It became for me a little
tradition each year to watch a film at this strangely named
“Indo-German” Film festival in Berlin. It began with Konkona
Sensharma´s highly praised first long film A Death in the Gunj
and one year later I saw Anup Singh´s The Song of Scorpions,
films which are difficult to find on the big screen of my city. This
year it was Sudipto Roy´s first long film Kia and Cosmos.
The title suggest a double
meaning, first it is about the 15 years old autistic girl Kia who
investigates the murder of a pregnant cat from her neighbourhood but
it is also about Kia and her cosmos. Her cosmos that is the concrete
city landscape of her neighbourhood in Kolkata but also her
imagination, her passion for mathematics, writing stories or reading
the detective novels about Feluda and Byomkesh, these two most
popular detective characters among Bengali readers.
Her social cosmos is her
single mother (separated from her husband), her teacher Souvik and
the young rickshaw driver Rabi. Rabi picks her up every day for school
and backwards. Her every day life follows always recurrent routines,
like school or the quarrels with her always stressed mother Dia. But
part of her cosmos are as well the streets and small alleys of her
environment which we see often through her eyes. These alleys,
streets or backyards are more colorful than in my memory. Under the
influence of the street lightning it appears as a mystic place of
dreamlike beauty, the ideal background for the murder mystery novels
Kia loves so much.
Roy sometimes uses
subjective shots in which we follow Kia´s movements, moments in
which we see how Kia sees the world. In other moments the subjective
perspective is replaced by long, hardly moved shots when she is alone
in her room, with her teacher or her mother. Especially the shots
when she is quarrelling with her mother, who is often overstrained,
are very long, very intense and they often leave the bitter
aftertaste of alienation and the lack of communication which reminds
me in the films by John Cassavetes. That is sometimes emphasized
through the spatial distance between the characters through the
mighty cinema scope format.
These moments of a sober
naturalism which puts the confidence in the precise and seismographic
ability of the cinematic apparatus is contrasted by these moments of
imagination when for example Kia is making with Rabi a forbidden
excursion through the nightly city. These are dreamy moments which
strangely evoke in me the imagined city landscapes in the animation
films by Hayao Miyazaki which are inspired by real architecture but
recreated into a mystic dreamlike landscape.
The relationship between
the subjective moved shots and the long almost static ones from a
rather objective point of view reveal the movement between Kia´s
difficulty to communicate with her social environment or define her
place in the world – or if we want- in her “cosmos”. But it
also reveals the energy she needs for managing her life and the
imagination that gives her the strength to live.
The film does not even
comes near any conventional sentimentality or pity-provoking dramas
about handicapped people. Roy´s playful and versatile visual style
makes both equally present: Kia´s suffering but as well her strength
to live.
In all its playfulness
poetry and dreaminess, the cinematic richness this film is offering,
bases as well on hard and very grounded work. One of these foundation from which the film unfolds its glory, is the performance of Ritwika
Pal, which reveals all colors of human feelings and moods like a
kaleidoscope.
The body language, the
lack of a proper verbal or non-verbal communication the hyperactivity
and even slight primary troubles must have been accurately
researched. Even Kia´s obsessive behaviour in her every day actions
look of amazing authenticity. It is one of these indescribable
moments when it is hard to distinguish the poetry and imagination an
actor evokes and the sense for the physical work of acting which
causes this. traces of exhaustion in Pal´s face which could be the
exhaustion of the character´s or the actress herself. Her
performance reminds me in some glorious performances by Konkona
Sensharma or Kalki Koechlins acting in Margarita with a Straw
by Shonali Bose – and sometimes as well in the young Robert de
Niro.
Finally, Kia leaves her
“cosmos” for a while. With the stolen credit card of her mother
she makes the long journey to the far distant city Kalimpong to look
for her father. Her father, a dreamer and activist of a movement
(which is only vaguely described) has left her mother. Kia finds out
the reasons why her parents had separated themselves from each other.
From a murder mystery and Coming of Age-drama, the film reveals now a
family drama. On her journey by train, the young girl occurs as lost
and vulnerable but as well admirable for her courage to confront
herself with the truth about her dysfunctional family. She describes
the encounter with her father “as a journey to a far distant star
“and the mother “as the power which will bring her back to
earth”. That sounds as well like a beautiful description of the two
big movements of the film which complement each other. .When she
looks down to the panorama of the city Kalimpong, the lights look
like a cluster of stars in space. Kia explores the unknown parts of
her cosmos. Like most of all great films with a strong “Coming of
Age”-element, Kia and Cosmos ends with a question. Kia has
to choose how she continues with her life how to go on with the
search for her place in the world.
In a perfect world, this
film would run in the good old repertoire,- or art house cinemas (as
far as they are still in existence in India and elsewhere else). In
India and some other countries (USA or Germany not yet included) Kia
and Cosmos is available at Netflix. Now, I really understand how
lucky I was to have watched Sudipto Roy´s wonderful film on the big
screen where it belongs. My persistent effort to explore Indian
cinema outside the merciless commercial Indian film industry was
rewarded once again with another hidden gem.
Rüdiger Tomczak