Pure in its emotion but slips in its expression- Cinema express

Director Pan Nalin’s Chhello Show or Last Film Show is the story of ‘samay’. And I am not talking about the protagonist. It is about the passage of time. Time, light and nine-year-old Samay’s bid to catch the latter and turn the former. It is about trains, food and cinema, and life strung between them. Pan Nalin, who hails from Gujarat’s Amreli district, relives his childhood through visuals of grass fields, frolicking children and railway tracks. It is endearing to see an artist tell a personal story. It takes a lot of courage, commitment and vulnerability. But in stories like these, sometimes the lines between artistic expression and pure indulgence blur. If not anything else, Chhello Show is guilty of that.

The film is still pure in its emotion. Labeled as a Pan Nalin ‘flight’, it is the director’s love letter to cinema. It tells the story of young Samay (an impressive performance by Bhavin Rabari) who lives in Chalala, a village in Gujarat’s Saurashtra. His father makes tea at the railway station and he sells them to the passengers of halting trains. Samay’s innocence is cuddlesome as he goes around from window to window, balancing the tea and the cash being given by travellers. His childlike wonder though is reserved for light. Sample this scene where Samay goes to a theatre for the first time to watch Jai Mahakali (1951). He is in awe of the pictures on screen, the fluttering pigeons on the wall fans (in an interview with me, Pan Nalin told that as a child, when he first saw the zoom-in on the face of Goddess Kali in the film, he got petrified and hid under the bench). But what mesmerizes him the most is the ray of light coming from the film projector. Samay tries to catch this light between his fingers. Grabbing this light, understanding it and using it to make images becomes a fascination for the young filmmaker for the rest of the film.

Starring: Bhavin Rabari, Bhavesh Shrimali, Richa Meena and Dipen Raval

Directed by: Pan Nalin

Chhello Show aces when it comes to images. Swapnil S Sonawane’s cinematography invigorates the village of Chalala. The way Samay and his coterie of young cinephiles look at the sun with their hands curved into a scope is a shot worth cherishing. There are others too: the children looking at a pride of lions waiting for them to leave; them lying on the grass, looking at the sky through a film reel or Samay looking at a film from a small window in the projector room. All of them are visually striking but it’s debatable if they give the necessary weight to the story. When Samay looks at his beloved projector being craned out of the theatre like a fish out of a pond it serves as a gloomy image but it doesn’t convey Samay’s loss convincingly. Similarly, the scenes where he goes to a factory and sees the film reels being robbed of their colour to make bangles feel tedious.

The relationship between characters is intricately depicted. Richa Meena as Samay’s mother says a lot through her expressions, the way she cooks his lunch and how she looks in the mirror while applying bindi. Bhavesh Shrimali as the projectionist Fazal, whom Samay bribes with food in exchange for free movie watching, has the most entertaining and adorable scenes. In one of them, Samay shares food with him. A Brahmin, and a Muslim laughing, relishing a meal with a film playing in the background. It is an arresting visual which still feels like a distant dream.