Gondhal begins with what is, roughly, a 25-minute single shot at night. It follows an old man, Bhivaba (Kishor Kadam), and his grandson Vishnu (Dhruv Thoke) walking towards the gondhal, a ritual folk celebration in the village for newlyweds, and on that long-ish walk, the old man meets other men, and gossip is exchanged under the guise of curiosity, resentments are expressed under the guise of conversation, and the child’s curiosity is mistaken for his personality—he only seems to ask questions: What is this? Why is that?
A bullock cart ploughs through and the bodies shift in the lamplit night, and as they reach the location, the camera unlatches from them, giving the lay of the land—Anandrao (Yogesh Sohoni), the innocent, and perhaps impotent, but certainly undeveloped groom, who is getting married to Suman (Ishita Deshmukh); Sarjerao (Nishad Bhoir), the son of the vile Aabasaheb (Suresh Vishwakarma), the richest man in the village, has eyes on and twirls his moustache for Suman.
Information trickles in economical exchanges, smartly woven in. Suman was to get married to Sarjerao, but the dowry was exorbitant, and so her parents settled for Anandrao, whose family did not ask for any dowry. The camera rests on Suman—who is feisty and angry about this arrangement, but who has other plans brewing on the side. Here, the camera stops, having introduced all the main characters present, in full physicality, walking, talking, pausing like people caught in a moment of life. (The debutante director, Santosh Davakhar, has noted in interviews his fascination with films like Birdman and 1917, both stitched together to look like a single shot.)
Shot by Amalendu Chaudhary, the film's single shot gives a palpable sense of the world and the geography of the house it is set in, for the course of the night. Performers are going to dot the narrative. Subterfuge will be exchanged. The plot thickens as Suman tries to pit lover against lover. She has her own eyes on a man. Sexual summons and entrapment—even rape—is happening on the sidelines of the ritual.
Aabasaheb, the Patil or the head of the village, is a consummately evil man, as amenable to rape as he is to extortion. There is not even a flicker of humanity the film allows to seep in here. He is feared, and in one of the most brazen scenes, recognises that the villagers don’t respect but fear him, and the job of the Patil is not to serve, but to “keep the terror alive”. His son recognises this, even as he is angry with his father for letting Suman go by demanding a heavy dowry.
Here, the film falters. It marshals the style of realism, but writes characters and plots them as though melodramatic. It is not that melodrama and realism cannot cohabit in subversive ways, but at some point, it begins to feel like characters are plucked from one genre and force fitted into another. They rub up against the style. This is the central tension at the heart of the film that feels clumsy.
Besides, this is a packed plot with a lot of cause and little consequence. Actions float above the narrative without a sense of urgency or aftermath. People are insulted, and they erupt, and the film plods on, as though unaffected by the eruption. The entire last act of the film is a pile of bodies—and the loss of each doesn’t weigh down on the film. As though their deaths were incidental, irrelevant.
The maxim that holds for horror films holds here, too: once the value of each additional life lost is forgotten, neither felt nor established, the film loses its gravity, as people are now reduced to bodies being cast aside by the writer’s pen. As it dawns, and some clarity on the new world is gained, the new world doesn’t feel new, but old sans a few bodies.
Debutante Santosh Davakhar uses his excitement for the form of cinema to mask any such discontent. The film has a strange attention span. It keeps cutting to the overnight performance—and the performance has some vague resonance with the action, but really, it neither builds nor complicates it, merely existing as a parallel, diffuse narration, allowing the film to bloat its thin central premise. This is where the single shot could have been put to better use—the single shot replaces the urgency of the moment with an immersion into it, where the time-span on screen maps onto our own, giving every action the texture of belonging to a temporal world we are still ticking with. The film abandons this single shot once it has preened. The single shot is not a fetish. It is a substance realised as form.
A note regarding the rhetoric around the film, given its selection for the Academy Awards by the Film Federation of India (FFI). The director has noted in interviews how Indian films at festivals are “often seen as being about poverty or caste. These are important subjects, but every country has similar ones. I feel India is a diverse country, and we should represent India with its cultural heritage.” He seems to be in pursuit of an “Indian” approach to filmmaking.
What is Indian in this film’s approach, then? Its style is inspired by foreign films. Its melodrama, perhaps Indian melodrama—Suman running, blushing, to a swelling score when she meets her lover—keeps butting heads with this style. Besides, the Indian “heritage”—the gondhal performance itself—is quickly relegated to the background. What emerges in the foreground is the very patriarchy and class dynamics that plague the films Davakhar is wary of. Cultural heritage is not a prop. When used in films like Kantara or Vanaprastham, it evokes the sublime or the schism between the life lived and the life performed.
While ambient and ambitious, Gondhal is stuck in the weeds, between the films it is inspired by and the film it wants to frame itself as, between the way it wants to tell its story and the way its characters express themselves, between an Indian film demanding attention for being a film and an Indian film demanding attention for being Indian.