Vardhan Vijaykumar Kamat’s Konkani feature Umesh begins in chaos—bumbling kids running amok fishing a cricket ball from a well, adults in eternal susegad—until it focuses this spread-out gaze on Rohan (Sushant Nayak) and Anton (John D’Silva), two middle-aged theaterwallahs and deep friends.
They have hit a cross-road. Anton is bored of theater, and wants to pursue cinema. Rohan dismisses this, angered by Anton’s sudden swerve of heart, leaving their play high and dry. But, as friends do, he comes around. They discuss cameras and lenses. Anton is so lost, he doesn’t know if the camera they are to purchase is priced in the tens, hundreds, or thousands. They go to a film director for advice, but are shooed off when they confess they don’t have a story. “If we roam around a bit, we’ll find out a story,” Anton notes nonchalantly.
At this point, I wondered what this desire for cinema is, for Anton neither has a story he wants to tell, nor has any respectable knowledge of filmmaking. Then, why cinema? What draws him to the medium? Is it possible to be drawn to a medium when we don’t know what to do with it?
These are questions Umesh leaves untouched, for answering it would require introspection—and thus, a distance—which the tone of the film is uninterested in. Instead, there is an immediacy that rushes the film along, preferring to stay close to the skin of life, taking it one conversation at a time.
In the local shop where they sit and while away time with chai and butterfly bread, they see Umesh, a mentally disturbed man, who lunges at the world, but with a storied past related to cricket. In Umesh, Rohan and Anton find the protagonist of their documentary. They pursue Umesh, as Umesh does, too.
The fascinating crease here is that until they got the camera, they never bothered about Umesh. Now, with a camera, and a desire to document an interesting life, Umesh suddenly is of interest to the filmmakers—that exploitative empathy that documentary filmmakers suddenly embody, when they have a camera in their hands and a story to tell.
Storytelling is exploitative, Umesh concurs. Rohan and Anton are chased with a bat when they try to enter Umesh’s house without his permission. But since the film is so tightly wound around the rhythms of life, it doesn’t have the space to come to this conclusion. Instead, it hops around, from one interaction, one interview, one skirmish, to the next.
Umesh, then, is a refreshingly kinetic portrait of a community, stitched with Dhalo and other folk musical accompaniments, a charming tissue of songs that patch the film together. Its decision to stay away from what exactly happened to Umesh and not be emphatic about it might seem , on the one hand, underwhelming, but on the other hand, the film plays out as a critique of these clean answers that can be easily sensationalized. In pursuing a film about cinema, Umesh offers a critique of it, too. Some stories, perhaps, are not meant to be narrated but held, like weight, in the body, till the body itself has no weight to speak of.