Starring: Rajesh Tallang, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Anurag Arora, and Irfan Khan
Distributor: Pinnacle Films
Runtime: 97 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2014
| 
| 
This is a Canadian-Indian film about a father who goes in search of his lost son. It bears some similarity to elements of the 1922 novel, “Siddhartha” by the German-born Swiss poet, Hermann Hesse, and was screened at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival.
Mahendra (Rajesh Tallang) is a meek, illiterate man of integrity who works on the streets of New Delhi, mending broken zippers. He makes less than four dollars a day and struggles to provide for his family.To ease his financial plight, he decides to send his 12-year old son, Siddarth (Irfan Khan), to work at a factory 200 miles away. Sending Siddarth to work in the factory is suggested by Mahendra’s brother-in-law, Ranjit (Anurag Arora), and Mahendra knows that Siddarth will be illegally employed.
Siddarth fails to return home to celebrate an Indian holiday one month later. On the day everyone expects Siddarth to return, he is nowhere to be seen. Mahendra is told that his son ran away from the factory. But he is also told that perhaps he did not, and his father knows that Siddarth is not a person to just run off.
Mahendra and his wife, Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee), fear that their son has been taken by child-traffickers. Mahendra sets out to find him and travels across India to bring him back. All the time, he is anxious that his son has been abducted, or has been harmed.
He is helped on his journey by friends and relatives supporting a man they greatly respect, and who are mindful of the agony of his search.
This is a film that explores poverty in modern-day India in a completely unsentimental and natural way. In assured social-realism style, it captures unpretentiously the sense of hopelessness and helplessness of street life in India and comments insightfully on the social and economic ills of contemporary India. The film exposes us poignantly to the ugliness of child labor in India. It offers a powerful critique of Third World poverty and social exploitation. And it provides no easy answers to the problems it raises.
The film reserves its most moving messages for delivery at a more personal level, and captures the major themes of Hesse’s work which deal with the search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. The pursuit of Siddarth becomes a spiritual journey for Mahendra, who loves his son deeply.
Love between father and son is a theme that has universal appeal, and it is a theme as relevant to a father’s affection for his son, as it is to a son’s need for his father. The realisation of that love is not always simple. Mahendra fears the sternness of his father. He hasn’t the skills to inquire meaningfully from anyone about the whereabouts of his son. Neither he nor his wife have a photo of him, because they are too poor to own a camera, and they are even unsure about his age. Mahendra’s fierce determination to find Siddarth is never in doubt, however, and Mahendra grows in self-knowledge through his journey. As the film comes to its conclusion, Mahendra contacts his father in a moment of despair to absolve his personal guilt at not being able to find his son, and to ask for guidance on what he should now do. His father tells him supportively that whatever happens to Siddarth is out of his hand. It rests with God.
This is a film that combines a sense of the tragedy of life with joy in being human, and it never loses touch with the significance of hope that helps people survive in the midst of the tragedies of life. A street urchin tells Mahendra that “maybe he got lucky and left this world”, but Mahendra goes on hoping and searching.
This is a very moving film about the encroaching despair of a father, who searches for his son. It is very well scripted and directed, and the acting of everyone in the film is close to flawless. The movie denounces child labor, but it addresses very realistically other significant social problems in contemporary India. The performances of Tallang and Chatterjee, in particular, are superb, and the film is beautifully photographed.
This is a gentle, sad, and an emotionally very compelling movie, that richly deserves to be seen.
12 Random Films…
