Pyre Review:
The hills are alive with the sound of music. Music as in the mumbling song of an old man, singing in Kumaoni to the gods of the mountains. He smokes beedis as he croons downhill, his ageing wife being carried by two villagers behind. She has to be taken down often for a checkup by the nearest town doctor. As they ride in a mountain taxi (often a Sumo car) to the clinic, the old man can’t help but look at a funeral pyre flaming at the banks of a river. Death, a universal impending fate.
Cast: Padam Singh and Hira Devi
Writer and Director: Vinod Kapri
Padam Singh and Tulsi (played by non-professional, local actors Padam Singh and Hira Devi) reside in a cozy, lonely house on top of a green hill in the mountains of Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region. He whiles away his time smoking and walking around. She busies herself with feeding grass to the goats. He gifts some of them to the villagers everytime they help them out. The evenings get lonely as Padam Singh and Tulsi look outside the window as the mist rises over the hills. She asks him if he would be interested in having an argument only to kill some time.
Writer and director Vinod Kapri’s film resides somewhere between solitude and loneliness, between calm and grief. A letter has come for the old couple from their son who went away to Mumbai years ago. He says he will be coming for a visit. The frail, wrinkled Tulsi lights up and invites the villagers for a modest feast. Padam Singh does a little dance. Pyre gets you in these little, non-attention-seeking moments. As the camera glides over the hills like a mountain eagle, you feel the cold beauty and a comforting sadness. It is the story of Uttarakhand, of villages emptying out as the new generation leaves the green mountains for greener pastures of the plains. It is heart-wrenching to see Padam Singh give more and more goats to their neighbours, hoping they would stay.
Pyre is told tenderly, without haste. Your mind, constantly buzzing with new information, can just exist while experiencing this film. Like every “slow” film this one also runs the risk of not having enough “plot development” but Pyre is not about intense, emotional moments, it presents a world, a feeling you can sit with. As Padam Singh walked around grazing the goats, pensively smoking a beedi, I too started meditating on life’s purpose.
For all its soothing stillness, the film can get repetitive in instances. Pyre is more life than drama and witnessing life can get boring. But what makes you care for the film is its central characters, played with an endearing accuracy by Padam Singh and Hira Devi. They can appear a bit green in moments but they make do with their sweet earnestness. Beyond loneliness and abandonment, the film at its heart is a story of a couple trying to find different ways to express love each day.
For me, Pyre felt like a look back on what we leave behind while sprinting through life. Padam Singh and Tulsi are representative of ageing parents everywhere who educated their children and sent them to big cities for big opportunities and better lives. Although the film never gets into it, I couldn’t help but think about the life of their son in Mumbai. Did he slog and sweat under the harsh sun? Did he look at the towering buildings and thought of the hills back home? Did he look outside the window of probably a kholi at night, trying to spot stars? Did he ever think, was it worth it?
