Pandemic, pyaar, paisa: The crumbling of love & youth in ‘Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar’

Tanaya Khan Jha and Abhinav Jha in a still from Parth Saurabh's Darbhanga-based Hindi feature debut 'Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar'.

The camera opens to project a building, like those Walt Disney films, only the palace here is a palace of illusions. It is a dilapidated boys’ hostel of a party office — AISF (All India Students’ Federation) and CPI (Communist Party of India) written and symbols drawn, in red, across the grey walls — and what lies ahead is most certainly not a fairy tale. The skies are bluish grey, overcast, it sets the tone of the film, and the mood of its subjects, it would be perennially raining. There is a palpable exhaustion and lethargy hanging in the air. The protagonists of writer-director-editor Parth Saurabh’s first feature Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar (On Either Side of the Pond), Priyanka and Sumit, are a couple from Darbhanga who had eloped to Delhi two years before the movie begins, but the 2020 coronavirus pandemic compelled them to return to their hometown. The film begins in medias res and what unspools over 1 hour, 45 minutes is the repercussions of a decision made and the breakdown of institutions and emotions in the clash of reality and dreams.

Achal Mishra, known for his Darbhanga-based Maithili films, Gamak Ghar (2019) and Dhuin (2022), also on Mubi, has designed, held the lens partly and through his company Achalchitra, produced Saurabh’s Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, which released on MUBI this week. In 2021, when Saurabh’s new work-in-progress film was selected for Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival, he wrote to Anurag Kashyap, who roped in others (Vikramaditya Motwane, Devashish Makhija, Sriram Raghavan, etc.) to fund its completion. It won a Special Mention. Kashyap presents the film.

A still from 'Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar'

Among the similarities in Mishra and Saurabh’s films, there’s the Bihari city and its people, but also the visual texture, the sense of being stuck spatiotemporally in your own circumstances, and the protagonist Abhinav Jha, who the world would have seen in blink-and-miss scenes of Rupesh, the son of the security guard Veer Singh (Rajesh Tailang) in the Netflix series on the 1997 Uphaar Cinema tragedy, Trial by Fire. Unlike his roles in Mishra’s and Saurabh’s films, in Trial by Fire Jha gets to be brash and release his anger, even hurl cusswords, at the Krishnamoorthys, who he thinks brought misery on to his family. And through these minor characters and in micro scenes, the show evinced that the fight for justice is the prerogative of the privileged.

Dhuin and Pokhar… work as a double bill. Dhuin carries the patina of a gentle despair where Pankaj is stuck between dream and duty, torn between giving his savings to his father and wanting to leave his city to become an actor, like Shah Rukh Khan. Pankaj still does street theatre to save pennies, but Sumit (both played by Jha), even while jobs are hard to come by in the post-pandemic world, isn’t trying too hard. He’d build castles in the air, seek favours from, and — to seek a release — shoot the breeze with, equally jobless friends, much to the chagrin of Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha). Both the films were going to be part of an anthology which was not to be. That COVID’s financial impact has been on all institutions, not just the socio-political ones, Saurabh shows through the crumbling of another: love and relationships.

Saurabh, by his own admission, was tired of seeing runaway couples getting killed in the end of films and chooses to show a tragic ending differently. He excels in presenting the tragedy of a young love which isn’t predestined to suffer — owing to social trappings of family rivalries, class or caste, as was the case with Love Story (1981), Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), or Sairat (2016) — but suffers from free will, from the choice they made. Of course, Priyanka’s father’s disapproval of Sumit must have compelled Priyanka to elope in the first place, it doesn't take a lot to guess the reason would have been Sumit’s lack of a stable income/job.

The “better future” that Priyanka seeks is actually a yearning for her past, evinced as the film progresses. Sounds postmodern? Blame Milan Kundera, for he writes, “the future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” This vicious cyclicality is a gift of capitalism, which thrives off insecurity. With economic growth comes social standing/acceptance and with social stability comes economic insecurity. Both the presence and absence of capital/money impinges on intimate relationships.

The adult, good-for-nothing Sumit needs taking care of. Priyanka is willing to be the mother-figure, to salvage him, mould him the way she had willed, but every day she realises that is not to be. The provider father-figure she looks for in Sumit is absent. It is — god bless Kundera, for devising the vocabulary — “the unbearable lightness of being” (of Sumit’s), as well as her own, that’s eating her up. “The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

A still from 'Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar'

Back then, Priyanka let her id or instincts held sway, attending only to the pleasure principle, and now, her superego/morality is at odds with her ego/reality. In the film, we see a directionless horse roaming about, much like Sumit. The Freudian id is a horse while the ego is the rider. The ego is “like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” and, therefore, Priyanka is the ego to Sumit’s id. But Priyanka needs anchoring, too.

The pond, of the film’s title, and a presence in the film, is where people hope to calm their mind, meet people who they think can resolve their issues, Sumit meets his friend Nihal (Dheeraj Kumar) and Priyanka meets a go-between hoping he could make her father speak to her (his voice she can hear only in a dream sequence), the pond signals conventional knowledge and old wisdom, but also individualism and self-reliance. On their return to Darbhanga, Priyanka chokes in the punishing, isolating familiarity of her hometown, while Sumit loses himself among his friends, an avenue unavailable to the woman, the cross is hers to bear alone it seems. While she has stuck on with the unsalvageable and incorrigible Sumit, she does yearn to return to a life of comfort that her father provided. She’s ambitious but is she really independent if she needs either of these men to validate her existence? Sumit may not land a job but he’d rather do the job-hunt than let Priyanka look for a job, she should take care of the household, but even there Sumit dawdles for long before getting her a stove and groceries. The two side of the pond is, then a tussle of the mind, between the conscious and the unconscious. On either edges, stand two genders, weighed down by their roles and expectations.

Abhinav, a theatre actor, brings a natural ease to his Everyman roles, making them relatable. Jha is exasperating and tender at once. And Tanaya’s serving of resentment with a side of compassion grows on us. “For there is nothing heavier than compassion,” Kundera concurs in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), “Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Sumit’s lack of drive in getting a job could have been a Marxist’s rebuke of capitalism, but it isn’t. While Saurabh embeds Marxist symbolism: red sari and shorts, Communist party’s hammer-and-sickle logo; a jobless Sumit sells his friend Nihal’s borrowed bike, with some of that cash he buys alcohol (albeit illegal) to drink with his friends and insists one’s money is all’s money, blindly parts with some money to a third person for a plot of land, which he hasn’t seen, to start a coaching centre. Sumit is wayward, he’s neither Satyajit Ray’s Siddhartha (Pratidwandi, 1970) railing against capitalism nor Gulzar’s Mere Apne (1971) Robin Hood-esque boys. These men just sit, drink, and yap away, simply be unproductive, even when there are speeches being made at the hostel to fight for worker’s/labour’s rights. The pandemic also saw so many young people in their hometowns, together, being wasteful, aimless and hopeless — intoxicating on cough syrups, alcohol and drugs — not a common sight earlier as most would out-migrate for study or work. Saurabh would drink with his band of boys, too.

A still from 'Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar'

Inside the hostel, in the film, the audience gets a fly-on-the-wall view of Priyanka’s listlessness and growing vexation. Being the lone woman on the premise full of men, who’d hand-pump water wearing towels while she needs to brush her teeth can be awkward. She has to jostle for space inside the room as well, which was likely a storeroom previously, there are cracks on the wall, water drips from the ceiling, unused cartons are stacked in a corner.

Sumit is the making of a classic toxic male too, a man-child if you will, when things go south, and he has no arguments left, his sole recourse is to shed tears, the camera stays a mid-distance of 4:3 frame ratio, best suited for character mapping, so, we aren’t close enough to see whether those are crocodile tears. He needs Priyanka as much as she needs a provider-man. Is love then the reason why he needs her? She takes care of him, and having her around also makes him the alpha male among his group of single male friends.

At a teleological point in the film, Priyanka meets her old friend, also named Priyanka. Either is an inverted image of what an alternative life could have been. Each judging the other for the choice they have made, and, in effect, self-critiquing their own choices. If the lead-Priyanka seems to have more freedom/choice but pathetic living conditions, the friend-Priyanka has material possessions along with possessive male figures, from her brother to her husband, who’d lock her up if she so happens to step out/meet friends.

The pond, shot in languorous, long, single takes, set to a music, mostly muted otherwise, has both life (underwater flora) and refuse (cigarette stubs, piled-up dumped crashed cars). Like the American naturalist-poet-activist Henry David Thoreau who measured the depth of the Walden Pond, Saurabh, too, is questioning whether his pond, the figurative Priyanka — on whose either side stand two men, a hardened father, an idler lover — is bottomless, inexhaustible? Thoreau’s Transcendentalism states that humans need to believe in infinity, but can love ever be infinite? As, Kundera puts it, “loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.” So, “what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?” Life is but a sketch — “an outline with no picture”.