The visual poetics of Sabar Bonda, caught between stillness and scrutiny, distance and closeness

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In these early scenes, the wide, static frames gesture toward a double entrapment. Anand, dislocated in a home that no longer feels like his own, and time itself, seemingly arrested in the rituals of mourning. But as the film unfolds, Anand rekindles his bond with his khaas dost, Balya (Suraaj Suman), a childhood friend and local farmer, and the same visual grammar begins to evolve and deepen. They find each other again on rooftops, gazing at stars, tracing constellations back to their childhoods. On bike rides to dairy farms, at each other’s homes listening to songs from Sairat, in the long, lazy afternoons of the village, where they speak of things lost: the disappearance of cactus pear plants, a beloved mango tree that once stood in the yard. In the fields, Anand follows Balya and his goats, and, here too, Urs composes wide, contemplative frames of the two of them sitting beneath a tree, almost as if caught in a faded photograph. Distance, once a measure of isolation, now becomes the vessel of their closeness. Time still pauses, but now in a romantic register. This is one of the film’s most graceful achievements: how the temporal connotations of stillness begin to shift in tandem with the emotional dynamics.

So when we finally see them getting intimate, the camera moves in extreme close-ups, where their faces appear at unexpected corners of the frame, geometrically askew. It’s as if the very composition is subversive, reflecting the rarity of queer love rendered with such peace, such exquisite gentleness. Perhaps that’s why they remain on the edges of the frame. In another film, their closeness would not be permitted. The form, even in its tenderness, carries the weight of threat. Perhaps, that’s why, sometimes these expansive frames begin to feel like warnings. They suggest the world is watching, encroaching. As the two draw closer, we fear for them. We wait for interruption. For violence. For the cut to reality. Because that is what cinema has conditioned us. But here the wide frames do not close in. Instead, they open further. The world, for once, makes room. Nature envelops them. The air breathes with them. And in this rare allowance, you’re reminded of Rumi’s words: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Most films only imagine the light contained in that line. Sabar Bonda dares to show it.