Goldfish review: Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin's relationship with dementia hits home

Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin in a still from Pushan Kripalani's sophomore 'Goldfish' (2022).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that mothers in possession of daughters, and daughters under the jurisdiction of mothers, are wont to fight. Growing up, often when I would have panic attacks or be depressed, years before I could fully comprehend the meaning of those words, my mother would — out of concern, of course — tell me that I am being hyper or sad, respectively, and that I should not be so. Neither of us knew any better, but each time she said that, I remember turning a deeper shade of red. I’d think, what if, when she would go senile, years later, and I told her to not to be so? Reckless days of youth. Ours was a tad like the mother-daughter duo in Rituparno Ghosh’s Unishe April (1994). Neither of us tried to ease the knots between us.

Today, we talk a lot more. She tells me she’s becoming forgetful and I tell her to eat more badams (almonds), knowing well that these could be the early signs of that we live in denial of, until we can’t. She doesn't do anything non compos mentis, though, like Mohanlal, the cop who kept his file in the freezer, in the Malayalam film Thanmathra (2005). From Away from Her (2006), Still Alice (2014), The Father (2020) to Bengali film Mayurakshi (2017), enough and more films have been made around dementia, and yet, Pushan Kripalani’s Goldfish hits home. It takes me to the roads I hope not to walk on. The dread of having to face the elephant in the room one day.

A still from the film.

The English-language feature, starring Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin, which had its world premiere at the 27th Busan International Film Festival and India gala premiere at the 53rd International Film Festival of India (IFFI) last year, released in theatres on Friday. Kripalani’s sophomore also features Rajit Kapur (Byomkesh Bakshi, Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda, Sardari Begum), Bharti Patel (Bhaji on the Beach), Gordon Warnecke (My Beautiful Laundrette). Shot in less than a month, between two lockdowns, this UK production waited four years to get a producer until the US company Splendid Films came on board.

In the film’s universe, set in London, the biracial Anamika/Ana (Koechlin) is an estranged daughter who prefers to go by her British name Ana Fields, distancing herself from her Indian genes — and Indian mother, Sadhana (Naval). Their relationship is fraught, and yet the bitterness isn’t overstated. It ebbs and flows.

It’s easier said than done what Ana says, on her return home, as she walks past her mum: “Let’s get through with this”. Neighbour Laxmi (Patel) called Ana to return home — much to Sadhana’s chagrin — because her mother almost set the house on fire, one day, while frying pakodas (fritters). Sadhana lives alone, and needs some form of care-taking. The whole neighbourhood rushes to Sadhana any time the need arises. Sadhana knows she has dementia, but declares she’s “well, enough”. Well enough to don her finest silk, thinking she — formerly a Hindustani classical singer — has a recording with the BBC, but not well enough to remember to wear shoes when walking out on the streets one Winter dawn — the said recording happened years ago.

For Ana, or Sadhana’s Miku, a return to filial duties is also a return to childhood memories she had tucked away — not forgotten, never forgiven. For one, it’s the memories of her mother getting her a goldfish for a pet and then flushing it down the toilet to spite her. For the other, it’s the memories of a daughter ganging up with her English father and picking on her. Both are stuck in time. Both have selective memory. Words begin to take Sadhana’s leave. Her writing in her daily-accounts diary, over time, becomes illegible. Her helplessness is palpable. At times, Sadhana’s words are profound, in the context of Laxmi’s diabetes, she says, “She’s a grown woman. She made a choice. If you make a choice, it is yours. Even if you don’t want it.” That sounds like her choice of having a child/Ana and keeping distance.

A still from the film.

It's Anamika's turn now to make a choice, a crucial one, on which hangs the whole film. It is not “Indian”, Ana knows, to put your ailing parent in a care home. But as an only child she can neither leave her mother in that condition nor leave her new job in Basel, Switzerland.

Kripalani’s film gently nudges you towards despair but ends on a note of hope. Like filmmaker Deborah Hoffmann’s remarkably witty Oscar-nominated home-video documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1994), where at one point, after her conversation with her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mum who doesn’t recall who Deborah is, she says, “For the longest time, I still insisted on truth, reality being important to me.” One day, she realises, what does it matter what her mom believed, even if she were to be corrected, she would forget the next moment, and even if she believed something wrongly, how does it matter, just play along, and that “was a liberating moment” for her. By the end, Ana, like Hoffmann, gives in, too, when she asks Sadhana if she knew who she was talking to, and Sadhana says, “no, but this is enough”. Mother and daughter will finally start afresh, with the past behind them, one hopes. Goldfish ends where Complaints… begins: an exploration of the tenacity of love. Love comes with forgiving, forgiving comes with acceptance, of the self and the other.

The film is from Ana’s perspective. Interwoven are her interior monologues when the screen goes blank. Kripalani, the cinematographer, works with two cameras, and he'd much rather show the cuts in human ties than jump-cut a scene. He layers the dementia story with that of difficult relationships, unresolved trauma, and cultural identity. Laxmi gets a backstory, too.

Kripalani, the son of actors Jayant and Gulan Kripalani, with his films, seems to be creating a subgenre: elderly films, especially of elderly women, and fragmented relationships. In his debut The Threshold (2015), Neena Gupta and Rajit Kapur are an elderly couple and Gupta, having had enough, decides to leave after the marriage of their son. There’s a certain stillness to Kripalani's keenly observational films, such nuance can only come from close encounters. For Goldfish, however, Kripalani depended on his writer Arghya Lahiri, whose father suffered from dementia.

A still from the film.

What strikes the most about Kripalani’s new film is also its title, which hearkens back to the Fauvist master Henri Matisse, who, in 1912, obsessively painted the goldfish. It is believed that he was struck by the Moroccans, in Tangier, endlessly gazing into goldfish ponds. To him, the goldfish came to symbolise tranquility, stillness and pause. And those are the very sensations Kripalani’s Goldfish leaves you with.