'A RIFLE AND A BAG' JUNE DIGEST CINETICLE

(excerpt from an article dedicated to several films, the link to the source is at the end)

“Did you die?” - the baby asks his mother who tells him of her past as a Maoist rebel. After their surrender to the government, Somi and her husband are living stuck in a limbo, separated both from their former Naxalite comrades, who now became a threat to their lives, and from the government, that only went half-way on their part of the deal: no land was given to them as promised, and bureaucracy prevents them from obtaining the documents necessary for sending their children to school. The camera stops halfway to the characters  too, on a static medium shot. We can often witness the scenes where the filmmakers locate themselves on the other side of the table - as an invisible guest or an inspector, aware of their part in the film. The government behind the friendly faces of the clerks is invisible and indifferent too, saying: “Well, you understand that there is nothing we can do”.

Somi is more open and talkative than her slender husband, who has been lower in rank in the Naxalite movement and who has sought her attention for a long time. Now he, seemingly unemployed, is stumbling around the house busy with little chords. Somi says laughing that at first she went to the jungle just for spite of the petty tyrant, the head of the village, and it was only later that she became involved with the communist ideology, that she stays true to even now after putting down her rifle. She stays cheerful revisiting the story of her parents who rejected her (rare close-up here).

Somi’s character is presented as undeniable, as a matter of fact. It seems like her controversial behaviour is inevitable, and her whole life is built from “it can not be done the other way” to “no one can live like this”. The medium shot doesn’t let us forget the presence of the camera, and it becomes one more limitation and condition of their everyday life. The characters are often looking straight into the lens without imposing the impression of naturalness, not hiding anything but controlling what exactly is being disclosed. It’s also probable that some of the events are staged for the camera, but if Robert Flaherty was fairly criticized for staging the “wild life” in front of the camera for the “civilized audience”, here it’s more fair to speak of the collaboration between the filmmaker and the characters. While the elder son is successfully sent to school where no one speaks his native language, where he’s being taught patriotic songs and the concept of joy of dying for the state, the camera stays to become his parents’ accomplice and a way to preserve his identity.

Their mutual understanding and connection, despite all the hardships, seems almost idyllic, and even after their son is eventually expelled from school for the lack of documents, his mother will take him for a walk to tell him the story of their work and fight with police for the rights of farmers, asking tenderly: “Will you also become a Naxalite?”. And that’s how the circle is complete.

Review by Maxim Karpitsky

Published in Cineticle, Russia.

The original version here.