Bombay rose

The great value of animation movie Bombay Rose (Gitanjali Rao, 2019) is multifaceted. The pleasure to watch it is constantly multiplied by such techniques as colour and black & white shift, eye-dimming, mythological or religious symbolism, dream sequences, film parallels, flashbacks, viewpoint transformation, and its deceptively simple artistry creates a kind of distancing which makes you feel that it’s art, even though everything in it is very realistic. The story is the life of several people in a Bombay seafront community; the time is now, it can be supposed, but the people carry with them their sentimental period, like one-time dancer Shirley Da Souza, who teaches English to the young schoolgirl Tara (star) and takes her through the past to her own life interests; it seems we also see her, ghost-like, dancing with her deceased partner, above the graveyard stones at one point.

Then there’s her sister, Kamala (lily), the young and graceful gajra vendor, whose doe eyes have attracted the attention of Kashmiri orphaned Salim. He also sells flowers on the opposite streets, but unlike her, he steals them from the cemetery tombs, causing Mrs Da Souza (who goes there regularly to be in the presence of a departed friend) to complain about the watchman not doing his job. Salim occasionally doubles up into Raja Khan, a Bollywood hero who appears to comment on the ordinary lives of street people. His “hero” self is paralleled by Kamala’s, whose story at some moments is also told in a fairy-like way, perhaps inspired by the Mughal legends and long-ago haveli life.

It's a hackneyed theme, but the author uses the hero motif cleverly, as when he transforms the children's victories over life's worries into a heroic destiny!

Then there’s the girls’ grandfather, the watch-maker, who fled his village with them, and is now cripple after an attack took place some time after his arrival in the city. He can be interpreted as the time-mender, the story master, in a metaphorical way. He’s part of the community, just like the paan seller, a benevolent old man who distributes his wares freely to one and sundry. The story also focuses on a bright little boy, as bright as he’s deaf, whom Tara befriends and “saves” from the child-labour police who scours the town in search of sweat shops where the children find much needed employment.

As IMDb user arundhati-44392 very perceptively says, the story is full of life, not just human but vegetal (flowers) and animal (cats especially, stretching, purring and stroking people’s legs), the sort of life which makes its presence precious and felt as life. The attention to life, its value and purpose, is also shown through the glorious dances and music which erupt now and then, a rowdy shadi barat or a firelit nightime concert, not forgetting of course the haunting melody about the river Rewa flowing through the eyes, a sort of life stream connecting all forms and moments of life. A nice comment about the mystery and beauty of life is also brought to us through the automated toys which the watchmaker is asked to repair: at first they’re seen as broken and lifeless, but when he succeeds in mending them, a joyful welcome greets their return to automation, as if they too had a sort of life! To continue the metaphor: just like the broken lives of our characters.

Perhaps the visible inner structures we see here are also an image, that of forces which oblige real beings to follow systematic rules and accept a destiny which they would rather escape. The cog wheels inside these toys remind one of the wheel of fortune which grinds in its path little beings too frail to resist it.

People in Bombay Rose are poor. This is theme which connects Rao’s work to Rohinton Mistry’s A fine Balance, a book I strongly recommend to anyone wanting to plunge into the urban system of dependency in India. Poverty is constantly weighing down the existences of the characters, the two lovers first, who have to resort to shameful dealings in order to bring in the much-needed resources, and whose half-innocence is shattered when the other one discovers what they were forced to be up to.

But the elders are also poor, even Shirley who has to pawn her belongings, and the way out isn’t indicated, except through love and care for others. But that’s limited, for example when Tara brings back home the little deaf boy who cannot stay at his work-place because of the child-police, they first say they cannot keep him, and it’s only through circumstances that he stays on to help the grandfather (I wouldn't be surprised if he were meant to remind the viewer of a child-God in the Hindu tradition) :

What attracts people to the sea?

Finally there’s the sea, a symbol of unbounded hopes and dreams, where sand-castle destinies are shaped and then erased, where hopes rise like the waves and then subside. The sea is a powerful reminder of eternity, or of the afterlife, in its endless dimensions, its open horizon hiding what we cannot guess beyond its line dipping away day after day. I’m not sure if there is a connection, but let me also say something about a fine trick used by the artist with people’s faces. When people in the film are undifferentiated, or just unnamed strangers, their eyes are blurred, it’s almost as if they didn’t have any, because what we see are the shadow of their brow, a blurred shadow where eyes should be. But as soon as our attention is focused on the characters, they gain eyes, bright eyes, as you can see in this still from the episode where Tara manages to free her little friend from the child-police:

It seems to me that this technique is very realistic in the sense that what makes a face distinguishable is when you look at it and recognize (or have to recognize) the person thanks to their looks. But otherwise, people don’t have any “necessary” eyes, and you might just as well dim them, because they have not emerged into the field of attention and personality. Dimmed eyes also serve to distance somebody from someone else. When Kamala and Salim, at one stage, are driven apart psychologically, their eyes turn into a blur, thus indicating they have (momentarily) become strangers one to the other. Brightened eyes on the contrary indicate a presence, an intentionality which can be felt through the light shining in the eyes: