The expendables: "Homebound"

India's submission for Academy Award consideration this year, Homebound, is an unusual one: inspired by a New York Times article and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, it's a near-contemporary piece - set in the months leading up to the pandemic - which alludes (and, in places, speaks openly) to the fact all's far from well in Modiland. Co-writer/director Neeraj Ghaywan, who brought us the exceptional Masaan a decade ago, introduces us to a pair of childhood friends who've endured the rural poverty of North India; now in young adulthood, they've concocted a scheme to elevate themselves further, namely taking the police recruitment exam. Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) is a Dalit-caste farmboy whose parents have worked themselves to the bone to afford their offspring this chance; his pal Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter, from Dhadak), son of Pakistani migrants, tries to shrug off his community's prevailing Islamophobia. The opening sequence finds these brothers-in-arms cramming onto a packed, city-bound commuter train ("I never knew taking an exam was so much like going to war"), then they return home to take whatever work they can find while waiting for the make-or-break results to be published. What they get in the meantime is an unsentimental education in how latter-day India both works and doesn't work: they're at that age where we really begin to notice the infelicities and inequities of this world. The police ranks are oversubscribed and prone to sudden hiring freezes, but even if they weren't, there'd be other issues; this is not a society set up in such a way as to afford its young easy mobility. Even the pandemic, a leveller in certain respects, serves to further divide those who were vulnerable from those who weren't.

That the film has so far passed without censorious comment is surely due to the way it goes softly and quietly: it opens with the personal, detailing credible people in actual locations, and only then builds towards the political. For much of its duration, Homebound plays as a naturalistic study of smart, sensitive kids finding things out the hard way: how people in power react when your status becomes apparent, say, or the price of the average textbook (it's a bit on-the-nose that Chandan should wind up studying business, but the lesson takes), how fragile dreams are, that these boys will for some while be set on different paths. Ghaywan once more strips his performers of Hindi film's usual comforting melodrama, and complicates our assumptions to some degree by casting emergent posterboy Khatter as the downtrodden Shoaib, a choice that only underlines how bafflingly arbitrary the caste system is: in this India, you could even be a pin-up, and some people would still look down on you. (No wonder Khatter's performance radiates growing disillusion, a profoundly felt disappointment; the actor has been forced to consider what might have happened if he hadn't caught such a break.) Jethwa, by contrast, spends much of the film suggesting something more robust: a lad pulling himself up by his bootstraps. His reward will be a kiss from Janhvi Kapoor as the middle-class college girl who takes a shine to Chandan, though even she - famously, the daughter of Bollywood royalty - has been removed of much of her usual glamour. (A quirk of scheduling means Homebound will likely end up sharing UK multiplex space with Kapoor's next project, the frothy-looking romance Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari. Two films, adjacent screens, worlds apart.)

As in Masaan, Ghaywan seeks out real spaces, lined faces, lived-in homes; a family wedding unfolds in a single room on a touchingly finite budget. The whole film is suffused with sadness: everywhere one looks, one sees unrealised potential, hopes dashed, people being led to expect the worst (Chandan comes to answer his phone with a blunt "what happened?") or, worse, nothing at all (a line to haunt all of us: "I even dream of biryani now"). It should by rights be despairing - it is, to an extent - yet on a moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene basis, Ghaywan and his collaborators resolve to show us something new, to reroute our downturned gaze and emotions: there's some really astute screenwriting going on in a scene that asserts that, however bad Chandan has it, his sister has it even worse on account of her sex. It's a very organised film about a society that still isn't as organised as it could or should be. These boys are required to race across live train tracks, travel vast distances to work; this, the film underlines, is an India that forces people to run around in extreme heat - making migrants of its own citizens - or otherwise expend unnecessary energy chasing things up. Measurable, straightforward progress is all but impossible: the rungs have rotted on those ladders that haven't already been pulled up. And that's when it's business as usual; when Covid hits, the State's response makes the Boris Johnson-Matt Hancock approach appear capable and coherent. Ghaywan, in complete contrast, knows exactly what he wants to say and show: each scene and sequence develops his argument, up until the point where he pares back to stark essentials (two kids abandoned at the roadside) and illustrates what happens when this way of life becomes life-or-death. He goes softly but assuredly, and he cuts deep. Though it catches moments of poetry, beauty, even possibility in passing, what strikes you most about Homebound is its very great seriousness of expression. Confronted once again with the hazy indifference of those occupying positions of power, Ghaywan and his team counter with a blazing, ardent belief: these people deserve better.

Homebound is now playing in selected cinemas.