Captured with the assuredness of a true auteur’s vision and defying all known conventions of commercial Indian filmmaking, Dhobi Ghat will be a revelation to those that think sub-Continental cinema is just all song-and-dance. Kiran Rhao’s directorial debut deserves major film festival exposure and acclaim and an audience far beyond the pocketed enclaves usually reserved for Bollywood-friendly filmgoers around the world.
Taking social class distinction as its thematic core, melding in the pulsating landscape and shifting atmospherics of Mumbai then expanding its emotional pull via the intersecting lives of three key characters, Rhao’s self-penned script is world-class. That she can then draw superbly naturalistic performances from her cast and command sublime work from her cinematographer Tushar Kanti Ray and editor Nishant Radhakrishnan posits Rhao as one of the most exciting directing talents working in international cinema today.
We first meet introspective artist Arun (co-producer/star Aamir Khan, channelling the smouldering charisma of a Jude Law/young Tony Curtis) as he takes the keys for a new apartment overlooking the bustling streets of old Mumbai. At a gallery opening of his new work, he charms and beds Shai (Monica Dogra, vivacious and warm), a New York-based upper-class financier’s daughter on a sabbatical in her birth-land before taking an executive role in her father’s business. Arun shuns her the morning after their tryst, though both are left with unshakeable feelings – he, racked with guilt over his ungentlemanly taking of her virtue; she, with romantic longings.
Arun discovers tapes in his new apartment that reveal the life of a beautiful woman named Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra); she was recording her Mumbai visit for her brother back home, and Arun becomes infatuated with her image and the story that she tells. The bridge between Shai and Arun’s world comes in the form of the handsome Munna (Prateik Babbar), a strapping young man from the slums who dreams of being an actor but must help care for his family by taking various menial jobs – as a laundry-boy, primarily, but also as a late night rat killer stalking Mumbai’s back alleys.
Some plotting errs on the side of cliché and is overly convenient, but Rhao’s skill at creating nuanced, subtle moments of intimacy effectively negates passages that may have played melodramatically in other, less precise hands. The director abandons plot altogether in some beautiful sequences, none more so than when Shai captures the faces and experiences of Mumbai’s working class with her black-and-white camera; the images are breathtaking. Also outstanding is the guitar-laden score overseen by Subir Kumar Das, which is utilised to tear welling effect when Arun visits the shoreline that Yasmin had captured so poignantly in her filming.
Ghobi Dhat may someday come to represent a moment of seismic change in the direction of Indian films. Traditionalists may harrumph; one elderly audience member at the screening SBS attended bemoaned the absence of an intermission, despite the film running a spritely 99 minutes. But Rhao’s work should appease all comers. It is a both an embracing of a truly independent cinematic spirit, barely glimpsed in the nation’s output to-date, as well as a loving homage to the complex universality of a city that many Indians believe to be the centre of the earth.(The wooden pole in the centre of the Banganga Tank in Mumbai signifies the centre of the earth. Legend has it Lord Ram created the tank by piercing the earth with his arrow.)
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