This beautiful short-film creates a poignant reminder of forced solitude and of the ways humans seek to cope with it. It sheds light on the struggles of the working-class youth who don’t realize yet that they can’t make up for all their lost time. Unemployed men decide to migrate to abroad, where the work is for any meagre pay. Our protagonist Shubham, who got back to his hometown, reflects on the lifestyle that people run behind.
There is a brilliant panning shot in the film. It’s shot on the terrace of the protagonist’s house. You see houses in the neighborhood that are half-built, wielding just the brick walls and not having concrete and paint to cover the exposing walls yet, except the protagonist’s house. Shubham seems to have done his due to complete building his house. And it’s evident when a father-son duo in the neighborhood enquire him about the procedure to get a passport, so, that the son can also find himself employed and complete building their house. It’s brilliant when they show the houses whose walls are parallel to each other, one is completely built and the other isn’t, from where a man seeks the help of Shubham to get abroad just like him. It’s a blend of whimsy when the other man wrings his wet clothes on the side of Shubham’s wall past his wall, and there are small plant pots to receive the water. Director Shubham Sharma, exceptionally brillaint Cinematographer Vaibhav Yadav and Music composer Karthik Pillai makes this film more meaningful with their best work. The lights in the film, is more like one of the characters in the film. It sets the mood and fetches the message it wants to convey.
Shubham, a kind-hearted young man, deals with his unbearable solitude. He lives with his mother who keeps herself occupied with TV and household chores. Even when she strikes a conversation with Shubham, he isn’t emotionally available to talk back, he just listens. He is bothered by existential crisis. He yearns for a heartening human connection, a friendship, a companionship in which he could dwell deep into and talk about everything that bothers him. He’s not just bothered about his existence but also the insensitivity he has to witness around him, in strangers, in people he works with in a local store.
Shubham, a seemingly well-educated man, reserves himself to his alone time. And only then when we can also truly see him at all. Except then, we are only given his glimpses of reflections, on a black TV screen, on the mirrors. In his alone time, He finds his “patience stone”, a tape-recorder, to pour all the issues that’s aching him. He decides to send that message to a stranger for whom he feels an utmost sympathy. And you can see the protagonist at the end who just unburdened his sadness into a tape and decides to resume being happy a little bit, even with all the broken, unresolved issues he still carries. He picks himself up like he does the fake flower from the ground. This film, it’s a search for meaning in everything we dearly hold in the modern lifestyle.
