Great visuals and premise desiccated by a pedantic pace
Director: Girish Malik
Cast: Purab Kohli, Kirti Kulhari, Tannishta Chatterjee, Mukul Dev and Saidah Jules
There are many a slip between a cup of water and the parched lip. Girish Malik’s Jal is a novel attempt to showcase the frailty of human life. It’s a deeply moving premise. The idea is phenomenal. The execution is nearly abysmal. It is the director’s first film and his meandering script, screenplay and direction let down his otherwise fantastic vision.
This is the story of survival in the Rann of Kutch. There’s a diviner of water called Bakka. He likes to put on a show for the village folk as he searches for water in the desert using just two copper rods and a heart full of faith. He’s called the God of water in his village and quite ironically he also becomes the bridge between orthodox and modernity for the villagers. That happens when a Russian zoologist lands in the barrens of Kutch and makes the water craving humans dig ditches and lakes for migrating Flamingos. Like Bakka says in the movie, no water for humans but all the technology and resource in the world is being used to farm water for birds.
The film does well to dwell on that tragic idea. Like a classic Shakespearean tragedy, the film leaves its protagonist clinching for life because he has no water. It’s quite a caustic fate for a man who prides himself in unearthing water.
Director Malik opts for a surreal fantasy treatment for a subject that is more real than reality itself. It’s not a bad gamble if you know the tricks of the trade. But his narrative spends too much valuable time in unnecessary theatrics. The point of all the dramas is to establish character development. But Jal goes overboard in creating its theatricality. That the initial segments have such amateur CGI doesn’t help the cause either. And that subplot of birds having more resource than humans takes the entire first half and a good part of the second half to unfold. Too much time is spent establishing too little.
And then there’s the curious case of over acting. Mukul Dev is supposed to be the Iago of this story. He plots and plans to bring malice to Bakka’s picture perfect life. And then he spouts Haryanvi accents while speaking Gujarati. Kirti Kulhari, an otherwise clinical performer, and Purab Kohli, playing the lead man Bakka, are too inconsistent as well. Though they have their moments of masterful underplay, at random their histrionics seems excessive and jarring. These could have been award winning performances.
Same goes for the film. The cinematography by Sunita Radia belongs in a David Fincher film. Without dialogue you could stare at the visual compositions of this film for countless hours. The barrenness of the Kutch really comes through as if another character in the film. The music does a fine job to complement that sense of overwhelming nothingness. But the dawdling way in which the tale unfolds just robs this film of all its beauty.