You, me, and the Grim Reaper here, yay?
Photograph (2019) is a story that moves along stubbornly at its own pace. As landless and wifeless Rafi works the streets of Mumbai, he is pursued by a sense of not having a purpose. He’s an entrepreneur, one might say, taking pictures of tourists and others, and selling prints of their pictures to the subjects, sometimes for little more than a song.
But Grandmother is unhappy, because he’s not married. It’s not that he doesn’t wish to marry, but, years ago, his father fell into debt, and they lost the family home and business because of it. Rafi has sworn to repay those debts and regain the family home.
But this is Grandmother we’re talking about. Rumor has it, and it does seem like all of Mumbai knows Grandmother, that she’s stopped taking her meds.
Thus, Rafi sends her a photo of a high-caste young woman who did not accept, nor even look at, the photo she had agreed to buy, and that’s putting your foot in it, because now Grandmother is coming from the village to the big city to meet this woman he says he’ll be marrying, and lying to Grandmother would appear to be a quick way to Indian hell, because she’s hell on wheels. I liked her a lot.
So now it’s stalkin’ time for Rafi, isn’t it?
I’ve commented on occasion on the difficulties of interpreting foreign movies, but it seems to me this meditation on the societal walls of Indian caste and gender, and how they can stop even the most ambitious from achieving their dream by encouraging its very victims to prop those walls up, is both inspiring and disheartening. While the pace is sometimes a bit bewildering, it gets to where it’s going in time, all the while exploring the problems Rafi and his hypothetical fiancee are facing: crossing caste lines, aggressive suitors, familial expectations, and a possible endpoint to lives that do not meet expectations.
Not all characters are fully developed, but even those who only have a couple of lines and a couple of moments can project an entire life, such as the retired businessman, summoning his battered body to demonstrate his home-based factory, and utters the practiced and, to my ear, unexpectedly charming, directive, “For your special friend. Serve chilled.” Having viewed this final few minutes of the movie again, it strikes me that I’ve never seen an assembly line used as a symbol of love.
The unusual pace, the occasional feeling that the actor playing Rafi may be too old, and perhaps the captioning militates against a general recommendation, but if you have a taste for odd movies, this is one to put on your list. We really enjoyed it.
