Review | 'Qala' delivers well on performance anxiety

Triptii Dimri in a still from 'Qala'.

Qala in Urdu means evulsion or the act of extracting forcibly. The title of Anvitaa Dutt’s second feature film after her debut Bulbbul (2020; Netflix), a haunting, crisp period film about demons and women boxed in by male entitlement, plays on the theme of evulsion in a ruinous mother-daughter relationship. In this film, her lens is more piercing and more deep, into the emotional gangrene of her eponymous protagonist (Triptii Dimri). The film is also about the word’s phonetic equivalent kala or artistic talent, and how a gifted singer obsessed with proving herself to her mother — and in extension, to herself — surrenders herself to a vision of perfection and success at the cost of her own emotional and psychological destruction. It is the story of a possessive, demanding mother who fails to see her daughter, and of an absent father, whom Qala’s nervous gaze is constantly searching for — impossibly, desperately.

Swastika Mukherjee and Dimri in a still from the film.

Qala is born in and grows up in a cavernous villa in the middle of a snowy expanse of undulating land in Debisthan, Himachal Pradesh, before Independence, when Calcutta was the capital of musical talent and success — when playback music was new but its commercial machinations were already ignited, when male music directors already began to capitalise on their power to exploit women’s talent, when Bapu’s visit to even snowy Himachal towns would mean a music performance would go attended. Urmila Manjushree (Swastika Mukherjee), Qala’s mother — flaunting an ornate bohemian sense of style and adornment — is a Thumri singer with a gifted voice and pitch, and a personal motherly wound that she nurses all her life.

Urmila is a ruthless disciplinarian, subjecting Qala to punishments and hard scrutiny since childhood. Urmila is a character whose taciturn allure and melancholic eyes hide enough self-loathing to emphasise over and over again that inheriting her legacy will be her daughter’s biggest undoing; unless Qala can be a “pandit” like her deceased father, her talent would be meaningless. Urmila channels her rage and disappointment into coaching the daughter with heartless rigour and taunts, all the while infantilising her. Qala internalises the pressure early on and subjects herself to relentless self-analysis.

When Urmila gets Jagan (Babil Khan), an untrained but gifted singer, an orphan of Qala’s age, into their home to prop him up in the world of film music under her tutelage, Qala’s insecurities magnify. Her mother had found her son, and she would be more inconsequential to her mother than she ever was. When a prospective groom asks her, “So you like music?” Qala’s quivering voice says, “No, I hate it.” She agrees to meet the prospective groom because her mother’s reason is unequivocal: “The son stays with the mother. The daughter stays with her husband.” This is the beginning of her will to rise to fame — she does, and becomes the “didi” of the film’s playback music cognoscenti in Calcutta. After Jagan, who Qala believes is her “replacement”, commits suicide, she leaves Debisthan and starts working with a leading music director (Amit Sial) who makes her a star at the cost of brazen exploitation — this marks the beginning of Qala’s slide into clinical neurosis.

The way Dutt has treated the pithy narrative, there is no difference between inside and outside. Everywhere is claustrophobic. Alternating between close-up camera movements and menacingly beautiful snowy landscapes and vintage Kolkata architecture vistas, Siddharth Diwan’s cinematography is grandiloquent, sometimes excessive — like the fireworks going off in Qala’s head. Props are precisely functional to represent emotion as well as judgement. Puppetry for whirling minds, a crusty black stone statue of a winged monster with its tongue for sexual exploitation. Whiteness, through snow, real as well as imagined, is a refrain. So are black feathers in surrealistic raptures, enveloping Qala in a sequence reminiscent of a Darren Aronofsky world. Incidentally, the film has similarities with Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), in some ways the relationship between the mother and the artist daughter and in other ways the way music and visuals convey nervous energy and neurosis. The background score by Sagar Desai also alternates between melodic soul and gravelly keyboard and string orchestration — balancing the two ways we always see Qala, living her life out as a neglected child and someone in the throes of escalating insanity. The music and the cinematography brilliantly complement the catacombs in her character.

The film’s songs, mostly performed as part of the story, and some, like a Himachali folk song Amma puchhdi sung with sublime sonority by Sireesha Bhagavatula, as ode to the protagonist, are some of the most accomplished and heartful creations in Hindi film music of recent times. The lyricists’ credit roll — Sant Kabir, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, Swanand Kirkire, Amitabh Bhattacharya, Kausar Munir, Varun Grover, Dutt herself and “the mothers of Himachal” — are so full of promise; Trivedi uplifts their appeal in the narrative scheme perfectly. Shahid Mallya, the male playback voice, and Bhagavatula are singers with remarkable promise.

Dimri is just three films old. She played the lead also in Dutt’s Bulbbul, in which her character required her to channel rage and repression with a cocky unpredictability. Here, her arc is more internal. Dimrii is over-invested with the external manifestations of her character’s inner turmoil. She suppresses tears, then trembles, cries, crumples, collapses. Her head bobs a lot and her neck chords stand out. At times, her performance feels blatantly over-the-top but is overall a superbly judged and timed act. It is Babil Khan’s debut in the small but important role of Jagan. He has a doleful, laconic but assured character to get into, and with few dialogues, he has to depend mostly on eyes and get-up to play it. Khan delivers a few moments harnessing the biggest emotional drifts of Jagan competently. Mukherjee, in the mother’s role, is unforgettable. Her internalisation of Urmila’s grief and bitterness can be seen in every scene she appears in, although her external actions and words are that of a woman relentlessly in control.

Babil Khan makes his debut with 'Qala'.

The best secondary role in the film is by Varun Grover, playing an Urdu music composer Majrooh — obviously an ode to Majrooh Sultanpuri. In red nail polish, a poetic, intuitive stamp in each scene he is in, he is the film’s moral, even prophetic, voice. In the bleak emotional landscape that Qala inhabits, Majrooh is the only person who gives her susurrations of lightness, joy or hope. Grover plays the role with relish.

Qala is one of Netflix India’s best releases ever. Produced by Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Films, it has Sharma in a charming cameo of a heroine from the black-and-white era.

There is enough darkness in the film, but it is also richly, sensually enjoyable. There is enough fascination in seeing Qala, and Dimri, surrender to the overwhelming madness in and around her. Dutt is after the inner life, and pursues it deeply and relentlessly. It has a director’s signature — all the elements of the film align with a singular vision. Dutt’s showing us what Qala sees and experiences — and also showing us eloquently what she sees without the crux of literal dialogues. The eruption of chaos into a boxed, ordered universe can have a thrilling graph.