Note: This is not a review of the film. It is a reflective piece I am writing to understand and appreciate Photograph better. Spoilers ahead. Read it after watching the movie.
Every photograph has a story behind it. When William Wyler’s Roman Holiday ends, a sense of sadness looms over us. We wish that Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and the Crown Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) can live a happily ever after. But that can never happen as their worlds would never meet in reality. We accept the end of Roman Holiday with a grumpy bitterness. But, when Irving hands over Ann’s photos of her wild detour from her stifling and scheduled life, we are only happy for that brief moment for Ann. When all else is gone and when time gently robs away her memories, she can still hold on to the photos and travel back in time to connect with herself.
Is that why we love photos and love clicking pictures? That it helps us to capture and preserve anything we love (including ourselves) at a particular point in time which allows us a passport to travel backwards in time and connect with ourselves? Because we cannot trust our memory to treasure our moments? Or our resigned acceptance of our ineptness to capture a specific moment in all its beauty and vulnerability through words?
In Ritesh Batra’s Photograph, Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a street photographer who makes a living by clicking pictures of visitors at the Gateway of India. He assures them that the photos captured by him will make them remember the sun on their face even after the erosion of their memories. He lives with male migrant labourers in a cramped tenement. The space, save for the camaraderie they share, is reminiscent of a jail.
On the other hand is Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a student preparing for her CA (Inter). She is into her studies not because she genuinely is interested in it. But more because of her unfailing obedience to life’s dictations. When she wants to pick a dress, it is her sister and mother who convince her on the colour without bothering to listen to her choice. The camera lingers on Miloni looking at the mirror and perhaps wondering what if the colour she is trying out is actually her choice. Like Ann in Roman Holiday, she is treated like a Princess but it is stifling for her. There is a yearning in her eyes that craves for freedom. She is the portrait of an adolescent young woman to whom the memories of her childhood (including the insignificant bits) are still fresh and the seeds of desire to slip into a decision making adult have begun to germinate.
When Rafi takes a photo of Miloni, she takes the copy and leaves without paying him. Rafi moves on, forgetting about the incident. When he learns of his grandmother stopping her medicines to pressurize him to get married, it spreads to every person he interacts with on a daily basis. He wants to convince her that he’s with someone. He writes a letter to his grandmother announcing his relationship with this imaginary girlfriend of his, who he fixates it to be the fair girl who left him without paying for the photo. As for her name, he chooses Noorie, from the title song that wafts from a theater nearby. His grandmother insists on meeting his girlfriend. The situation warrants a rom-com. But, Ritesh Batra treats the story with tenderness and crafts a subtle drama.
We learn through Miloni’s sister that she wanted to be an actress as a school girl and her mother intervenes to tell as to how she had to insist the school to stop giving her anymore trophies as she had to focus on her studies. Miloni is not quite happy with this transformation of her. Notice how the camera focuses on the space. The family is seated at the dinner table and the camera is focused towards Miloni. Behind Miloni is the balcony but that is grilled. As if to emphasize that Miloni, despite her privilege, is not quite free and she is imprisoned.
Later, Miloni is taking notes in her class where her teacher is dictating about the role of a Chartered Accountant in a Limited Liability Partnership. The scene cuts where the line dictated is ‘chartered accountant is authorised to sign and act…’. Rafi is traveling by bus and by chance, looks up with wonder and decides to get down. Only when he gets down to have a clear look does the camera zoom in on a billboard for a training institute for CA aspirants with Miloni ‘crowned’ as a topper (incidentally, Miloni also means achiever). He pursues and perseveres to gain her attention. While you wait for the scene where he tells her about his peculiar quagmire he finds himself in, you realize that it has happened off screen. Ritesh Batra appreciates the collective intelligence of the audience and knows that you will connect these.
Rafi’s grandmother (Farrukh Jaffar) is a riot. As we grow older, there is a sense of acceptance of who we are. We don’t feel the need to invent lies and with less people to corroborate events in the past, we become unashamedly truthful. And his grandmother is exactly that, in a good-natured way. In her presence, Miloni becomes Noorie. She loves this part of herself because as Noorie, she can invent her pasts and futures without worrying a thing about the present.
Rafi too need not bother about the tides against him. She is a Gujarati, upper-caste and upper-class Hindu. She is well-educated too. He is a Muslim trying to make ends meet and is not educated. He is darker in complexion while she is fair. In this arrangement, an extension of his fictitious imagination, he could for a brief while pretend that their differences would not affect their relationship in any kind. There is a sense of inherent awareness that this will not last forever which allows them to enjoy the arrangement privately. It is like eating that kulfi icecream. Unlike a softy that melts in your mouth easily, kulfi lasts longer and is a deliberate design to linger in that moment longer.
At Miloni’s house, her father’s business partner has come with his family. He is interested in getting his son hitched with Miloni. When they request for her photo, her father brushes off telling that face-to-face is better. You realize that she has not been cherished in the way she desires, by her own parents. She quips in to say that she has a recent photo of her clicked at the Gateway of India. Her brother-in-law exchanges glances with her sister. The scene cuts. You infer that she is a private person who has not shared this even with her sister because they don’t see Miloni the way she intends them to. In an earlier scene, she has preserved that photo in between the pages of her CA books. When she comes across it, she thinks about him clicking her. The sound of that click freezing the moment when the breeze gently caressed her. She loves the photo. She loves herself in the photo. Does she feel that she is different from the one in the picture? Could be. In a later scene, she shows it to her friend who recognizes that she looks pretty (and different) before passing it on and ending up with the teacher distracting his train of thought. He is unsure what to do about it and keeps it in his chest pocket. There is a mild disappointment in Miloni when her teacher doesn’t return it after the class. That’s how good the photo is.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once proposed that our sense of self develops as infants in the mirror stage. That we begin to identify ourselves when we are between 6 months to 18 months. Later, he went on to elaborate that the mirror stage is not confined to the infant phase but a permanent structure of subjectivity. Lacan points out that the relationship we share with our mirror image is partly sexual. We are attracted to ourselves. Is this why as a human race are obsessed with selfies? But Miloni doesn’t own a smartphone (her parents could have not bought her for it would be a distraction from her studies) and she misses out on friends who would click her. Hence, she requests Rafi to click her. After all, when we see ourselves in the mirror, we partially desire ourselves. A photograph only allows us to preserve ourselves at a particular point in time. And when another person clicks us to show us in a way we have not imagined ourselves to be, we see ourselves in a new light. Our admiration for the photographer only thickens because without our realizing, we have come to share an intimate bond.
Miloni comes to admire Rafi through the photos he clicks of her. She yearns to be desired for and seen in ways she could not imagine herself. It is therefore not surprising when it rains and Rafi is unable to catch a taxi for her, she asks him if they could have chai. She talks about her love for Campa Cola as a kid and how she hadn’t tasted any other soft drink since it stopped. She, who has been known to us as a private person all along, shares an intimate (and indistinct) piece of herself with a man who was till then a stranger. How admirably Ritesh Batra savours this moment of the love that’s begun to blossom in her. When she gets into a taxi, the song being played in the car is one by Rafi from Teesri Manzil and the song is:
‘Tumne mujhe dekha hokar meharbaan (You’ve been kind enough to look at me)
Ruk gayi yeh zameen, tham gaya aasmaan (the earth has stopped moving, the sky is silent)
Jaaneman, jaanejaan (O my dear, O my dear)’
She requests the taxi driver to make it louder, to fill her head with Rafi.
(to be continued…)
