‘Vimukt (In Search of The Sky)’ Movie Review: Of Sin, Redemption and Rebirth

Like the evening haze that settles over an unnamed Madhya Pradesh village, faith is everywhere in Jitank Singh Gurjar’s directorial debut feature, Vimukt/In Search of The Sky. That his characters make a liferaft out of devotion and belief is not a point he hammers home. The visuals do the talking. A woman begins her day by offering prayers to the shrivelled-up tulsi sapling in the courtyard. Bhajan-kirtan is the reigning pastime among the locals, like a game of cards after sundown. An especially adored child is likened to chanda chakor—a motif of religious poetry in the subcontinent.

The independent Braj Bhasha film recently premiered at the 50th Toronto Indian Film Festival, the only Indian title in the Centrepiece section. Jasrath (Raghvendra Bhadoriya) and his wife, Vidya (Meghna Agarwal), eke out a hard, uncherished existence in rural Central India. They own a scattering of cattle, and the ageing Jasrath supplements his meagre income with hard labour at a nearby brick kiln. They weren’t always this poorly off: we learn that Jasrath was cheated out of his ancestral land, and, in one shot, see the work-weary Vidya massaging her heels with oil, a silver anklet around her feet.

Jasrath and Vidya have a grown-up son with intellectual disabilities. Naraan (Nikhil Yadav) is introduced as a sweet, curious soul, frequently bullied and made sport of by the villagefolk. Jasrath, at least, has started to see him as a burden. So helplessly desperate is the man’s plight that we ignore the patriarchal venom he aims at Vidya, blaming her for bearing a ‘useless’ child.

On a neighbour’s suggestion, Vidya proposes a trip to the Maha Kumbh, hoping that a holy dip would ‘heal’ their boy. We see the family take off on foot, on a grey-blue morning, and then traverse miles on bullock-cart, train, public vans and buses—echoes of the migrant exodus of the last five years in Shelly Sharma’s cinematography are impossible to shake.

It’s nobody’s fault, but my investment in Vimukt’s plot was mildly derailed by the memory of Kaalidhar Laapata, a Hindi film from earlier this year about a man abandoned by his debt-ridden family at the Maha Kumbh. Gurjar has an assured, humane directing style, and there is some striking image-making in the sequences of Naraan in freefall, adrift in a swirl of light and night.

That said, this is often a staid, consciously ‘indie’ film, and I hope that, in future works, Gurjar manages to shake the formalness that seems to stiffen his style. For all its open-heartedness, Vimukt carries the burdensome poise of an older tradition of art films.

Vimukt had its world premiere at TIFF.