‘Village Rockstars’ Is a Small-Scale Miracle

In Village Rockstars, a 10-year-old girl dreams of becoming a guitar-wielding musician. But what surrounds her is not the cheered wisdom of deliberate heartbreak but a life that knows only hard work and an unbridled enthusiasm to get past it.

Dhunu (Bhanita Das), the protagonist asks her widowed mother (Basanti Das) plainly as they’re traversing a flood, why she keeps planting crops when she knows the inevitability of every monsoon. The mother rowing through submerged paddy fields says succinctly, “hard work is our only religion.”

This little Assamese film may have the garb of a coming-of-age tale, but deep down it’s a film of quiet resistance. And it’s also a telling tale of the apathy of the establishment that plagues the northeastern state.

Director Rima Das places her narrative in Chhaygaon, a village that is both blessed and cursed to be close to the Bramhaputra. The tributary of the mighty river in its quaint state has a beautiful flow, allowing people to pass over, or offering fish as catches. But when the fury of the monsoon sets in, it engulfs everything on its way. Dhunu’s father drowned in the flood, and that’s why she is coached by her mother to learn swimming. But all Dhunu can talk about is an embankment that is present now but wasn’t earlier to save her father. Das, who has taken no shortcuts while shooting the seasons in her film, makes us imperceptibly aware of the indifference of the establishment in Assam.

‘Village Rockstars’ is also an invocation of the breezy narratives that can be found in the works of Nabakanta Barua, Atul Chandra Hazarika, or the great Laxminath Bezbarua. The bitter pill is always edible if one has enough sweetness to cover it with.

So we get Dhunu, the tomboy who likes to hang out with her gang of boys. She is usually the lone girl playing sports, climbing trees or fishing. She is also part of a mock band with said gang, mock because they belt out their numbers with colourful guitars fashioned out of thermocol. But our girl dreams of strumming a real guitar someday.

Before womanhood dawns upon Dhunu, she is blissfully unaware of gender programming, partaking in games only boys play, so much so that she invites the wrath of her female neighbours. But Das places her mother in the story with a genteel halo, a woman who toils hard to feed her children, but also wants her daughter to live the way she wishes to. Buying a real guitar is way out of her means and yet she makes enquiries at the local market. Here is a mother who understands the worth of a dream.

Dhunu is clearly the godchild of Durga - the tomboy of ‘Pather Panchali’ whom monsoon adored like a welcoming lover. This is a girl clearly not bound by her societal covenants, and only nature knows how to placate her.

Director Rima Das’ feature is a wonderful anomaly in the current realm of Indian cinema. It is a far cry from what we are used to in the synthetic optimism of masala entertainment. It also carries a staunch refusal to belong to the pantheon of manufactured craft of realism. Instead of following any technical and storytelling rulebook, it opts for a very original gliding tempo to immerse its viewers into the sights and sounds of Dhunu’s world.

Shot in the warm light of the magic hours much like Terrence Malick’s wistful days, and decorated with the remarkable sound design of Amrit Pritam, ‘Village Rockstars’ makes you wish you could be a fly on the wall, offering you the murmur of words instead of a clear stream of dialogue.

Das has been an one-woman-army, who has not only written and directed, but has also edited, produced, and shot the film. And this must be said – she has simply created a small-scale miracle. Dhunu and her village are far removed from the corruption of a city, and the setting signifies a certain kind of innocence and life we may have left behind, but often yearn to return to. This kind of purity perhaps is not possible in our commerce-conscious collaborative projects. Only a mighty heart with a singular dream can create a marvel like this. Quite like Dhunu, who when she finally strums her live, breathing guitar against a fading sun, keeps the promise of a new dawn alive.

(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).