Lost Self and Search for Meaning
Hemanth Rao has made a promising debut with Godhi Banna Saadhaarana Maikattu as a director and a screenplay writer driving the point to the Kannada movie going audience that it is the writer-director who basically makes a cinema work.
Venkoba Rao (Ananth Nag) aged 66, goes missing after his son Shiva (Rakshit Shetty) takes him from the old-age home for shopping. The interaction between the two and the fact that Venkoba is in an old-age house reveals the troubled relationship between father and son. Shiva with the help of Venkoba’s doctor Dr. Sahana, sets out to search for the missing Venkoba.
The missing Venkoba accidentally lands up in the vehicle driven by Ranga (Vasishta Simha) and his assistant Manja (Ravikiran Rajendran) who are carrying the dead-body of a murdered official. The vehicle meets with an accident and accidentally Kumaar (Achyuth) ends up with the three of them.
While Shiva and Dr. Sahana are searching for Venkoba, the politician who has masterminded the murder is looking for Ranga and Manja who have failed to do their job of burying the dead-body without it becoming known to the outside world.
All the three who are sought; Venkoba, Ranga and Manja, end up in the house of Kumaar where his wife and son also reside.
As the search of Shiva continues and escape of Ranga continues the audience realize that Venkoba going missing is just a pretext for the writer-director to explore the personal journeys of these two characters that are lost in life and have lost the memory of what their actual potentials are.
Shiva in his aspiration driven life has forgotten his art and has been dissatisfied with the middle-class family and father. Ranga being an abandoned child has not been able to touch and awaken the humane side of his. Being pushed to a harmful life Ranga and diving into a market-oriented life Shiva both have lost touch with their inner core and realizing this existential level of getting lost becomes the journey of the film, at a deeper level.
While Shiva has to reconcile with the lost self, Ranga is forced to accept defeat and the inability to walk into a future since the shadow of past is inescapable. But the only way he can make his life achieve meaning is by saving lives and the only way Shiva can bring meaning to his life is by enabling himself to love, his father and also achieve romantic love. Thus both have to find themselves to find meaning for their lives.
Dr. Sahana who was once lost and found herself with Venkoba’s support is capable of loving someone unconditionally.
While Venkoba is missing in his own city, Shiva and Ranga are lost within their own lives and the search for self and meaning should take place within oneself. And these are journeys by themselves. And nothing lost is the same when you find them again. Things have transformed. Quite a lot.
What looks like a story of a lost father with a lost memory grows to be a film about lost childhood, lost innocence, lost future and a lost ability to love and live! It is in creating such layers that Hemanth Rao turns an explored arena of old age and Alzheimer disease into a fresh work of art and story-telling.
Neat cinematography by Nanda Kishore helps the film and music by debudant Charan Raj strengthens the mood. One should mention, without fail, that the music and visuals, at places, are not in harmonious synchronization. Editing, quite evidently, could have been more tight and crisp.
But the centre forward who finally kicks the ball to the opposite post is his actors, especially Ananth Nag and Vasishta Simha, though not to forget Achyuth, Shruthi Hariharan and Ravikiran Rajendran.
What is commendable about the writer-director is his ability to avoid a moralistic position about the actions of any of its characters, especially that of Shiva for neglecting his father and Ranga who has turned violent being abandoned in life. Hemanth, the writer-director, has a sympathetic gaze towards all characters caught in the whirlpool of life, which makes him a promising director, who has a fair command over the medium.
[Originally written fors the newsportal News Karnataka, where an edited version of the same has been published]
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