Some very rare and precious works of art forge their reality from fragile dreams and untold passions.
Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara is a tender dewdrop perched on a leaf that clings on to the tree by sheer willpower. Its strength comes from within. Director Jahnu Barua knows how to build a symphonic crescendo out of vignettes from the dining table.
An ideologically enthused patriarch rapidly degenerating into irretrievable memory-loss, Professor Uttam Chuadhary(Anupam Kher) and his strong encumbered but unvanquished daughter Trisha (Urmila Matondkar) form the core of Barua's brilliantly designed chamber piece. Till the end, the ailing father and the indomitable daughter keep the windows of the narrative open so that we get a view into the soul of humanity.
Barua is a master of nuances. He builds miniature domestic scenes like a carefully carved out doll's house where every room and its details are visible to the eye.
Even as the distraught daughter suffers the consequences of her father's mental illness (following a lost job and a broken engagement) we get to see other characters (for example, the old man's two sons, the supportive shrink played by Pravin Dabas and the concerned maid enacted deftly by Divya Jagdale) move in and out of the narrative's vision creating a montage of images glimpsed through the window of a speeding train.
For a film that makes memory loss its theme, the images and visuals are edited and put together with death-defying dexterity. There's none of that deathly stillness at the nerve-centre which often emasculates cinema about mortality and pain.
It is noteworthy how Barua paints time lapse in Chaudhary's memory. In one sequence, he stumbles into a chemistry class in college thinking it to be a Hindi class while in the next, he's at the dining table having breakfast with his daughter thinking it's the day after the class-room fiasco, when actually three years have elapsed!
Interestingly, Barua does not try to be clever. Unlike his avant-garde contemporaries and seniors who spend a lot of time creating passages of techno-savvy brilliance, this sensitive director simply wants to tell a moving story in the most intelligible language.
Sanjay Chauhan's writing skill peels off the inherent artifice of cinema to lay bare the soul of the characters. The two principal actors do the rest. Anupam Kher with his awry body language and a growing bewilderment regarding his own inability to comprehend what's happening around him, gives his finest performance to date. There's an ingrained hesitancy to the character's demeanour which Kher brings out with a seasoned actor's confidence.
In all her recent performances, Urmila Matondkar has never ceased to surprise. Here she takes tall looming strides as an accomplished actress, bringing out nuances in her character without getting shrill or over-pitched. Urmila plays the daughter of an ailing father with rare understanding.
Her controlled and finely-tuned performance makes room for interludes of high but smothered drama. Her portrayal of stifled emotions when Trisha's kid-brother Addy suggests they send their Alzheimers' stricken father to a mental institution or when distraught and dishevelled by his impulse to disappear she runs into her ex-fiance who has found a new woman, are cases in point.
Barua suffuses the elegiac narration with ambrosial touches of pain and noslatgia. The Gandhian allusion is sensibly tangential to the plot. Though the mock courtroom where the traumatized professor is exonerated and exorcised of his guilt for having killed Mahatma Gandhi seems more slapped-on than integral, there is an aura of disarming sincerity to the plot that clings to ordinary characters even as they undergo extraordinary levels of struggle and pain.
Two elements add substantially to the film's sense of symphonic nobility. Bappi Lahiri's background score is so delicate and emotionally driven that it catches the characters by their collars and transports their emotions into reams of articulate motions.
Raj Chakravarti's cinematography remains largely indoors, panning the dining table and moving upwards to the old protagonist's bedroom searching for areas in the domestic idyll where pain decided to lodge itself so stubbornly.
This film about a man who forgets his bearings cannot be forgotten easily.