A proclivity towards morbidity would be inherent in any film dealing with loss and mortality. Yet, it can also spawn luminous cinema like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue (1993) in which Julie (Juliette Binoche) finds herself in an emotional void after surviving a car accident that claims both her husband and child. Cruelly wrenched from her family, will she find liberation from their memories?
Closer to home, Umesh Kulkarni’s Vihir (Marathi, The Well , 2010) was an aching portrayal of an adolescent’s silent, incoherent mourning for a dead cousin. Now, veteran filmmaker Sumitra Bhave’s Dithee (Marathi, Seeing) offers a gentle and poignant rumination on loss, grief and reconciliation. It is bolstered with philosophical layers about life and death, knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, reality and illusion. ‘ Dithee’ means vision, an ability to perceive the conciliation of these paradoxes.
Way of rituals
Based on the original story ‘ Aata Amod Sunasi Ale ’ by noted Marathi writer D.B. Mokashi, it is a seemingly simple narrative about a tragic moment in the life of village ironsmith Ramji (Kishor Kadam). His world collapses when his young son drowns in an overflowing river, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a prematurely born daughter. Ramji — the wise guy to whom the village turns for succour — has to reconcile with this immense loss in his old age, share it with his elderly and ageing friends and acquaintances. Bhave frames his wizened grief in spirituality. However, it’s not a celebration of the claptrap of religion or rituals but an intense evocation of the profound theology underlying life and death. Here faith is a healer, god a proxy therapist for a desperate soul.
Ramji is quite like the Biblical character Job in The Book of Job. Just like Job wonders why he is being made to suffer despite leading a blameless life, Ramji questions god’s ways. Why must he bear the pain when he has been following the age-old Waarkari tradition (where pilgrims walk from the holy town of Alandi to Pandharpur, the home of Vithoba) for 30 years? Does this devotion mean nothing?
Two for company
Meanwhile, there are his friends who wonder how much of his sorrow they can share. Despite being close to him can they feel the depths of his unfathomable pain?
The film operates more in the realm of ideas than action and takes viewers into the mind of a distressed soul. On the one hand are the recollections, an unhurried narrative going back and forth in time. On the other is the constancy of the sombre mood, the unexorcised feelings, the seclusion and withdrawal, the inner monologues of Ramji, his conversations with friends.
Grief takes its time to abate and life runs on its own rhythms. It’s a birth that eventually makes Ramji come to terms with the inevitability of death and the continuum of creation.
In the lovely final scene, the fabulous star cast, including Mohan Agashe, Kishor Kadam, Dilip Prabhavalkar, Uttara Baokar and Girish Kulkarni, sing together in their own voices, about the knowing in unknowing and unknowing in knowing. The answer is in Sant Dyaneshwar’s verses, in his ‘Amrut Anubhav’ and ‘Dnyaneshwari’. And the dualities become indivisible.
