When the first word that comes to your mind for a film is “sweet,” it can mean different things. Sweet could be a euphemism for small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, which implies: it means well but I’m reluctant to admit that it’s not made well. Sweet could be the sugarcoating of positive intent over weak craft. Sweet could be the kind of thing adults say to encourage eager kids and soften the blow of mediocrity. But we live in an age of such unbridled skepticism — where fault-finding precedes soul-searching — that we forget how the word can sometimes mean just that: sweet. Little Thomas is that film. It reclaims the harmless adjective from the clutches of condescension and agenda. English is a funny language, but we make it funnier.
If seen in isolation, it’s almost too sweet for its own good. The story of a 7-year-old boy (a spirited Hridansh Parekh) navigating a cutesy Ruskin-Bond-coded existence in 1990s Goa is the story of reality treated like fantasy: pastel colours, saturated frames, quirky score, humans behaving like caricatures, sitcom-like staging, and narrative plainness posing as nostalgia.
The extreme close-ups of faces and the stilted dialogue — especially Thomas and his school friends when they interact — can be cloying. The adults slipping in a “men” and a “bugger” at the end of each sentence turns Goa into a classic my-culture-is-your-costume setting: the kind of production that wants you (and your young family) to derive humour out of watching actors pretend to be Konkani and Catholic locals. The role-playing is part of the tone. The louder details — like Euro 1996 jerseys on the kids, or the “cooling charge” at a bakery with a fridge — do well to supply the period.
Breaking the suspension of disbelief is a children’s-film habit, of course, but Little Thomas stands out in a landscape where even ‘normal’ Hindi movies infantilise middle-aged audiences by dumbing down social themes. The artifice here is supposed to be a reflection of innocence: a little boy’s view of the complex world he occupies.
On one hand, there’s the distinctly adult arc of a love marriage going through its rockiest patch yet. Desmond (Gulshan Devaiah) is too honest and idealistic to keep the family bakery alive, his wife Jessie (Rasika Dugal) is forced to be the practical and mature partner, and the mounting financial struggles threaten to tear them apart. On the other hand, Thomas, their only child, is overcome by the desire to have a sibling. One is a consequence of the other: he is essentially a lonely boy stuck in a dysfunctional household, and he wants company to share the pressure with.
I like that the conflict is suitably sanitised: not too reductive, not too tense. The parents are so used to simplifying issues in a fairytale-like tenor around their son that they tend to communicate like that with each other too. The pre-bed teeth-brushing ritual becomes a covert signal for sex, and Thomas sees their ‘love’ as the image of two brushes meeting in a mug. Most kids turn to imagination and art as a refuge, but the film has fun with Thomas’ uncluttered mindset — he gets obsessed with how children are born so that he can hasten the process of getting a brother.
His ideas range from feeding his mother an apple (thanks to the priest’s Adam-and-Eve explanation) to ‘entertaining’ a stolen chimp so that time passes faster and it can evolve into a human baby. I also like that this playfulness ends once the kid senses the truth. The toothbrushes don’t touch as much, but he concludes that a kiss might get his mother pregnant. His desperation to get a brother coincides with their marital stress, and the solution to both is the same.
The film’s take on naivety and childhood trauma works more in theory than execution. Some of the clumsy devices — Desmond’s wedding-cake mishaps; a confession-booth gag; a few supporting characters — hide behind the optics of a children’s film.
As an only son who grew up in a similar environment in the 1990s, I saw a lot of myself in the airbrushed adventures of Thomas. Particularly when one of the parents admit that “there’s nothing more heartbreaking in life than a grown-up 7-year-old”. But relating to a story too hard can result in two outcomes. One, you resent the film for offering a convenient resolution and whitewashing a common middle-class hurdle. Or two, you can see the film for what it is: an alternate reality, a fairytale version of everyday fractures, and art as medicine over diagnosis.
At this stage in life, I choose the second option, because I’d rather see hope as the little brother of delusion. In a parallel universe, Little Thomas stays little for a while. Some call it juvenile. I call it sweet.