Sairat... dissolving reel and real life
boundaries
In our democratic set up, caste
invariably holds the key to any poll outcomes but the recent
phenomenon called 'Sairat' substantiates that the caste factor can
even drive the box office results. It seems no one has understood it
better than the maveric director Nagraj Manjule, whose epic love
story, Sairat has put myriads of Bollywood flicks to shame by winning
critical as well commercial accolades.
The movie without being preachy about
the issue of honour killing and inter-caste hatred, unfolds with all
the essentials of a typical filmy love-saga. All the ingredients of
done-to-death tragic romance formulae viz. archetypal lovers,
melodious tunes, suave visuals, slo-mo shots (establishing larger
than life existence of the protagonists), chase sequences and
engaging humour, the film gives away everything generously to its
escapist audience till the conflict point in the story arrives.
From the conflict onward, the filmmaker
takes reigns in his own hands and steadily and silently drives the
audience towards the harsh realities of love life. The eloped couple
madly in love with each other arrives in a completely hostile
environment of the slums of hyderabad and starts facing the real-life
challenges. Archi, an upper caste girl who is bereaved of her social
capital, gradually discovers her own independent essence and identity
while Parshya, a lower caste boy slowly overcomes the boundaries of
patriarchal mindset. In the course of making their living, their love
for each other gets redefined and when they are about to settle down
in with their kid, the final blow of the bigger social reality
strikes.
Number of established filmmakers from
Marathi film industry must be groping for answers as what exactly
made Sairat a smash hit. The answer lies not just in understanding
the fundamentals of good story-telling but also in comprehending how
exactly the good story should be told in a socially relevant way. I
think here the director with his acute understanding of the social
realities outscores the number of other directors existing in the
industry.
His characters undergo through mundane
situations of life but at no point the reality in the movie becomes
filmic or untrue-to-life. For the purpose, the language used by the
characters in the film remains colloquial and dialectal. Nagraj takes
care, neither his characters arrive in Pune or Mumbai (when they
elope) nor do they ever try to speak the 'so called standard'
language of the metropolis. In Sairat the reel life of the characters
is not really different than the real life of couples from any
semi-rural areas of Maharashtra. Raising the bar of his signature
style of direction, Nagraj also ensures that his actors do not get
engaged in any 'theatrical pattern of acting'. They 'act' as any
other boy-or-girl-next door would react in given situations.
I think, here somewhere Nagraj forges a
close, special and strong bond with his audience who was craving to
see the true reflection of their lives on silver screen. With his
inimitable style, Nagraj at the end brings cinema closer to life for
sure.
