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CHILDREN'S FILMS Growing Up The three award winners are a fine display of the cadences of childhood. By Madhu Jain
Children's films need to grow up. Often loud and pitched to basement-level IQs, these films inevitably show adults who behave like children. And children, bereft of any childlike wonder, go through their lines robotically -- like little adults. Happily, in the three new children's films that recently won national awards the directors have explored, with varying degrees of success, the inner world of the child caught at that fragile intersection of life when innocence runs into the exploitative world of the adults. Turning point time, learning other-than-school lessons. Virendra Saini is a cinematographer whose debut directorial venture Kabhi Pass, Kabhi Fail was adjudged the best children's feature film. Santosh Sivan (Malli: best child artiste and best environmental film) and A.K. Bir (Nandan: best Oriya feature) are also cameramen doffing directors' hats. So when three sterling cameramen turn their lenses on children what do you get? Visual delights and breathtaking photography. But pretty images apart, you also get the cadences of childhood. And some fine acting. Especially from P. Shwetha, who won the best child artiste award and plays the title role of a tribal girl in Malli. The moment Sivan's masterful camera lingers on her mobile face as she cavorts in the middle of a lush forest you know that you have a winner here. Beyond charm, beyond the Home Alone cuteness of Macaulay Culkin (though Shwetha has that in abundance too with a puckish nose and chubby cheeks), she effortlessly zips through a range of emotions with the ease of a seasoned artiste. She incarnates the Wordsworthian adage of child being the father of man. Malli hears the silent heartbeat of the forest and its inhabitants and instinctively realises, more than the adults living off the forest, the need to preserve nature: she is its little sentinel. And her generosity of spirit is the leitmotif of the film: the slender plot revolves around the efforts of Malli to find the magic blue gem that would enable her handicapped friend, the forest officer's daughter, to speak. It's the same grace which Sajil Parakh brings to Kabhi Pass, Kabhi Fail in Saini's delightful and genuinely funny film, scripted by director Saeed Akhtar Mirza. You'd think that Parakh -- he plays Robin, an eight-year-old mathematical genius -- is the only mature person in this film which looks at the commercial exploitation of a child prodigy and is peopled by moronic adults. His uncle (Saurabh Shukla) turns him into a sort of performing monkey on stage who solves mathematical problems. Saini pitches the rural idyllic world of a village in Goa against the big, bad city and comes down heavy on the glib world of television. The film could have dwindled into sentimentality: goodness is a pastoral preserve. But the cameos are priceless: Naseeruddin Shah as a Sikh dhaba owner, Dipti Naval as a washerwoman, Tom Alter as a priest. And the actors in the film sing the songs themselves. In Bir's Nandan too, the protagonist's self-contained world gets a rude rubbing in its brush with the underbelly of the city one day. Nandan, the spirited and rebellious 12-year-old -- played by Saubhagya Chandan Satpathy -- who roams around in all innocence with a Rs 500 note dangling from his hand to buy a remote-controlled car, gradually comes across a host of unsavoury characters who want to steal his money. The film has its moments -- the shots of Nandan running are super -- but the storyline is too thin for a full length feature and the acting is stilted when not wooden. Children's films may finally be coming of age but they still tend to be preachy. Kabhi pass kabhi fail. |
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