KIFF 2024: In ‘Parikrama’, Goutam Ghose probes the human cost of development

A still from ‘Parikrama’

Destiny and development politics delicately come together in Goutam Ghose’s latest work of art depicting big-ticket projects’ impact in the Narmada basin on human life and the environment.

At the outset, the Indo-Italian production appears like a venture to sell the serene Narmada valley to the Italians who historically love to travel and explore the cultural diversity of India. Still, as the narrative takes shape, Ghose, one of the vanguards of the Parallel Cinema movement in India, displays how the gentle touch of the ethereal could be a subversive device, reviving memories of the days of the New Wave when projects co-funded by the State didn’t shy away from speaking truth to power.

Mounted like a picturesque canvas that carries the contradictions of tradition and technology, growth and development in its layers, Parikrama follows Alessandro or Alex (Marco Leonardi), a conscientious Italian filmmaker who makes films on environmental displacement. He is keen on making a documentary on the pilgrims that circumambulate the Narmada but the river is fast losing its character because of multiple dams that have come up on its vast course.

A single father, Alex leaves his son Francesco (Emanuele Esposito) behind with his grandmother in the Mediterranean country to explore the journey of the mighty Narmada into the Arabian Sea. Shot by Ghose and his son Ishan Ghose, the film captures how water can both be a life-giving and destructive force and meditates on how nature is central to Indian civilisation. The form is pure and the expression ranges from poignant to the pointed as the gaze oscillates between empathetic and incisive.

In India, Alex is joined by Rupa (Chitrangada Singh), a social worker in child welfare who is battling her demons. Keen to find a voice for the film, Alex comes across Lala (Aryan Badkul), a street-smart teenager selling curios on the banks of the river. As the two develop an enduring bond, the otherwise ebullient Lala narrates the tragic backstory of how his village got submerged in the river because of a dam project. Only an unhinged man in the village dare speak against the project and a child is left to tell the tale.

Critiquing the Western gaze on India, the film comes across as a poetic follow-up piece to Roberto Rossellini’s ethnographic docu-fiction Matri Bhumi (1959). In the Italian master’s picturesque depiction of Nehruvian India, the narrator Devi finds livelihood and safety from floods at the then-upcoming Hirakud Dam. Six decades later, Lala loses his land, livelihood, and possibly hope because of another monstrous concrete structure in the middle of the river. And if you look closely, a portrait of Nehru, covered with years of dust, hangs in a government office where the officer refuses to provide compensation without papers. Yesterday’s solution could be today’s problem.

For Marco, who emerged as a teenage star with Cinema Paradiso (1988), Parikrama is a cinematic circumambulation of sorts as three decades after playing the teenaged Toto in the Italian classic, he gets an opportunity to be an Alfredo for the doughty Lala. Like Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala, Alex, a foreign traveller, sees the shadow of his son in Lala. The film has an interesting phrase for it, humara naseeb, which explains how the marginalised surrender to their fate and how our lives seem to be intertwined. This twinning of destinies comes through the background score as Ghose uses Operatic music to generate an emotional swell in the scenes depicting environmental displacement around Narmada. When Alex gets enraged with giant structures protruding out of the river, he refers to Atlantis, the fictional island in Plato’s work that was lost to the world because of human hubris; much like the revelry in the water parks built on stagnant water where the consumers perhaps don’t realise who have paid with their lives for their entertainment.

The film has taken a long time to complete and perhaps that’s why the impact of certain scenes in the second half is not fully realised. The conversations between Alex and Rupa tend to drag. Aryan has an unmistakable charm and flair for performance but at times, his enthusiasm gives the impression that he is in a summer workshop. Ghose, however, doesn’t give up on his quest and even puts himself under scrutiny. Rupa questions Alex’s morality for milking Lala’s heart-rending story for his project and wonders whether his gaze is voyeuristic. The same question could be asked of Ghose. Parikrama takes a few extra rounds to avoid easy answers but the question it raises leaves one numb.

Parikrama had its Asia premiere at the ongoing Kolkata International Film Festival