Ritwik Pareek’s film opens with the image of a temple on a hill after dusk, prayer bells on the soundtrack. This gives way seconds later to shots of distant highway traffic and a great reverberating spaghetti western guitar chord. A man stumbles out of a dive bar, slurs a farewell “Jai siya Ram” and rides off into the night. In the world of Dug Dug, the distance between sacred and profane can be covered in one drunken lurch.
The opening stretch, around 11 minutes, is as mesmeric as anything I’ve seen in this decade of Indian film. Walking out of the bar, the man stands in semi-darkness, takes a swig from a quarter bottle, tries to light a beedi. He’s successful on his third try. At this exact moment, lights come on overhead, a brilliant mesh of blue and purple neon. A gravelly voiceover mulls the mystery of life. The man sets off on his motorbike, straight down the middle of a badly lit highway. More ominous twangy music. Vehicles whiz past; some curse at him and he curses back. He veers off the main road onto a less crowded one, but having got this far, skids and crashes. Under a gaze of a lurid billboard announcing a magic show, he lies, gasping. The camera pans away just in time for a passing truck to run him over.
The deceased, we learn the next morning, was known as Thakur Sa. He was a local of no great importance, and the early reactions to his death are mild shock but mostly indifference. Having sent off the body, the cops—two young policemen and one on the verge of retirement—bring back his Luna motorbike to the station. After dark, they start drinking. The next morning, the bike is gone (there’s a wonderful unbroken shot when the older cop realises it’s missing and panics). Incredibly, the vehicle is found standing at the site of the accident. It’s brought back, placed under lock and key. Again it breaks out. On its third escape, the village gets involved.
The miraculous reappearances of Thakur Sa’s bike fires everyone up. With a sarpanch and a local priest eager to take control of proceedings, it’s decided that this case of restless wandering spirit can be solved through the construction of a memorial. “What did he like?” the head priest asks gathered villagers. There’s silence, and then someone offers, “Alcohol and cigarettes.” So, by religious decree, these become the offerings at the shrine. There’s a trickle of local visitors. The memorial becomes more elaborate. Now the whole village is praying there. Outsiders stop by. Politicians get involved, so does the royal family. Before long, Thakur Sa is a deity.
Dug Dug premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2021. A five-year wait for a theatrical release in their own country must take the wind out of the sails of a first-time director. Still, it’s great that audiences here will have a chance to see a film that, in conception and treatment, will be dissimilar to anything they’ve come across. What starts out like it could be a noir mystery becomes a tart satire on the commerce and curiousness of faith in India.
The story develops in a loose, unfettered way. There’s not a lot of dialogue. There are no central characters to hang onto. I got the sense of a debutant director trying out different things: intricate long shots, lightning edits, trippy musical sequences. Thakur’s inexplicable deification is shown in a rolling series of montages, a tremendous job by editor Bijith Bala. It shouldn’t all fit together, but it does. Pareek’s production company is called Bottle Rocket Pictures, but there’s only traces of Wes Anderson style in the film—the clearest borrowing is during a scene when the camera whip-pans repeatedly from cops to priest to villagers.
Pareek has a wonderful eye. He fills the screen with splashes of colour that pop against the desert landscape (the pink of Thakur’s bike’s seat becomes a dominant motif). Working with cinematographer Aditya Kumar and art directors Prerna Kathuria and Ranjit Singh, he finds inspiration in all manner of high and low pop art. The billboard at site of the crash is a wonderful hand-painted advertisement. The film’s title is done in the style of neon signs for roadside bars. A change of heart at the end is presaged by close scrutiny of a painting in the style of one of the Rajasthani schools. There are so many bits of funky design through the film, flyers and commercials and signposts, some of them barely on screen for seconds.
There is an ‘explanation’, but at the same time, nothing can really explain this. The ‘based on true events’ disclaimer arrives midway through the film, as if Pareek suddenly realises audiences outside India might mistake this for fanciful satire. Whereas viewers here would know, disclaimer or not, that this could pass for slightly exaggerated non-fiction (the film’s based on a true story). The only suspense is where the combination of superstition, faith, enterprise and opportunism will take us. Dug Dug has comic designs. But we’ve seen too often how this cocktail leads us to dark places.
If Thakur’s cult seems to spread like a virus, it’s worth remembering Dug Dug was completed during covid, a time of especially crazy beliefs and misinformation in India. As the modest original memorial is being assembled, a local starts to blow up a pink balloon. Memorial becomes tourist site and, finally, swanky temple. Through all this, Pareek keeps returning to the man with the balloon. By the end, it’s the size of a bike. A shimmering vision that could burst at any second: this is also the promise of Thakur Sa. But Pareek doesn’t judge the believers or cynics or grifters. Like the cops in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’, he just stands back and lets it all be.
‘Dug Dug’ is in theatres.
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