PIYUSH ROY
It is a quiet moment, as quiet as a kid’s, or rather two kids’ solitude can be.
The one with a professed, know-all attitude, asks the other.
“Can you smell fear, pain… sadness?” A quick thoughtful pause later, headds, “Danger…?”
Irrespective of whether you know anything about the story, that moment, or the characters on show, you are clued in. Pronto!
The other kid, in acurious, vacant way that adults would instantly scream to declare ‘cute’, asks, “Danger ki smell kya hoti hai?”
“MAUT…” a big dramatic pause “…Death!” Answers, our know-all questioner.
Wow!
A simple quite moment, becomes quiet a moment in an instant, and how.
Who are these two kids?
What is their drama?
What’s their story?
What’s going to happen next?
Story teller Amol Gupte has got the kid in you booked, with a familiar storyteller’s hook, like a good old bedtime tale, where the narrator, has much fun as the listener.
Naturally, the narrative is the king.
The above moment is a scene from Sniff!!!, writer-producer-director Amole Gupte’s latest film, which released this Friday. I will not limit the appeal of his delightful peak into some unique tribulations of a restless young life by terming Sniffa ‘children’s film’ or a ‘film with child-like sensibilities’, as some reviews and most word-of-mouth introduction have tagged it as. This often, is not done with any deliberate intention to patronise, but for that easy marketing need to categorisethe audience, in service of a box-office need to ration films by genre.
I think, it is an unfair tag to introduce a filmmaker, whose auteurshiphas consistently revealed intimate, overlooked insights from the wonderful world of pre-teenage hood, captured with a lot of genuine fondness, understandingand respect.
In that steady focus for a repeating slice-of-life context with different protagonists, each diverse from the other, and yet exclusively belonging to a signature story scape of their teller –is what makes Amole Gupte India’s first auteur of cinema on childhood.
Or to be more precise, ‘pre-teenage hood’, if there could happen to be, a term like that.
Ishaan Awasthi (Taare Zameen Par), Stanley Fernandes (Stanley Ka Dabba), Arjun Waghmare (Hawaa Hawaai) and now Sunny Gill (Sniff!!!) – think of a director, in any cinema from the world (including Iranian cinema), who has given one memorable child character after another, with such admirable consistency.
There have been many great directors and auteurs who have competently visited the life of childhood in films like Pather Panchali, 400 Blows, Kitaab, ET, Home Alone, Bashu, Masoom, Children of Heaven, Central Station, Kolya, Lavanya Preeti, Halo, Gattu, Cinema Paradiso, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Boyhood… and my all-time favourite in the genre, the achingly beautiful and humbling, Kurdish brotherhood drama, Bekas.
The world of cinema has indeed been enriched by heart-warming personal and inspired odes to childhood. But rarely have directors returned to that narrative backdrop, again and again, to make it the raison d’être of their cinematic oeuvre.
In that, Amol Gupte is a rare world cinema auteur… perhaps, after Majid Majidi?
The ebbs and tides in his dramas happen within a returning stream of dreams. His world of children is not devoid of adults, but we encounter those adults always, from a child’s exploring perspective. His protagonists are no winners extraordinaire; their wins are scripted in small,uncommon battles that unfold within the daily dramas of life… fairly, convincingly. The conflict always springs from their immediate context, they don’t go out into the world looking for an adventure. They hail from marginal backgrounds or are living in the margins, when hailing from a better economic environment like Ishaan or Sunny. And despite Amole’s films revolving around one child protagonist; the hero is always a team. A team of schoolmates in Stanley Ka Dabba, a team of street urchins in Hawaa Hawaai, a team of kids from a neighbourhood in Sniff… all hailing from the city, he knows and understands best, ‘His Mumbai’.
Amole’s films abound with characters he knows or has known, intimately and affectionately, drawn from his years of dedicated and continual working with kids in workshops celebrating creativity. He is like a Santa, who if he could, would shower children with gifts, almost daily… precious gifts, which would make them and those who love them, awaken to many-a-talent born and lost in the unrecorded personal joys of a journey called growing up, relished long after in an after-thought called nostalgia.
In a day and age where the lifeline of childhood keeps getting shortened in an increasing rush to be or behave like an adult, occasionally with some shocking shades of the grey too; take a bow Auteur Amole, for still being able to find and share, simple entertaining vignettes about lives in the green.
It’s like savouring 35mm in the age of the digital.
Take your entire family – kids, adults and the grand adults – for a liberal snort of Amole’s latest ‘sniff’ into childhood. It will not change your life; but will offer a sumptuous plateful of something different, in our story starved times.
After all, there is more to cinema than the popcorn!
