The opening shot of Mithya is that of a boy standing by the doorway of a train compartment. Outside this doorway, scenes of untamed Nature fly by. Inside the doorway is the comfort of berths and other people. The boy is neither here, nor there. As we will see later, this boy is the Mithya of the title. His given name is Mithun, and he’s played by Atish S Shetty. There’s been a horrible tragedy. Mithun aka Mithya is being taken from his home in Mumbai to the home of his aunt and uncle in Udupi. The physical displacement brings with it mental displacement. The Marathi-speaking boy is being taken to a place that speaks Kannada. He will get a room of his own, but his younger sister Vandana will sleep with their aunt and uncle. Except for one older chap, very few local boys seem to want to be around him, and sullen loneliness becomes a default state.
The aunt and uncle (beautifully played by Prakash Thuminad and Roopa Varkady) are good people. The aunt is amazed that there are so many thoughts in his small head. “How will we know anything unless you tell us?” she asks him. But even if he wanted to, Mithun would be unable to put what he’s thinking into words. In a remarkable performance, Athish S Shetty plays Mithun as a near-wordless boy, struggling to make sense of the circumstances that brought him here and the various things that have been happening since. See, for instance, the playfulness in him the first time he plays “inky pinky ponky” with his little sister, and the violence in him when he plays the game with her again, later in the movie. The change in emotion has to do with something he now knows about the girl. He probably knows she is blameless, and yet, he realises that she is another stone thrown into the placid pond that was once his mind. The ripples never seem to stop.
With the extraordinary cinematographer Udit Khurana, writer-director Sumanth Bhat gives us many scenes that function as a mirror of the young protagonist’s mind. At one point, Mithun takes permission from a teacher and goes to the washroom of his new school. The subtle way the scene is framed and staged, we see that Mithun did not really need to relieve himself. He just wanted to be alone for a while. Many of the ripples in his mind are due to things said by older people, who didn’t feel it necessary to lower their voices so that Mithun would not hear what they were talking about. And sometimes, scenes turn multidimensional in extraordinary ways that go beyond Mithun. His uncle tells him he always wanted a boy. Mithun asks him why. The older man says, “Maybe to show my father that raising a son is not difficult.” At that exquisitely vulnerable moment, I was able to imagine the uncle being like Mithun at some point, a sulking, withdrawn boy dealing with his own mental ripples.
The uncle and aunt follow established gender roles. She has a “woman’s job”: she is a beautician. He is an auto driver who refuses to feed his child because that sort of thing is a wife’s department. He appreciates Mithun for fighting with an older boy who insulted Mithun’s masculinity, for riding a girl’s cycle. But hearing his uncle and aunt quarrel at home reminds Mithun of the way his parents used to quarrel. Composer Midhun Mukundan gives us an absolutely gorgeous strings/piano melody over the closing credits, but while the movie is playing, he rarely makes his presence felt. We aren’t manipulated into feeling anything; every emotion is earned. And many shots have a payoff, from that game of “inky pinky ponky” to the visual of Mithun swimming in a local pond. These payoffs are internal, taking us, to the extent possible, into Mithun’s mind. As older people, we see what he isn’t able to see.
A tug of war between two sets of relatives who want Mithun makes things worse, and you see why the horrifying end was necessary. Does this closing stretch mean that Mithun has to come to terms with whatever happened? In other words, is this catharsis? Or is this just a temporary quieting of the ripples in his mind? Mithya is not quite a coming-of-age film. There isn’t a clean A-to-B arc that the central character negotiates. The film is more like a series of snapshots of a certain state of mind, and that’s what makes it so different, so moving, so beautiful. If there’s a metaphor in this movie, it may be the scene where Mithun is playing with his magnifying glass in the sunlight and accidentally sets off a fire. The way I saw it, that’s what life is. We want to do one thing. Something else happens. And we are left to bridge the gap. For the duration of its running time, Mithya offers us the privilege of watching Mithun trying to bridge those gaps.
