The most fascinating thing in Vinod Kapri's Pyre is everything that happened offscreen. The crew reportedly had to trek 2-3 hours to reach locations and carry equipment through difficult terrain and forests. Kapri has also said that he worked roughly 14-hour days for a month and that wild animals were a genuine safety concern for the cast and crew members. What's more, the whole team chose to stay in local homes, sharing cramped accommodations, and on top of all this, it was difficult to shoot demanding scenes with Padam Singh and Hira Devi, both elderly non-professional performers making their screen debuts. A behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Pyre, then, would be interesting in itself. And that's the movie I wish I was watching in the theater because what's on the screen in this drama set in a remote village in Uttarakhand is not only thinly conceived but also devoid of any sense of life, experience, or imagination. Pyre is precisely the kind of "arthouse" movie that people who don't watch arthouse movies accuse arthouse movies of being: dull, plodding, repetitive.
For at least the first thirty minutes or so, Kapri does succeed in sustaining your interest in this world by making you aware of the daily routines and rituals of the villagers, especially the lead couple, Tulsi (Hira Devi) and Padam (Padam Singh Kapri). We see how challenging and precarious it is to scale the mountain to reach the houses and to descend from the top as well. Tulsi has to be carried down the mountain by two young men, Jeevan (Shubham Chaudhary) and Laxman (Subhash Chandra), after which she and Padam get into a cab that takes them to the hospital. Much of their economy seems to run through goats. Padam gives one to a postman for bringing a letter, and he also uses goats as barter when he needs help getting Tulsi to the hospital. There is, however, one curious gap here. After being admitted to the hospital, Tulsi returns home by herself one day. The film doesn't show how she makes the journey or, more importantly, how she pays the cab driver. Given that Padam and Tulsi use goats for transactions, how does Tulsi manage the return journey? Does Padam leave a goat behind for her to use? That seems unlikely, given that he would never willingly let her undertake such a difficult journey alone. It's a tiny question, but once the film establishes goats as a means of exchange, it's hard not to wonder about the one cab ride it conveniently leaves unexplained.
While walking through the mountains, Padam often sings folk tunes, and in the opening scene, we see him beating a small drum. Oh, I forgot to mention that Padam blows a bhankora to call Jeevan and Laxman for assistance. How tough is it to blow this instrument? Tulsi picks it up at one point but isn't able to blow it with the required strength. It's a nice, little funny scene. It's also an ominous moment of foreshadowing.
In fact, everything in Pyre is ominous and points towards Tulsi and Padam's death. The couple is more than 80 years old. The mountains with their steep, rocky paths are perilous, and they drive only one thought into your head: "How would Padam and Tulsi (mainly Tulsi) receive emergency medical attention at such a high-altitude, almost-away-from-civilization location?" The roofs are leaky, and the houses are collapsing in the rain, which means it's only a matter of time until Tulsi and Padam's own roof collapses. Then, of course, there is the thing about the villagers leaving the mountains to go to live with their children. Jeevan gets a job in Bombay, and Laxman plans to leave after two months as well (there is a touching moment where Padam begs Jeevan to stay back). This means Padam and Tulsi would eventually be the only two people in the village, putting them in more isolation and danger. Kapri, in other words, keeps pushing his leads into the pit of loneliness and death, and after a while, all you do is guess when they will meet their maker. You see Tulsi lying unconscious outside in the rain and think she's dead. You hear Tulsi saying that Padam hasn't moved an inch since morning, and you think he's dead. Kapri plays the "Dead or Not" game with the audience. That becomes the only notion that drives this story forward. Will Padam leave the mortal world first? Or will Tulsi succumb to her illness? Or maybe the two of them will commit suicide together?
It's no accident that Kapri chooses to open the film with the scene where Padam asks Tulsi to jump from a cliff together. Their survival becomes the sole source of suspense and narrative interest, which Kapri shamelessly exploits for emotional manipulation. The scene where Tulsi goes to her neighbors' houses, weeping and in the rain, to ask for help is all kinds of cheap and despicable. We know everybody has left; Tulsi knows everybody has left. Yet, Kapri inserts such an exploitative sequence that gratuitously reaches for your sympathy and blatantly begs for your tears. Instead of committing such a cinematic offense, it would have been far better if Kapri had dug into his characters' thoughts, past, and opinions to develop them beyond sentimental stick figures. Padam might not be educated, but when has education stopped any old man from talking about politics or narrating tales from his own past experiences as a young man? Are there no funny or exciting incidents from Padam's own life that he likes to remember and recount as a story over a bottle of alcohol with Jeevan and Laxman? Don't those two young men ever show curiosity about Padam's past? Don't they, at the very least (or as a joke), want to know from him the secret of such a long-lasting marriage? Padam listens to news on his radio. Does he have no thoughts on the things that are happening outside? Does he just passively take in the news through one ear and throw it out through the other? Has he never heard a news report so interesting that he felt like sharing it with Tulsi or discussing it with her? Does that radio not give him access to contemporary Hindi film songs? Has Tulsi or Padam heard any of those tracks?
By omitting his characters' personal views and opinions, Kapri thins them down to plot puppets. They don't have strong personal beliefs or complex ideas that could fill them with contradictions, that could make us see them as fully formed individuals with diverse tastes and preconceptions. Basically, Kapri doesn't seem interested in seeing his characters as fully realized humans. He intentionally makes them easy-to-admire and blandly likable because he wants to deploy them for mushy purposes. It's only Padam and Tulsi's constant bickering that adds a comic flavor to Pyre, which Devi delivers with sharp wit and which also becomes repetitious after a while since the jabs are almost monotonously along the lines of "Go and die, you old man" and "Go and die, you old woman." The behind-the-scenes troubles and the casting of elderly non-professional performers then become virtues in themselves for a movie like Pyre because without these stories of back-breaking production difficulties, such films would generally be dismissed as shallow and mediocre. The real locations also add to this virtue in a climate where almost every movie seems to have been generated on a green screen. Put simply, Pyre is a shrewd trap for critics, and it's dismaying to see them fall into it, celebrating the film with adjectives like "evocative" and "haunting"; some have even called it "the best film of the year." I guess this is what the standard of a "best film" becomes when the theaters and the OTT platforms are riddled with all kinds of slops and when social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram are riddled with people celebrating the mainstream mediocrities of the past.
Final Score - [4/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times