Pushtaini movie review: Vinod Rawat’s gentle story of homecoming and hill life is inspiriting yet bumpy

A still from Pushtaini (Ancestral).

When his acting coach Vinod Rawat first told Hrithik Roshan about what would become his debut film as an actor-director-producer, Roshan couldn’t “quite imagine or visualise the film”. The Bollywood star thought of it as “a gem of an idea”, into which Rawat put in all his finances. That’s what most independent filmmakers do, they start out by putting their all into their first film and then some. And there is a plethora of gems of many such ideas scattered all over India, many such gems do become films and travel to festivals but don’t reach the theatres and the OTTs. Not many first-time filmmakers can find stars to stand by them. Like the Shettys (Rishab, Rakshit, Raj B) of Kannada cinema, if the Bollywood fraternity, like Roshan and beyond just Anurag Kashyap, is making space for other stories to co-exist on the big screen, it’s great news. Because, let’s be frank, the mainstream monopoly, is getting boring, for the lack of good stories.

A still from Pushtaini (Ancestral).

ALSO READ: Jio MAMI 2023 | Aarya co-director Vinod Rawat: ‘Pushtaini is my launch film as an actor, to explore themes of grief and loss’

Pushtaini Movie overview

Vinod Rawat’s debut film, Pushtaini (Ancestral), is yet another film from the hills, by a local, that tries to peel off the layer of its touristic veneer painted on by Hindi films, to pry open its unsavoury stories and festering wounds ensconced in beautiful mountains. It is a personal film, inspired from stories Rawat has heard around him, and has been made very gently, with care. The hills readily give themselves to striking cinematography and it's visually pleasing film. But unlike, say, Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains, Maisam Ali’s In Retreat, Dominic Sangma’s Rapture, Haobam Paban Kumar’s Nine Hills One Valley, Pushpendra Singh’s Laila Aur Satt Geet, among others, Pushtaini hits narrative bumps in this road to homecoming.

Pushtaini Plot

The film begins in Mumbai, where Bhuppi (short for Bhupinder Singh Rawat), name changed to Aryan Shaw, a struggling actor, is trying to get a scene right, with Rajkummar Rao in a cameo role. On the side, Bhuppi is being blackmailed by the guy who got him the role and now bullies him to give him Rs 8 lakh in a week’s time. It sets the timorous Bhuppi on a journey back home in Uttarakhand and a journey unto himself. He could never forgive his father for a childhood trauma. Bearing a baggage of grudges, he left his village for the want of a better life. On his return, he realises he could no longer reconcile with his father. He meets a woman, Dimple, a tourist and yoga practitioner, who has come to the hills to meet the man who is her biological father. Both Bhuppi and Dimple are both suffering, because of their respective fathers, and these two are connected to each other by one man, Yashpal, who has wronged them both. Will they find closure?

Pushtaini Trailer

The film is produced by Rawat’s Lotus Dust Pictures and Vinraw Films, and distributed by Platoon One Films, which is known for championing off-the-beaten-track films, such as Sir, Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Ja Riya Hoon, Ghaath (Ambush), An Insignificant Man, Bhagwan Bharose, among others.

Pushtaini performances

Every character — all the actors and the non-actors comprising mostly of Rawat’s own family members — performs decently. Rawat delivers a competent performance as the protagonist Bhuppi and Rita Heer (also the film’s co-writer) as Dimple is an apt casting choice. Hemant Pandey stands out as the cab driver ferrying Dimple from one hill stop to another, he has quite the screen presence and would be a talent to watch out for in the future.

Pushtaini writing and themes

The film begins with a promise but ends in a cliché. There are many issues that Rawat tries to layer in; child sexual abuse, trauma, bullying, mental harassment and blackmailing in the film industry, the many struggles of a struggling actor in the big bad city, absent father, father-child discord, the question of trust, home and belonging, grief and loss, selfishness and selflessness, the quest for one's identity, right to inheritance: whether of married daughters to parents' wealth or of a lovechild to her father's name, masculinity, the vulnerability of single women to predatory men, and cheating on partners. The build up to the problems is either weak or absent. And the resolution to dilemma feels easy and rushed. The character arcs feel flat, there isn’t much growth of the protagonist’s character. His dilemmas and inner turmoil are predictably touch and go. The narrative writing and character sketch are a few drafts short of a near-perfect end product.

Pushtaini direction

Rawat, the co-director of the Sushmita Sen-starrer popular web-series Aarya, does a reasonable job as a first-time actor in his own film. But Rawat the director and co-writer of Pushtaini, a story that he says is close to him, inspired by his own life, needed more heft. Going back to one's roots, to one's ancestral house, to a lost past — more than just showing it — requires mining one's own soul and imagining what one has not seen already. It is this and its unique style that makes Achal Mishra's Gamak Ghar, unlike similar films on the subject, a masterpiece. It feels that Rawat's working in Bollywood has constrained his imagination into a box. The denouement, or film's ending, is too simplistic.

And, yet, it's a decent first attempt and Rawat, with his gentle lens, shows potential. The film deserves to be seen in the theatres because more than just a well-intentioned film, it is important that more people in the mainstream Hindi film industry start telling personal stories, stories that fall outside the radar of Mumbai and south Bombay at that, quotidian stories from far-flung corners of the country, which have vanished from our screens and from the public imagination.

Pushtaini released in theatres on June 21.