‘Paro Pinaki Ki Kahani’ Movie Review: When Love And Intent Are Not Enough

“A manhole cleaner and vegetable vendor fall in love during secret meetings in a train bathroom” is a great one-liner. Especially for an indie made on a shoestring budget. Especially in an India that’s gotten too real and complicated for love stories to make sense. It’s even better if said India then gatecrashes the love story, revealing why the title contains the term “Ki Kahani (the story of)” rather than the Bollywood-coded “Ki Prem Kahani (the love story of)”. With those like Pinaki (Sanjay Bishnoi) and Mariyam (Eshita Singh), it’s not falling for each other that’s the conflict; it’s the audacity to fall for each other that is.

They’re man and woman, Hindu and Muslim, but their social marginalisation cuts beyond gender and faith. Money is the only religion in their world, so all they are is poor. All they have are dreams (of hotels while canoodling in the train toilet every morning) and words (he writes poetry for her). They meet in an empty security cabin for lunch every day; she skips eating so that he can enjoy her tiffin to his heart’s content. Sacrifice is such an inherent state of being that hope is their default setting. And then one day, she disappears. If they were an urban and upscale couple, one might say she “ghosts” him. But they’re already ghosts here — invisible to society, no matter how desperately they strive to be seen. The irony is that nobody notices them until they go missing. So when Pinaki’s pleas fall on deaf ears, he sets out to look for her on his own. Except it’s like she never existed.

As a premise, Paro Pinaki Ki Kahani is full of possibilities. The problem is that I’ve made it sound better than it looks. Much, much better. It’s the film I wished I saw: intuitive, sensitive, politically alive, technically polished, culturally perceptive. But the storytelling is too undeveloped to realise any of the themes. It's a sensibility and craft issue, not a budget and aesthetic issue. The writing lacks life experience; the sound design is half-baked; the editing is patchy and transition shots are missing (the screen cuts to black if any action requires even the most basic choreography); a lot of the movie seems to be reverse-engineered to flaunt an elaborate soundtrack. As a result, there’s no “feel” for moments and drama either; things just happen in the same tenor, and it’s hard to tell when one phase ends and another begins. Independent film-making can be restrictive, but necessity is not the mother of invention here. It’s never a good sign when a fictional film looks like it’s been shot on the go: like a college project in which the makers are still discovering the ins and outs of the medium.

I kept hoping for the small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome to kick in. The way it begins with the couple, I was briefly reminded of the Divya Prabha track from All We Imagine As Light, where she plays a young Malayali nurse in Mumbai secretly dating a Muslim boy. Every time there’s a semblance of something interesting, though, this story refuses to follow through. For instance, when Mariyam suddenly stops showing up, Pinaki has nobody to ask because their relationship was clandestine. He is so desperate to send the cops to her house that he frames her father for a stolen chain. Basically, he doesn’t mind preying on the prevalent Islamophobia to get answers. But the writing shies away from difficult questions because it simply isn’t evolved enough. Similarly, later on, when Pinaki is on his own remote mission, the answers are worryingly in sync with the mood of the nation. Only, you don’t really know if the film is grown-up enough to mean it. It shyly flattens the identity of the characters and reduces them to broad-strokes victims of a predatory system: nothing more, nothing less.

There’s also a portion where Pinaki looks for a job to make urgent money — the staging is so awkward that it looks like a montage from a separate film. When he works as a helper for an upscale woman, they go shopping and she keeps complaining about a strange smell; you know she’s going to come back home and realise it’s the former manhole worker who’s stinking, like one of those corny cable-television ads in the 1990s. The performances are sincere in parts, but the brownfacing aside, there’s always a sense that these are big-city actors playing disenfranchised characters. There’s only so much they can do when the form itself is fundamentally flawed. A closing slate with statistics tends to be a red flag. Movies that aren’t confident about their craft employ PSA-style commentary as a crutch, even if it goes against the dramatic intent of the story. Paro Pinaki Ki Kahani does something similar, which is a pity, because it gets consumed by the “manhole cleaner and vegetable vendor” part to offset the failure of the “fall in love during secret meetings in a train bathroom” part. In an ideal world, the first two paragraphs of this review would’ve been enough. But we don’t live in an ideal world anymore, do we?