The Crow’s Egg ***
Dir: M. Manikandan.
With: V Ramesh, J Vignesh, Iyshwarya Rajesh, Ramesh Thilak. 91 mins. Cert: PG
After the
none-more-lavish escapism of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, the UK release of Tamil festival favourite The Crow’s Egg (Kaaka Muttai) returns us to reality with a bump.
The debut of erstwhile wedding photographer M. Manikandan plays out around the
margins of Chennai – its dumps, slums and wastelands – among a cast of thugs,
drunks, urchins and goats who have neither the time, nor really the joy in
them, to make a song and dance of things. No fairytale, then – but this
committed latter-day parable mines both laughter and tears from the struggles
of India’s poorest to put food on the table.
Our heroes are two
young brothers whose shared nickname derives from an unusual dining ritual.
Little Crow’s Egg (Ramesh) tempts birds from their nests with handfuls of his
mother’s rice; while they’re otherwise engaged, Big Crow’s Egg (Vignesh) swipes
the eggs that provide the pair with a rare source of protein. They’re quickly
outmuscled by bigger boys: property developers who appropriate the lads’
preferred hunting ground before chopping down its trees. At this lowly level of
the food chain, everybody’s preying on somebody: you’d call it dog-eat-slumdog,
were there anything as luxurious as meat about the place.
Suddenly, however,
there is. One flash-forward later, and a pizza parlour appears on the spot
where the brothers once gleaned, serving 300-rupee pies that are some distance
beyond their budget. Manikandan gently rubs their (and, by extension, our)
noses in this disparity. The Ferrari-red moped of a misdirected delivery driver
putters into view as though it were some alien craft; a sobering cut removes us
from the mouthwatering toppings of a TV promo to the very small potatoes the
brothers are peeling for their own supper. Stomachs rumbling, brains whirring,
the Crow’s Eggs hatch a plot – to secure themselves a slice of the action.
Every subsequent
obstacle encountered offers a reality check to any viewer blessed with the
Domino’s app. Hidden coal deposits have to be located to cobble together a
disposable income; even then, the boys’ tattered clothes stand between them and
the pepperoni. Such hard knocks might have conferred a grimness on Manikandan’s
film, but instead it proceeds with an optimism you’d call misplaced were it not
so infectious, and so clearly what these kids rely upon to get through the day.
We’re on their side from the early tracking shot that first follows them on
egg-scrumping manoeuvres – swinging their arms in fraternal solidarity, like
Ozu’s schoolkids.
Manikandan leans a
touch heavily on montages to smooth the film’s passage, and throws in one
heartstring-tugging contrivance as the boys approach their lowest ebb. Yet
whenever he’s left to roam this scrappy patch, he spots a good deal of
interest: the unintended knock-on effects of gentrification, the centrality of
food among those whose fate in life is to do the heavy lifting (the film
provides a blue-collar bookend to 2013’s crossover hit The Lunchbox) and, at the last, the many and varied ways social
justice can now be engineered, even after all expectation and appetite for it
has dwindled.
Wherever he places his
camera, he registers people who really do seem to belong to this milieu: no
slumming is tolerated, and young Ramesh and Vignesh in particular have a
giggly, us-against-the-world bond you surely couldn’t direct into them. (Their
eyes visibly widen upon witnessing the discarded crust one contemporary has
enshrined in Tupperware, as though it were a holy relic.) Sandwiched between
starrier Hindi releases, it’d be a shame if The
Crow’s Egg slipped through the cracks: here’s a film that doesn’t merely
observe India’s economic divide from the outside, but inhabits it absolutely.
The Crow's Egg is now playing in selected cinemas.
No comments:
Post a Comment