Movie Review: Fandry

Director: Nagraj Manjule

Cast: Somnath Awghade, Suraj Pawar, Kishore Kadam and Nagraj Manjule

All things truly wicked start from innocence. Those are Ernest Hemingway’s words and a befitting description of what the Marathi film Fandry is all about. For the uninitiated, Fandry is Marathi slang for pig, and is most often used as a derogatory term. In the film, Fandry becomes a sort of wry misfortune for a young boy named Jabya. The lad just wants to catch the attention of a pretty girl. But his story ends up in a Shakespearean tragedy with innocence lost.

Jabya is a typical young Indian boy. His hormones are as active as his imagination. And a heady cocktail of both makes him hunt for an elusive black sparrow. Jabya believes, killing and burning the sparrow and using its ashes will allow him to hypnotise his lady love. The reason Jabya has to resort to such measures is because he belongs to the lower most caste, people known as untouchables in rural India. There’s no other way his upper caste classmate will consider him as her boyfriend. So Jabya, fighting off his poverty, his anguished father, his cheeky mother and sisters decides to conquer all albeit in love.

Watching Fandry is like going back to the good old Malgudi Days on Doordarshan. There’s a wonderful milieu of orthodox India. A complete contrast to the metropolitan life we witness in the big cities. Yes the cellphones and Facebook have a space in this old world. But so do ancient realities like caste discrimination, religious biases and social taboos. And it is in this goulash of cultural stereotypes that love tries to blossom, albeit with a sense of inevitability.

Director Nagraj Manjule, who also plays a key role in the movie, has done a masterful job at capturing the essence of his story. He’s used the barren and dry locations as a canvas. And used a young boy’s dreams and images as colour to paint vivid human emotions. Fandry is both a coming-of-age film and a certified dark tragedy. It goes from having two young boys singing songs and whiling away time to showing their bitter frustrations and handicaps in life. Jabya, played by Somnath Awghade is a depiction of a new India that wants to change but can’t. It’s partly due to peer pressure and partly due to society’s unwillingness to let go of hierarchy. These are character descriptions that fit a role meant for a thespian. But this young boy shows great spirit in his performance.

Don’t mistake Fandry for a commercial film. Yes it has its moments of crowd pleasing appeal when a family desperately chases pigs around the village. But you know the comedy is going to give way to a much darker end. This is art cinema at its best. There’s a visceral punch right at the end. And long after you leave the movie theatre, it compels you to think of the irony. And the more you think, the more you feel troubled at the grim conclusion of a fantasy tale. This is easily one of the best films of 2014.