Team FC
The seams between magic and reality refuse to make itself known that the film often feels unstable. If you want to be generous, you could see this as an abdication of categories. If you want to be cruel, you could see this as an inability to commit to one. The film evokes both, often together.
For two hours the film hawed and hemmed, weaving in threads of magic realism before receding into reality, with shaky politics and steadfast beauty. The film swirled in my head, or, perhaps, just the images did — how can you separate one from the other?
A lot of the narrative flourishes of this film are not inclusive of logic. The film is floating above such demands, and this itch gets increasingly notorious as the fable unspools. The film, as you can probably sense, never fits. Scenes exist, building up on nothing, building up to nothing.
Dialogues don’t flow but have this staccato rhythm, which is overcome, somewhat by the easy screen presence of all actors present. These are, after all, landowning people, with relations that go back to colonial deference.
What we are left with, at the end, is only a semblance of a film. The titular fable looms excitedly over the film, because it is neither clever enough to be cracked, nor emotionally rich enough to swirl the film’s surface.
Its ambiguity was not productive or generative, but final. Undeniably, it is also hypnotic, with Sunil Borkar’s camera always on the shoulder, Himanshu Kamble’s haze-streaked colour correction, producing a hissing rapture that makes you want to come back to it