The reinvigorating short film Sandhya Suri completed for Film London in the decade separating her breakout documentary I for India from her recent festival favourite Santosh, The Field invites viewer speculation on the precise percentages of non-fiction and fiction involved. The title describes both a site of escape and erotic possibility: a tangled cornfield in rural India where a wife and mother (Mia Maelzer) goes to meet her lover. The routines and locations are real: so real, in fact, that our heroine's husband recruits her to lend a hand with the forthcoming harvest, one way of keeping your other half busy (or, indeed, giving her away). But the longings Suri reveals and dramatises are more ambiguous: is the lover real, or is this just a place this woman goes in her head from time to time? If the affair is real, then how much of a future can there be in it? There's no denying Suri's masterful atmospheric sense: we feel the heat, and hear both the insects in the grass and the wind stirring things up. What I wasn't expecting was the movies' most symbolic and suggestive corncob.
The Field is streaming via Channel 4 until Friday.
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