Qala movie review: Tripti Dimri’s Qala is talentless in love, loyal in betrayal

4/5

STORY: Anvita Dutt Guptan’s Qala—both the film and her leading lady—has hues of grey sprinkled all over them, and provides an aerial view into the lives of those who want to learn how to live, before living. Qala’s quest for knowledge on human consciousness and its subsequent impact on one’s psyche may flounder every once in a while, but it never truly derails.

REVIEW: At an event in New Delhi, Vishal Bharadwaj once said, as I vividly remember, “... All an artist ever wants is appreciation. To be applauded for his/her body of work. To be seen.” Anvita Dutt Guptan’s Qala, troubled and troubling in equal measures, is an offshoot of what Bharadwaj had observed, albeit darker.

Tied at the umbilical cord to a twin brother who couldn’t make it for she, the stronger between the two, ‘feed off of his energy’, Qala (Tripti Dimri) had the gold and riches to kill time with but was doomed for a life of isolation regardless: somewhere deep in the mountains of Solan, this young girl being punished for seeking love, for wanting to be seen. While she navigates her quick-to-temper mother’s (Swastika Mukherjee) penchant for perfection, Qala, now somewhat detached from reality, reaches within the deep recesses of her mind for something she was cursed against all along: unconditional love, and external approval.

Deeply insecure and always eager to please, all Qala ever wanted was her mother’s affection and carry her legacy forward in Thumri: a popular subgenre of Indian classical music. Her mother, a hypocrite, encourages Qala to make a name for herself in an otherwise male-dominated world, only to shun her for a musically gifted young man, Jagan. “His voice touches souls,” Mrs. Mukherjee says; spellbound. Her protégé has a hold over her she cannot break: from sleeping with powerful men from the film industry to hosting high-end tea parties secretly hoping they would crack a deal with him, Jagan’s non-mother mother stops at nothing. Qala, however, lingers on ... in the shadows, almost as if she were a stranger to her own life; a human among ghosts. As destiny would have it, between the two, one succeeds while the other is pushed into oblivion. But what defines success, and who decides it anyway?

Anvita Dutt Guptan’s Qala feels like a psychoanalysis on musicians, a bare-open of the often morally twisted and visibly insecure world of creative arts. Encapsulating what the lead characters feel in the movie, a scene comes to mind: when Qala warns a top music composer against signing Jagan as he would replace the man and labels him a ‘serial replacer’. To which, the composer says, “Jagan will replace me just as I had replaced someone... Only music stays.” In Guptan’s dark palette, there are no heroes, and there are no villains. In true Guptan style, her Qala, however flawed, is a feminist and spares no man when her choices are questioned. The director’s vision of a woman is raw and real, for her protagonist, when faced with a morally responsible and an ethically corrupt decision, she chooses the former. Men, in Qala, are heavily entitled and disturbingly condescending, except for a character with a brief role that never truly reaches a respectable place within the story. Perhaps, it was deliberate: to show how the ones who speak up are often silenced. Perhaps, it was an honest mistake.

Rendering support to Guptan’s vision of a 1960s gloomy Himachal Pradesh, amongst the elite at least, is cinematographer Siddharth Diwan. Through Diwan, we see pictures in motion and every frame feels like an art of work within an art of work we eventually grow to admire. The complexity of each of these characters, or the lack of it, is heightened by Meenal Agarwal’s poetic set design. For a hot second, I was transported back to O.Henry’s world of melancholy.

Tripti Dimri must have felt the pre-release jitters a tad more once the Natalie Portman-led Oscar-winning Black Swan comparisons started to float around. Tripti, by all means, is no Natalie Portman and I say this with utmost respect to both the actors. At its core, Qala is about two passionate artists, with one constantly snipping at the other, but we get where the Black Swan comparisons are being drawn from. Dimri, even in her brief career thus far, has shown immense range and growth in her performances. Of course, Qala is no expectation. Dimri’s idea of an unrealistic mind reflects in her expressions: that awkward pouting of lips while rehearsing for an award-acceptance speech that is yet to materialize, the flaring of nostrils while burning with envy over being dropped; forgotten, and the general coldness in her eyes lamenting over what could have been. Tripti Dimri’s finesse as an actor is captured aptly in a collection of scenes: once when her own guilty conscience manifests in the form of a fly and she catches it with the angst of a dejected warrior, and another time, when she asks her mother what would it take to be loved by her, only to apologize a few seconds later for having asked the question in the first place. To compare Dimri to Portman would be criminal; they are on their own separate lanes.

Babil, on the other hand, aces the restrained rage of a beat musician. He is never loud, but always seen. He is never pushy, but always heard. Babil, as Jagan, is what a man with no reasons to carry on would like, I reckon. And this film is about Qala’s mind and not his body, and Babil Khan knows it, too.

Swastika Mukherjee, as always, takes to trauma and trouble quite organically. Her lover-like worshipping of Jagan is in stark contrast to her very-evident disappointment over her only child. In both the sequences, Swastika is her absolute best.

It also helps the script by leaps and bounds that Amit Trivedi, with Varun Grover and Shahid Mallya, has created a catalogue of songs that imbibe pain in what is already painful. Mallya’s Shauq is an absolute winner of a soundtrack, and so is Phero Na Najariya.

Qala makes the poorly timed choice of throwing in pay disparity in a conversation heavily invested in mental health and artists’ insecurity, but you forgive the fiasco. Flawed or not, it is a catharsis of a movie: leaves some enraged at their circumstances, while others at dear life itself.

VERDICT: Qala is a complex movie, with several layers added to all the characters in question, but if twisted yet meaningful movies stimulate your mind, then Qala is an absolute must-watch.