Homebound movie review: Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor film unflinchingly brings up troubling home truths

Director and writer Neeraj Ghaywan’s powerfully moving second feature, which comes ten years after the terrific ‘Masaan’, reclaims the big screen for so many elements that mainstream Hindi cinema has either lost the mojo or the ability to address, or has pushed aside. Chandan is Dalit, Shoaib is Muslim. Both live in a UP village, both are dirt-poor, their caste and religion placing them on the margins of the most marginalised.

The film is based on Basharat Peer’s 2020 NYT article ‘Taking Amrit Home’, marking the brutal lockdown in the first phase of the pandemic. The piece was itself inspired by a photograph taken by an unknown person featuring two young men on a deserted highway, one leaning over the other who had collapsed. The author found that the two young men were walking from Surat after the abrupt closure of the mills where they worked, like thousands of migrants, back to their villages, thousands of miles away.

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In ‘Homebound’, we see this pattern — of the two best friends looking for a way in, trying to find a spot in places inimical to their very existence — being repeated. That old bald question ‘kaun jaat ho’ may have been replaced by ‘poora naam kya hai’, but the intention is the same: to check where in the hierarchy of caste, the biggest scourge of Indian society, does the person in front fit — should they be asked to enter the house, or should they be sent back to the ‘bori’, that has been the rough fabric of their lives?

Chandan tries to pass off, as so many do, including the director of the film, as a ‘general category’, because that’s where everything resides: jobs and respect, ‘doodh and malai’. His family — mother (Shalini Vatsa), sister (Harshika Parmar) and father (Dadhi R Pandey) — have done all they can to enable Chandan to climb out of the well, the sister showing Chandan that being born male is an advantage even amongst the disadvantaged.

Shoaib, finding a peon’s position in a local firm, is at the receiving end of non-stop jibes from his bosses: starting from being unfairly ‘given out’ at a local cricket match, to the hurtful ‘rooting for his own’ comments during a cricketing clash between India and Pakistan. For both young men, a ‘police ki naukri’ is the holy grail: Chandan’s encounter with the limpid-eyed Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor), who gets a knowing but sympathetic look at the ‘Kumar’, propels him into wanting to get a college education. Also lower caste, even if slightly higher on a social scale (living in a ‘pukka’ house, with a father in a lowly-paid but ‘pukki naukri’), she gets where Chandan is coming from, and where he wants to go.

At times, the film feels as if it is trying to address as many hot-button issues as it can throw in the mix (the screenplay is by Ghaywan, the story credits are shared between him, Peer and Sumit Roy, and the dialogues are credited to Ghaywan, Varun Grover and Shreedhar Dubey). Kapoor downplays well enough, but in some instances, the effort shows; her role being a small one is a good thing. And in a crucial climactic sequence, Khatter’s outpouring of feeling comes off a bit literal, with the visuals of migrants walking giving off a seen-before flavour, from the many cinematic iterations of the pandemic which have gone before; some lines feel expository.

But none of these are deal breakers, because Ghaywan, backed by Dharma Entertainment (producer credits shared between Karan Johan, Adar Poonawala, Apoorva Mehta, Somen Mishra, with an Executive Producer credit for Martin Scorsese) has crafted a film which is urgently, cracklingly contemporary, speaking of and to an India where the advantage of birth and religion has unfairly deprived a whole section of its citizens from benefits most of us take for granted.

Both Khatter and Jethwa are excellent, with the latter feeling closer hewn to his character, but both making us believe that they’ve been old friends in the way they routinely sling their hands around each other’s shoulders as both affection and support. Shoaib’s office ‘gang’ is a microcosm of the unthinking-unfeeling-deliberately cruel majoritarian world that gate-keeps its privileges: Shreedhar Dubey is specially effective as the guy who wants to do the best he can but is also aware that he can never challenge the status quo, because at some level, he is also rendered powerless by an instinct of self-preservation. He will go so far, and no further, like so many of us. But if this film belongs to just one person, it is Shalini Vatsa. Her Phool Kumari, whose cracked, painful forever-labouring heels never stop her from treading hard ground so that her family can rise, is heart-breaking.

A lone film cannot call into account centuries of systemic discrimination, and disenfranchisement, but if you have to see one film which talks of all these elephants that have gone missing from so many rooms over so many unconscionable years, make it this one.

Homebound has been chosen as India’s official entry to the Oscars. It may or may not bring an Oscar home. What it has done is to bring up troubling home truths, unflinchingly but without rancour, which lends the film a note of compassion and cautious optimism, something we so desperately need in these times.

Homebound movie cast: Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor, Shalini Vatsa, Harshika Parmar, Dadhi R Paandey, Pankaj Dubey, Sudipta Saxena, Shreedhar Dubey, Yogendra Vikram Singh, Kuldeep Raghuvanshi, Chandan K Anand
Homebound movie director: Neeraj Ghaywan
Homebound movie rating: 3.5 stars