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'Amu' tells the price of
forgetting
 "I don't want to know. But I can't help it," says the protagonist of
"Amu", Kaju, after the scorching skeletons of her past come tumbling
into her present to create an upheaval that she could do without.
Really, it's far more convenient and comfortable to sweep history
out of reach. Let sleeping dogs lie... Because the truth is too
painful.
In her remarkable debut film, journalist-activist Shonali Bose shows
us the pitfalls of forgetting the lessons of our past. The domino
effect dominates the psyche of "Amu". You can't get away from
looking at the truth straight in the eye as Kaju, freshly returned
from Los Angeles, sets off to discover the "real" India.
Through the character of Kaju's cynical friend (played by newcomer
Ankur Khanna), Bose takes perky pot shots at dispossessed people who
return to their roots with stars in their eyes and video cameras in
their hands.
That entire episode about Kaju's touristy tryst with an awestruck
low-income family in a Delhi tenement is funny at one level but also
exasperating at another.
Bose takes us into Kaju's warm adopted Bengali joint family. Then
begins Kaju's confrontation with her adoptive past... "Amu" isn't
the first mother-daughter film to take its protagonist through a
journey into her troubled past. Tanuja Chandra's "Yeh Zindagi Ka
Safar" and Khalid Mohamed's "Fiza" adopted the same fascinating
format where the female protagonist journeyed into her past.
What Bose does it to create a lightweight framework of foreboding
within an environment of 'normalcy' that's ruptured when the past
creeps up on the protagonist to splinter her self-worth.
Once Kaju discovers the truth about her troubled past, the screen
lights up with sparing images of carnage and barbarism.
Some of it, for example, the sequence on the train in the flashback
where Sikh lives are protected from irate mobsters by co-passengers
do not have a direct bearing on the plot. What they do is to
supplant the essential plot with a credible and persuasive backdrop.
The 1984 riots against the Sikhs left many disturbing questions
unanswered. Bose makes a profound attempt to scratch the surface.
There're floating bits of dialogues, which tell us that politicians
and cops were directly involved in the carnage against the Sikhs.
At the end we see Kaju and her companion move away from a TV screen
announcing riots in Gujarat. We can afford to move away from the
past at the cost of our future.
31
October,
2007
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