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Journalism of Courage
Like a chameleon, light can turn to dark and a clear day into one shrouded in mist in seconds up in the Himalayas. In this world of shape-shifting shadows, silences that murmur and bird calls that recount folk tales of a little girl who takes the shape of a bird to escape her berating mother, pretty much anything seems possible. And in Raam Reddy’s ‘Jugnuma’ (The Fable), it does. In it the mundane meets the magical in encounters that flow seamlessly into each other. In the opening shot of the film, from the colonial-era bungalow that he shares with his wife, two children and two dogs, Dev (Manoj Bajpayee) steps out to a shed, puts on a pair of enormous wings, breaks into a trot and nonchalantly takes flight, soaring above the sprawling apple orchards that he owns. So did the mystical mountains inspire the flight?
“I think it’s like giving a sense of the cinematic to the realistic or the mundane. In Thithi we did it with humour and interconnectedness,” says Reddy of his 2016 debut feature film that he made when he was just 26 and that made waves internationally. Set in rural Karnataka, the film captures the fallout of the death of a centurion patriarch on the next three generations, in a light-hearted way. “In ‘Thithi’ the place came first. But in ‘Jugnuma’, first came my love affair with the genre. And the second step was this desire to hook the audience with mystery and suspense,” says Reddy.
Also read – Jugnuma The Fable movie review: Manoj Bajpayee delivers one of his all-time best performances
‘Jugnuma’, that’s been presented by Anurag Kashyap and Guneet Monga Kapoor, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last year to much critical acclaim and released in theatres in India on September 12. Reddy is overwhelmed by the response. “ I’ve been spending a lot of my day just replying to all these beautiful messages. I can feel that the film is connecting, and across age groups,” he says.
From a comment on class divisions to climate change to a cautionary ecological tale, the audience has interpreted the film in their own way. And with the devastation unleashed by the rains in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, the story couldn’t have felt more immediate. “It’s man against nature in a simple way. We think we can control those things, but can we really?” says Reddy.
The real in the film is constantly threaded with magic realism, a genre in which Reddy’s interest goes back even before he headed to study films at Prague, a city that nurtures magic realism. “My interest in magic realism did precede Prague but it added fuel to the fire that existed before it. And my choice of Prague was potentially also partly because I was drawn to that,” says Reddy who studied at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts). One of the oldest film schools in Europe, it has among its alumni several cinema greats, including one of Reddy’s favourites, Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica. Before he went to Prague, Reddy says he had done eight short films on his own. “And before that, I’d written a magic realism novel. So, the genre was already in my bones, it had seeped in via literature when I was studying economics at St Stephen’s College in Delhi,” says Reddy, 36, who comes from a business family in Bengaluru and now lives in Mumbai.
In Prague, Reddy’s flat happened to be near Franz Kafka’s grave. “For cold, misty mornings, I would go to the cemetery and just hang around. I would feel very Kafka-esque. It was a wonderful training ground! The bravery of literature allowed that genre to become mainstream. And as a filmmaker, I was really keen to challenge myself to do it in cinema,” says Reddy who counts among his influences Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hayao Miyazaki (who co-founded Studio Ghibli), Francis Ford Coppola and South Korean director Lee Chang-dong.
If Reddy’s novel ‘It’s Raining in Maya’ was his first shot at magic realism, ‘Jugnuma’ is his attempt to show it on film. “Cinema is a bit of a passive medium in the sense that you sit back and just watch. But how do you stay a part of that story? That’s more challenging. That means you have to put all your effort into making the world as believable as possible. So the performances of your actors have to work and it’s challenging to make everyone act like they’re not acting,” says Reddy. Unlike ‘Thithi’, where all the actors were non-actors, in ‘Jugnuma’, a few local villagers acted alongside a formidable cast that included Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and Tillotama Shome.
In the film, as the trees in Dev’s orchard catch fire one by one, suspicion swirls like smoke from the burnt stubs. Is it the work of workers at the orchard? Do the nomads who have set their camp near the house have anything to do with it? “It could be the perfect crime. Anyone could have done it, it’s an estate of 5,000 acres, there’s nobody watching it. It just takes a spark and it’s done. So that unknown threat gets the mind active and once the mind is active, no person is their true self. As fear kicks in, you’re a lesser version of yourself. So he (Dev) becomes a lesser version of himself. Then he reflects and becomes vulnerable,” says Reddy. The fire motif is rooted in Reddy’s personal experience of helping locals douse a forest fire during a trip to Uttarakhand. The film has been shot extensively in Kumaon. ”That fire was the narrative seed and it brought everything together.”
The deepening crisis also shows the fault lines that lie close beneath the surface and also explores the question of ownership. So how much of it was shaped by personal observations? “Oh, a hundred percent. It’s largely personal observation and my want to address it. I’ve seen how top heavy this balance is and how things kind of interact. Even though it’s hard to break out of that structure, I always felt it was fragile. How can such a top-heavy system work? If you look at nature, if you look at an ecosystem in a forest, there is no one tiger controlling the forest. Ownership is again an idea in our own minds. And I always felt that it’s fragile because it’s built on just mental constructs. The film is a cross-sectional analysis of a particular socio-political context.”
The film set in 1989 — the year Reddy was born — is shot in 16 mm film, conveying the feel of a pre-digital world. “We wanted this to feel as believable as it could, so we decided to shoot it in the format that was available then,” says Reddy. That bygone world is accompanied by its own sounds. “It was a conscious decision not to use music because I feel as soon as there is music, you know, you’re watching a film. So that willing suspension of disbelief, that realism side of magic realism will fall. Then you’re not creating a real world, you’re creating a cinematic world,” says Reddy. He has a deep interest in music though, which could shape his future stories. “I used to play the tabla growing up and I was part of a band in college. Now I’m trying to train my voice a little bit. I wanted to learn and understand it also to see how to utilise it in film powerfully and intrinsically. That’s where I’m starting off now, music is the seed. That’s where my heart is kind of moving me. So let’s see.”
With ‘Jugnuma’ now in theatres, it’s the end of one journey and, perhaps, the beginning of another. “My wife and I (production designer Juhi Agarwal) have helmed this for almost a decade, it feels older than our marriage,” laughs Reddy. The film that saw two pandemics and took eight years from start to finish, ends on a note of hope.
“’Thithi’ was playful but it ends on a slightly reflective note. This was an intense film but it ends on a playful note. As an artist, that shift has been something that I’ve done in all my work. I’m most happy with how that shift worked in this film, because it is something that makes you stop for a second, at the end you just pause. And that pause is so rare in this world at this point in time,” says Reddy.
