Team FC
Mithun (Athish S Shetty) observes, feels and knows. He harbours secrets and grudges; he questions and reacts. The film opens with a shot of him standing at the doorway of a moving train compartment, with his back turned to the viewer.
Mithya does a delicate documentation of a child learning to overcome an emotional catastrophe. The narrative has a bildungsroman touch, driven by the boy’s subdued and pressing quest for catharsis in the new environment, into which he must settle regardless of his liking.
He tiptoes around the new home, eavesdropping on the elders’ conversations and watching them closely, trying to sniff out the truth about his losses. The shallow-focused lensing underscoring the loneliness accumulated on the boy like mould.
Lies in its production of a child’s private world, nestled very much within the larger domain controlled by adults yet starkly cut off from it. It is through the boy’s confusion, pain, and muted anger that we see the adults and their capacity for casual violence.
The brief period after an episode of violence, and there is a pervasive suggestion in the narrative that it is slowly building towards another. Bhat circumscribes the depiction of violence, inscribing it within the reticent imagery and observational narrative
Is the film’s ability to present a child without patronising him, allowing empathetic observation as he gleans delicate experiences and ambivalent emotions from the landscape of a life run over by tragedies.