"Udaan": Up, up, up!

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan could have been lost in oblivion had not the Cannes breakthrough happened. It’s a very small film, and every frame, though shot commendably, shows how little money might have gone into its making. Money, in this case, did not matter. The Cannes recognition did not come just like that; though not completely flawless, Udaan struck gold at Cannes by a theme which has barely found focus in Indian films. It’s a very simple yet vehement critique of gender construction, an uncompromising unravelling of the deeply flawed conception of masculinity that has often wrought political havoc. The nerve-racking conflict between Rohan (Rajat Bamacheri, quite good as a debutant…not brilliant though) and his father (Ronit Roy in his Bandini avatar) and the latter’s triumph in the end dismantle a long history of a heteronormative patriarchal hegemony. The insensitive, militant and almost bestial father is apparently the villain and Rohan and his half-brother’s monumental struggle is to free themselves from his strangling control. In fact, while the audience’s full sympathy is directed towards the helpless boys, the sensitive makers (the trio of Motwane, Anurag Kashyap and Sanjay Singh) did not allow the audience to miss the helplessness of the father as well. The father rock-hard on the outside is not butter-soft in the inside − now that would have been an unforgivable cliché. If you are sensitive enough, you would certainly feel the father’s tragic predicament in his failure to understand how inextricably he has been interpellated in a system which so strongly demands hard-heartedness, militancy and a sheer sense of utilitarianism from a man that he has altogether lost his emotional self. Two of his wives are dead (the clear implication is that they were victims of his lust or his unearthly anger), he cannot relate to his sons, and he harbours a profound hatred for his brother who, he believes, is not manly enough for he has not been able to father a child. Surprisingly, however, he refrains from meeting Rohan in school fearing that he may spoil his fun. He is aware of his failure, yet cannot comprehend the reason behind it. In an emotionally charged moment, he confesses that he is simply tired of compromising with others, a compromise that had begun with his father. He is just another generation in a long lineage of patriarchal Fathers faced with a son who challenges his fixated notions of being and becoming a Man.

Rohan’s ambition of becoming a writer is totally alien to this father who only believes in the undaunted pursuit of worldly-ends. As Rohan operates the monstrous machine in the factory, his dream seems to be ground to death, every time the machine comes thumping down. His father in a drunken state teases him about his girl-like features and his ‘feminine’ ambition. Rohan’s subalternity in the household is also shared by his six-year-old half-brother Arjun whose childhood seems to have been robbed off. But Rohan learns to speak; in a dramatic altercation with the father, he ends up physically retaliating him. He literally runs away from the house, with the father chasing him. But this time he wins the race, and the exhausted father finally gives up on him. He, however, comes back to take away with him little Arjun. They are both freed from the prison, and they head for the dream city of Mumbai.

The ending is a tad utopian, but, nonetheless necessary. Although all fathers are not usually like Rohan’s, the model of aggressive hypermasculinity is more often than not the only compulsive model available to male children. Any digression from it is met with disdain and insult, often compelling children to forsake their true selves. Rohan’s father is a hyperbolic representation of many fathers who often impose upon their male children their own image. Rohan’s protest and final abandonment of the house is a telling act that steals the sanctity associated with the figure of the father and the mute submission he demands of his wards. Udaan, therefore, is not merely a coming-of-age story as the publicity campaigns call it. It’s much more than that. Indeed, while watching the film, I felt a bit uncanny that last week only I had been cribbing about the relationship between gender constructs and being adept in Mathematics on my blog. Udaan gives an aesthetic expression to my essay on “What’s there in Mathematics?” I hope you understand what I mean.