Rings a bell

Sujay Dahake’s debut feature film Shala, based on the Milind Bokil’s novel by the same name, has managed to generate a curiosity that is heartening for an industry which sees only a handful of successes per hundred films it produces every year. The 25-year-old filmmaker capitalises on the universal appeal of the subject — the sweet nostalgia of the growing-up years in school — and makes a film that is bound to touch a chord with everybody.

Shala succeeds in painting colourful vignettes of school life — the classroom banter, the cliques and the rivalries, the tenderness of the first crush, the love-hate dynamics between boys and girls, various shades of student-teacher relationship, the tensions between adolescents and parents, the thrill of sports day and the anxiety before class tests and results, the loss of innocence and coming of age. Much of the evocative beauty of this film lies in the way the Spanish cinematographer Diego Romero shoots his frames; they’re rich and wonderfully textured.

The performances, especially by the leads Ketaki Mategoankar and Anshuman Joshi, bring a delightful freshness to the film. The young romance between them is handled with a lot of compassion and tenderness by the director.

This, however, becomes both the highlight and the limitation of the film. In vividly portraying the rise and fall of their heartbeats, their wild hopes and disappointments, the film ends up overemphasising the love angle. The other aspects of school life, the sub-plots involving other interesting characters, the era of Emergency that the film is set against, are overshadowed. The track tracing the much-gossiped relationship between the young and popular teacher Manjrekar sir (Santosh Juvekar) and the new, convent-educated girl in class, who eventually commits suicide, is abandoned unsatisfactorily.

Though stereotyping teachers is common amongst school children, the characters of headmaster Dileep Prabhavalkar and teacher Amruta Khanvilkar deserved some fleshing out. Khanvilkar, in fact, exists purely to dress up fashionably and to be ogled at by testosterone-happy boys.

Also, when a film is set against a particularly significant moment of the country’s history, the context cannot but permeate the narrative. Shala, on the other hand, places the years of the repressive regime of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi firmly in the background, outside the walls of the school. The single instance where the larger political sentiment of the time seems to affect the lives of the students (in a scene where Joshi protests against the unjust behaviour of a teacher) feels like a tokenism.

But these flaws will surely be swept aside by the wave of emotion the film will elicit in the audience. The viewers’ choice award that Shala received at the recently concluded PIFF only proves this.