The director’s second film stars Achyuth Kumar, Dileesh Pothan. It is the first Kannada feature to be selected for the Berlin Film Festival, and it contains many of the themes (class, caste, man vs nature) we saw in his debut. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
Natesh Hegde follows up Pedro with Tiger’s Pond (Vagachipani), and the two films are companion pieces. Both are set in a village by the Western Ghats, and are shot by Vikas Urs in a manner that makes it a point to not exoticize these locations. (In other words, the extraordinary is rendered ordinary, like how it would seem to someone who has always lived there, as opposed to an awestruck tourist.) Both films feature a master-servant equation, along with observations on caste and class hierarchies. (Again, this is all presented to us as though it has always existed, and not as something that “kicks off a plot”.) Both films include wild animals (a boar there, tigers here) and godly rituals. If Pedro showed us a statue of Ganesha being immersed during a festival as observed by a social outcast, we get a goddess here with green bangles, who’s first seen amidst wild reeds and slowly slips into a pond. This goddess, too, is observed by a sort of outcast.
This time, the outcast is more of an outlier, a mentally challenged woman named Pathi (Sumithra) who tends to the cattle owned by the village bigshot, Prabhu (Achyuth Kumar). In an early scene set in a forest near this village, kids in school uniform race to their homes after hearing a tiger’s roar. But Pathi stays still. Either she isn’t scared, or she is unable to register the fact that danger is around, or she’s one with Nature in a strange way. I don’t mean that she’s a mystical presence. But her muteness renders her a mystery. She gets the film’s most stunning image, a wide shot where she’s at the centre of the frame and dwarfed by the forest all around her. She could well be a forest creature herself. The film is shot with 16-mm film stock, and the grain, the “imperfection” makes it all seem timeless, like something from a photo album that’s existed since the world began.
Natesh works in oblique ways. There’s a banner being put up for Prabhu, who is contesting in a local election. First we see two men carrying long poles. We then see holes being dug, and the poles are inserted. Only later do we realise what this construction is: a banner. This election is important for Prabhu, whose bare torso is bisected diagonally by a sacred thread. The family has been in control of the village for generations, but now, for the first time, there are opponents. Prabhu (whose very name means “god”) performs a small ritual at a temple, and God seems to tell him that he will win the election. But it isn’t going to be easy. He has to go around asking people to vote for him, and for assistance, he has the faithful immigrant named Malbari (Dileesh Pothan), a big man with a slavish devotion to his master.
The Malayalam-speaking Malbari knows that he is an outsider in this community, and no amount of speaking in the local dialect is going to make him an insider. Prabhu refers to Malbari’s family as “low-caste,” and a big plot point arises when Malbari’s sister is found to be in love with Prabhu’s younger brother, Venkati (played by the director). If you recall Natesh’s first film, there was, again, a master-servant relationship that set the “plot” in motion. And like Pedro, Tiger’s Pond (based on stories by Amaresh Nugadoni) uses genre elements – a police investigation, a suicide, a love affair – in subversive ways. For instance, Malbari’s sister (Bindu Raxidi) is far more assertive than her “upper-caste” lover. The suicide episode features a cobra being kept in a jar, possibly for venom extraction. And the police investigation is interrupted by Basu (Gopal Hegde), who has the spine to stand up to Prabhu.
Natesh Hegde doesn’t seem to believe in performances. He appears to cast actors for their presence, and every actor – professional and otherwise – is spot on. Based on Pedro and Tiger’s Pond, the director is interested in capturing snapshots of the caste and class divide, but with a documentarian’s distance. Every subplot is seen through an objective prism, without much narrative manipulation. Malbari does something really awful at the end, but whether he’s going to have sleepless nights about his action is something only he knows. Like Pedro, this second film is an impressive drama that is less interested in individual character development than in how these characters fit into the timeless tableau of man and nature, rich and poor, dominance and oppression. Tiger’s Pond ends with a freeze frame that suggests some sort of eternal presence, that killing someone need not mean that they cannot find a way to return, even if only as a memory. It’s haunting. Natesh Hegde proves, once again, that he is one of the most interesting new voices in non-mainstream cinema.
