MOVIE REVIEW..

MANJHA.

This Manjha comes with a sharp edge

Manjha, a Marathi-Hindi short fiction film directed by Rahi Anil Barve. This 27-year-old director’s B&W film won two top awards at the 10th Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation films (MIFF)– the best film award in the fiction category and the IDPA award for the best first film by a director. It was not surprising to see it winning these two awards. Barve’s 40-minute film deserves every ounce of the praise it got at the festival, despite its loud background score and somewhat tardy ending.

Even then, Barve has shown why he should be a man to watch out for. Shot in darker tones even for a B&W film, the camerawork by Pankaj Kumar is highly interesting, adding to the film’s mood. Barve has taken up a dark subject – of child molestation - in his very first film, and the way he has plunged head on into it is quite outstanding. I don’t remember the name of the child actor who played Ranka, a street orphan all of ten years old. He makes manjha (well, we all have flown kites sometime or the other, isn’t it?) for a living, and he has to take care of his three-year-old little sister Chimi, who is somewhat mentally challenged. The guy is simply too good, confidently mouthing the street lingo – not of the Hindi cinema kind but the kind one would actually hear from such homeless kids surviving on the streets of big cities – and making the rough-and-tough character enactment seem an easy thing to do.

A mentally-disturbed cop – disturbed because he had been abused by his father as a child – gets friendly with Ranka and takes Chimi on the pretext of buying her some sweets, only to sexually abuse her. Ranka finds her next morning at a construction site, lying half-dead, and the cop goes on to explain to him that such things keep happening, especially if it has to be with people of his kind of background, and it is best to forget about it and move on with life. But Ranka knows he has to protect his sister from monsters like the cop, and he takes his revenge, in the process losing whatever little innocence he has as a child. This more or less is the film’s storyline, but the execution of the subject shows Barve is on firm ground.

The film, made in SP Beta, is too dark for comfort sometimes, but he has not let the mood slip even for once, and that is where he has succeeded as a director. How many times do we see a film with a dark mood suddenly losing its way thanks to our propensity to squeeze in that so-called audience-pampering item number. Yes, it is easy not to waver in the short fiction format, and I don’t know if Barve would be able to show this uncompromising streak when he makes his first and subsequent feature films, but I hope he does. I would wait for this guy to come up with his next work. It’s a pity that we cannot get to watch this kind of short films in our theatres, and have to depend on festivals to access them. Catch this film if you get a chance.