Once in a bluemoon, we get an Indian film that tears away a part of us irretrievably. Kannada writer-director Sumanth Bhat’s is a haunting study of grief and healing, as an eleven-year old boy copes with emotions that he is not mature enough to understand, let alone process.
The introspective procedural is left unvarnished and unbeautified: all we see is the raw hurting boy, trying to make his way, stumbling kicking, through a world he barely comprehends.
The film begins with Mithya (Athish Shetty) uprooted cruelly from his home in Maharashtra to a village in Karnataka after his parents’ abrupt and suspicious passing. Mithya’s aunt (his deceased mother’s sister) and uncle take him in and try to provide him with the best possible care. The uncle especially (Prakash Thuminad) adopts Mithya as his son, gives the boy the emotional anchor he needs and holds his hand from the moment he arrives in the family, announcing that the elder daughter’s room will now belong to Mithya.
The aunt (Roopa Varkady)is equally affectionate though a little less demonstrative and more practical than her husband. “He listens to you, not me,” she grumbles good naturedly, but doesn’t hesitate in buying the bereft boy a brand new bicycle when she gets to know he gets ragged in school for riding a lady’s bicycle.
It is not short of astounding how many emotionally rich moments writer-director Sumanth Bhat pours into his short 97 minutes of sparse succinct storytelling, furnishing a fertility to the young protagonist’s uprooted life, ploughing gently through Mithya’s unimaginable grief, until the narrative arrives at a tentative closure to the boy’s sense of alienation and bereavement.
And what a closure! The brutal finale left me as deeply moved as most of the rest of the film. I was not too convinced by the custodial battle for Mithya. It felt like the only contrivance in a screenplay that wafts across Mithya’s intimate universe, in motions of whispering screams of agony and protest.
Words fail to express admiration for Sumanth Bhat’s understated skills as a raconteur in his first film. He weaves in and out of Mithya’s tenebrous life in pursuit of security and stability.
Would it have been possible for Bhat to tell this tender yet unsparing story without Athish Shetty, who plays Mithya, negotiating all his character’s unprocessed emotional trauma with a rare understanding. How did the boy do it? I suggest some of Hindi cinema’s star kids watch this 11-year-old actor at work. They may never be able to face themselves in the mirror again.
Mithya is a very rare variety of cinema where the pain of grief is so tangible, we don’t need to be prompted by the background score or camera movements to feel for the characters. The adult world is perceived through the young boy’s understanding of it, as in Satyajit Ray’s Piku (especially when he hears the couple quarrelling).
Another great director Hrishikesh Mukherjee once said he shot his classic Anupama on location in the protagonist’s heart. Now, I know what he meant.
Mithya is now streaming on Prime Video.
