Film Reviews "Not a Hero" and "Members of the Problematic Family"
Resilient Childhood and Grief in the Family

By Prathap Nair

In her Generation Kplus entry at this year’s Berlinale titled Not a Hero, Rima Das trains her lens on childhood resilience. The Assamese film follows a schoolboy Mivan, who lives with his parents in urban Assam. Mivan’s world falls apart when he is forcefully separated from his family. Despite his mother’s protests, driven by financial constraints, his father decides to send him to his ancestral village to live with his aunt.

Naturally, Mivan despises everything about life in a village – the unreliable running water situation, the lack of hot water at the turn of a tap, unclean squat toilets, and the free meals at his new school. He doesn’t like his new guardian, his aunt, either. That feeling, it seems, is mutual because his aunt doesn’t take to him immediately.

Detours into forests and closeness to nature

Mivan is a fish out of water in the new environment and yet he is at an advantage. His new schoolmates lack access to a smartphone while he uses it for everything from researching on ChatGPT to paying for chips using UPI at the village store.

Nevertheless, the apparently higher social status Mivan seems to enjoy in the village doesn’t alienate him from his schoolmates. What they lack in worldly knowledge availed to them in their fingertips, with the help of mobile internet, they make do with their closeness to nature. The film follows their barefoot explorations into the neighbouring forests, waterbodies and grasslands.  It also tenderly records their relationship to the domesticated animals – cattle, pigs and even a horse called Mai.
 

Children of the Forests

Not a Hero traces the inner lives of children with Mivan, a displaced child, at its centre. What displacement does to a child is explored in the minutest details. What emerges is a portrait of a resilient childhood observantly told and gorgeously captured.

“It is important for me to pay attention to children while working with them,” said Rima Das said at the premiere. “I observe how they respond to different situations and I give them space and time. I do my best to bring their true selves on screen.”

Das said she wanted to tell the children who watch Not a Hero that it’s ok to be bold, confused, unsure and angry because every feeling is temporary. “It feels like the children who are part of this project somehow directed me,” she added.

According to Das, sometimes heroism is just about being honest and stepping back. Sometimes being a hero just means surviving a day and that perhaps is the core message of this compassionate film.

While Das’ film presents childhood as bumpy ride, R Gowtham’s film deals with the other side of the spectrum of life, namely death and the emotional toll it has on a family.
 

Members of the Problematic Family

The Forum entry from debut director R Gowtham is a jaunty and shockingly realistic take on grief and toxicity in families. The Tamil film coasts along like an electric bike on a bumpy road. The ride maybe jumpy but lessons are plenty in the film because it deals with death and grief and unfolds as a testament to love and the loss of it.

Told with the touch of a documentarian’s incisive lens, Gowtham gently draws out flaws, emotional upheavals, alcoholism, and domestic abuse in each character. The result feels more like a documentary film, less like a fictional one although everything is scripted and well-choreographed. Morbid Fascination of Funerals

The film starts with a funeral arrangement of the family’s youngest brother, Prabha. What we get to see of Prabha is that he once had dreams of being an athlete but alcoholism did him in. At his funeral, there is an uneasy quiet.

Gowtham confesses to have, “a morbid fascination for funerals,” because death is also partially a celebration in Tamil culture. Funeral processions are festive with truckloads of flowers strewn around and crackers burst. Grieving is characterised by daylong feasts.

Unconventional Narrative

Curiously Gowtham’s characters do not have arcs of their own. Speaking on the sidelines of the film’s premiere, he said the choice of not explaining the back stories of his characters was deliberate. “On the first day of the shoot, I remember telling people that the characters they are playing have to be sketchy, incomplete and doubtful,” he added.

The result is a film that switches back and forth in time with a diversity of characters grieving for a problematic man, each grappling with heartbreak in their own way. Some are indifferent while some are explosively emotional. Some are simply nonchalant. In the process it raises an important question – how to grieve for someone whose existence seems to only cause misery to fellow members of the family.

Is grief a form of respect or a permanent absence of a loved one? There are no straight answers but plenty to ponder from the film.

Rima Das’ Not a Hero and R Gowtham’s Members of the Problematic Family debuted at the 76th Berlinale.