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‘Sabar Bonda’: Speak softly and defy expectations
Summary
Rohan Kanawade’s Sundance winner ‘Sabar Bonda’ is a tender and quietly revolutionary love story
It speaks to the relaxed control of Sabar Bonda how animals freely roam the frame and steal our attention. An optimistic goat breaks away from the herd and approaches two humans eating their lunch; it’s shooed away unceremoniously. A cat draws our gaze as it walks across the screen before it’s spooked by yelling and runs off. As Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) talks to his friend Balya (Suraaj Suman), he glances at a nearby buffalo that’s lifted its tail and done its business.
Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Marathi film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this month, is set in a village in Maharashtra. It’s close enough to Mumbai that Anand can take a bus there to perform his father’s last rites in his ancestral village. But it’s also a world removed, a place, in the local imagination at least, of opportunity and permissiveness, herbal shampoos and special friends.
The phrase khaas mitr, special friend, is said a few times during the film. It’s the closest Anand’s relatives and friends in the village come to articulating the fact that he’s gay. His cousin's wife says it with curiosity. When Balya, a closeted gay man, does, it’s with wistfulness. It’s a matter of limited vocabulary and propriety, but there’s also a tenderness to its usage.
That Anand is gay is hinted at early on when his mother (Jayshri Jagtap) tells him not to reveal to their family back home the real reason he isn’t married. He’s also out of the closet—or as out as is culturally possible. His immediate family all seem to know, though that doesn’t stop his uncle and grandmother from pressing him to marry. And, of course, Balya—whose refusal to marry while living in the village and maintaining close friendships with men is its own clear statement—must have been one of the first to recognise it in him.
There’s a suggestion that Anand and Balya might have been lovers previously, but Anand is shy and left fragile by a past breakup and his father’s death. Kanawade, who’s also written the film, tracks their halting attraction with great tenderness. Though he mostly uses medium shots, when the camera goes close, it’s with purpose. The opening shot of the film is a dazzling closeup: three-quarters of Anand’s face and his mane of curly hair. Later, there’s another intimate closeup of his hair, this time with Balya’s hand caressing it. Only one aesthetic decision struck me as incongruous: the corners of the screen are curved, even though this is neither a self-consciously arty film nor a throwback to an earlier era.
Sabar Bonda ('cactus pears') quietly shows the same kind of progressiveness that a mainstream film would trumpet as groundbreaking social service. The surprise that an urban viewer might feel at the frankness of Anand about his sexual orientation in a rural setting is built into the film’s DNA. Anand recalls that he didn’t think his father, who only studied till high school, would understand him coming out, yet he not only did but was unconditionally supportive. And his mother tells him that Anand’s father didn’t think she would understand—but “I already knew about you".
The film’s conception of Balya is frank, though not explicit. Early on, he’s visited by a young man on a motorcycle; it’s clear they’re regular lovers (his mother remarks that the friend only comes by at night). When he casually mentions that most of his encounters are hurried, Anand expresses some surprise at the idea of a local gay population. Balya’s response is that it's hardly unthinkable there would be others like him around.
As Anand, Bhushaan Manoj has an unruly beard, a giant mane of hair and a bewildered manner. His softness is entirely out of sync which the starkness of the village—one can see, apart from the obvious reason, why he left for Mumbai. A telling early moment shows him as the only male sitting in a group of women from the village, entirely at ease. There’s only one scene I can think of where he’s with an all-male group, and he handles it awkwardly. It’s a delicate performance, combining touchingly with Suman’s outwardly confident yet vulnerable Balya.
Sabar Bonda winning the Grand Jury prize is a huge achievement, even more impressive when you consider it’s a debut feature (Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes won the equivalent award in the documentary section at Sundance in 2022). Coming nine months after Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light’s Grand Prix win at Cannes, it’s a further boost for Indian cinema in global arthouse circles. One of the wilder accusations aimed at Kapadia’s film was that its style was somehow not intrinsically Indian. No one in their right mind would say this about Sabar Bonda, which seems to rise from the soil.
Also read: Remembering the pioneering legacy of Krishna Sobti at 100
