Rani is a dancer. When she performs, her movements come to us, outsiders, as one of those sensuous dances in Indian rituals. But in Ritesh Sharma’s The Brittle Thread, the English subtitles subvert our illusions and cultural memories of old India: Rani is dancing to a melody with lyrics that are more vulgar than erotic. Onstage a young man dances with Rani, fulfilling for the audience their fantasies. It does not matter that in the audience are children ogling at the gyrations onstage. At one point, the dancer needs to be wet and another man pours a water using a sprinkler. It is a choreography of pathos and bathos—the cheap act has cheap props.
Rani dances on, however. She is fetched by Baba, admirer and friend, who wants her to stop dancing. The man must be in love to have the illusion that he could keep the dancer to himself. In the small room she calls home, Rani has a daughter who is deaf and mute and loved. She is everything to her even as she has to leave her every now and then for a paid assignation with a local leader, a powerful man.
There is another character in this tale: Shahdab, traditional weaver of saree. He is a Muslim but the lovely pieces he turns out from a handloom are worn only by Hindu women. Shahdab is painfully shy; he lives alone in a tight space, accompanied by a mannequin that he dresses up in the saree he creates.
While Rani has friends—and admirers—and a daughter who is her joy, Shahdab walks alone, works alone with the loom. He brings his finished sarees to the middlemen who are good in assuring him of the fees but which are never given on time. Shahdab meets an Israeli tourist who talks to him in English and tries hard to use his language. It is an unusual friendship that, from the eyes of the reclusive weaver, seems to promise more than just walks in the evening. But Shahdab is wrong: friendship is flighty in this ancient city of Varanasi. Romance is buried in the dense histories of this civilization.
Survival seems the key to living in the city of Shahdab and Rani. Varanasi, an ancient place, comes alive as the other character, sources of imaginations from those inhabiting its alleys and interiors.
With most of the events happening on days when the place is celebrating festivals from different ethnicities, Varanasi, the city that is imagined for us by the filmmaker, is a glorious feast of multiculturalism. A group of Hebrew guests light Hanukkah candles on the roof deck while Hindu families throw flowers into the sacred river.
“We are all here; we all live together here.” Must this be the real power of multiculturalism—that people need not face each other but still manage their days peacefully? The sordid work of Rani continues and Shahdab gets to marry a wonderful woman whose families welcome him as a son. But one day, a Hindu leader is killed and all manners of quietude, happiness and respect fly out of the city streets. Every statement and every opinion is ethnicized. Each gesture, each word is colored by cultures and religions. The cozy neighborhoods are transformed into volatile venues of animosities.
Where the weaving of a saree by a Muslim is never crucial to identity, the notion that across the nation ethnic kinship runs like a theme is questioned. We are hapless tourists when we gaze across a land that is not ours—we prompt ourselves, a convict of our own conviction, how differences in faith and fate can be woven into the fabric of a society.
When one summons the logic in the power of Ritesh Sharma’s The Brittle Thread, it is found in the threat of a thread that can anytime unravel or entangle woefully all those who are caught in the loom of life. I make it sound almost didactic but that is not so: the film has an uncanny, majestic silent surface and beneath it the thought that nations can be indeed imagined, and the coexistence of cultures a duplicitous political myth that can be waived only up to a certain point. The truth is communities are spatial bubbles easily shattered by bigotry, essentialist constructs of race, and poverty teeming side by side with surplus.
I had the privilege of communicating personally with the director, Ritesh Sharma, where I asked him about his actors. Most of them are non-actors. Cinematic magic though is in the performances of the leads who imbue their characters with naturalism that they might be as well be non-actors who act greatly. As Rani, Megha Mathur is heartbreak and courage personified. She is, I would find out, an Indian actress who has worked with other eminent Indian filmmakers. This is her first feature film.
As Shahdab, Muzaffar Khan will long be remembered for those long, quiet gazes and the silence that is the language of his weaver. The same stillness is one we affect when the world turns out not the ideal world we dream it to be. Khan has a long theater background and this, too is his first feature-length film.
Ritesh Sharma, who also wrote the screenplay of The Brittle Thread (the original title, Jhini Hindi Chadariya, is taken from the mystic poet Kabir), is known for his advocacy in theater education and social activism. His first documentary film is The Holy Wives, which deals with caste-based sexual exploitation and human trafficking in India. Sharma has also done two short films on tribal rights and domestic violence. The Brittle Thread stars Sivan Spector, Utkarsh Srivastava, Roopa Chaurasiya, Nishant Kumar, Shweta Nagar and Syed Iqbal Ahmed. It is produced by Hardhyaan Films and co-produced by Veda Film Factory.
The film opened the recently concluded 34th Tokyo International Film Festival with the Japanese premiere of Cry Macho, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.