set in Banaras. In a succinct pre-screening word to his audience, Ghaywan said 'Escape' is a word writ large on the wishes of the age group the film is about.

India has made enormous strides in technical and economic fields but remains shackled by monsters of the past like caste, class and region. The young want something different.

Masaan offers a lot of familiar ingredients but in a creative cuisine. Corruption, police brutality, poverty and job scarcity, filth, the burning ghats -- they are all there but ennobled by good camera work, good performances, and great direction based on a good script.   

Four lives intersect along the Ganges, a boy of a family in charge of cremations, a hapless father who must collect three lakhs for a bribe, a girl ridden with guilt over a first love and a spirited girl yearning for a family. They long to escape from the social constructs that entrap them. All succeed, one of them through an accidental drowning. A script faithful to locale and character weaves a riveting tale.

The film is dominated by a wonderful performance from Sanjay Mishra as the father whose fading morality finds redemption by film’s end.

Richa Chadda, lovely and true to her role, is a shade too classy for the girl she plays.

Vicky Kaushal, as the lowly lad, will go far, symbolised perhaps by his sailing away into the sunset as Masaan closes. 

In the picture: Richa Chadha, Neeraj Ghaywan, Shweta Tripathi and Vicky Kaushal at Cannes