“A gift of the delicious laddoo and the lost jewel.
Think if you can
Where is the flower of the soul?”
Once upon a time in far off Rajasthan, a filmmaker made a film about women. The film she made is, in the loosest sense, a narrative focusing on one woman, an “everywoman” if you will, who sets out on an urgent quest for something that cannot be known. The woman is young and beautiful. She is guided on her way by a filmic tapestry of interweaving folk tales, riddles, symbols, songs, and magical events, a wise man, a dying man, even a deity: Bemata, goddess of the destinies of children. The setting is Jaipur, the fabled “Pink City,” as seen — magic, goddesses and all — through the lens of a visual sorceress, director Suruchi Sharma.
I am not in the habit of reviewing narratives. I like stories as much as the next fellow but my specialty is film as art, where a film is more likely to insinuate itself on the viewer’s consciousness the way poems or paintings do: as a whole, in one blast, a single bite, one gulp. By contrast, a narrative film reveals itself sequentially, plot elements leading the viewer down a path over time. Skyward (in Hindi: Gagan Gaman) may well be doing both. Plot elements may be coming at me in squadrons here, but my perception of them is blurred either by a limited knowledge of Rajasthani lore or by Sharma’s unchained, Felliniesque way with exposition. Blissful ignorance frees me to bask in the film’s cinematic radiance.
Sharma’s images are inventive, meticulously composed, luminous and dramatic. They are also ambitious. The film begins with a depiction of the goddess, Bemata, at work on a hilltop with her entourage sorting destinies. The camera, wide, pans with an old woman trudging up the hill carrying a sack over her shoulder. In passing, she greets a turbaned gatekeeper seated on a large rock making graceful semaphore-like gestures in a broken staccato rhythm that lend him and the whole setting an otherworldly air. The hill, seen in profile, is bedecked with toiling immortals. The shot ends with the old woman unburdening herself, saying,
“Stack of destinies delivered.”
“Oh!”
Welcome to the realm of gods.
A giant mill wheel turns at the end of a spindle from which a dark rough twine unwinds and passes back and forth on a zigzag path through the hands of Bemata’s helpers. Bemata herself, an intensely vital old woman with skin like leather under a cerulean headdress, eyes that laugh, few if any teeth in evidence, sits at a low table on which the old messenger has placed a stack of paper destinies awaiting the goddess’s stamp. The sound is that of a mill wheel grinding, punctuated by the thump of the stamp while an ethereal chorus sings in a chant-like, call and response,
“… wait for arrival, wait for departure
wait for destiny’s way
Girl you come looking for hope
But we see a riddle coming home.”
Back among mortals, Sharma’s everywoman, portrayed elegantly by Subrata Parashar, overhears a folktale in which the main character bears an uncanny likeness to herself. The story tells of a gifted and beautiful woman who has married into another culture and in whose heart there lives a flower. The flower becomes a jewel that is then somehow lost. While out looking for the jewel that had dwelled in her own heart, the woman in the story encounters Bemata on a hill sorting destinies and begins a new search, not for her heart’s jewel but for her own destiny.
Sharma builds the rest of her film on this compelling and delicately illusive symbolic structure. Her everywoman, having heard this story, is struck by it and soon finds herself on Bemata’s hill asking to be told her destiny. Wrong question! Unlike the deeply abiding truths of one’s own heart, destinies are not to be known just for the asking. Any goddess knows this, and this one, through an emissary, sends Sharma’s everywoman off on a quest for an unknown, promising only riddles to light the way. The setup provides an ideal environment for Sharma to let her creative horses run — a beautiful woman in a beautiful city searching for the meaning of life. Anything can happen, and many anythings do.
A waiter in a posh, moodily lit restaurant serves the woman an exquisitely simple meal of bubbly pancake and bitter gourd juice but then puts an hourglass containing purple sand on the table and, by and by, becomes apoplectic trying to warn the woman about time.
“I don’t have time to talk more
about time.
Ma’am … ma’am the sand
is falling …
Time is flowing ma’am …”
The waiter, played with nuanced delicacy by Parag Sharma, collapses. The woman hops nimbly over the waiter’s supine body and moves on. We see her next in another restaurant where older women chide her gently about time and children. And in the sequence of scenes that follow, the film presents a series of vignettes that do not so much tell the film’s story but revolve around the story’s theme.
Earlier I used the term Felliniesque. Once possessed of the notion that Sharma’s Woman is like Fellini’s Guido Anselmi in 8½, the idea is hard to shake. Like Anselmi, a film director, Sharma’s everywoman is pressed for time, surrounded by supporters awaiting her next move, pushing her to know what is in her innermost self and then to express whatever that is. In the tomes that have been written about 8½, it has been well established that the struggles portrayed in the Anselmi character were in fact those of Fellini himself. Sharma’s depiction of womanhood in Skyward may be seen as analogous to her creative life as a film director and a woman in India.
Whether or not that analogy holds true, I stand by the comparison of Sharma’s image-making to that of the great Fellini. Her sense of whimsy in depicting the fantastical, the feeling that some of her shots are either re-creations of personal memories or just there to dazzle and bemuse with no connection in particular to a plot of any kind — these qualities are Felliniesque. The goddess, Bemata, joyfully lifts up her arms and describes her electronic shredder used to recycle destinies as a “kick-ass machine!” The camera pans from the dome-lit cab of a truck at night to reveal a man playing a harmonium in an alley. A little girl calls out from a balcony, “Chachi, when will you be home?” An old man lying atop a fallen bicycle moans, “I have got asthma, my child. I am dying.” An old gasoline generator brings to life neon lights illuminating a four-piece band playing a kind of circus march, á la Nino Rota, in the street.
One can hope that Suruchi Sharma’s keen eye and adventurous image-making will result in more and grander films to come. Whether or not you see hints of Fellini in this work, you may have to concede at the very least that Subrata Parashar is as beautiful as Marcello Mastroianni was handsome. G&S
IG: @suroorchi
Excerpts of Skyward can be seen on @gagan.gaman
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