It is hard to categorize, let alone fully absorb and appreciate, the bonding between Man and Nature which writer-director Raam Reddy has attempted to achieve in his second, far more complex and ironic, feature film where Man and Nature never really get to collide dramatically even if we want them to.
Push never comes to shove in Jugnuma. This is not that kind of cinema. It is a slowburn test of the audiences’ ability to get under the skin of a film without prompting.
Raam Reddy, whose first film Thithi (in Kannada) explored the comic and cosmic complexities of a death in the family, here in Jugnuma plunges much deeper into the spiritual and emotional conundrum of the relationship between Man and mortality, between Nature and Man’s fluctuating relationship with Nature.
This synthesis of Nature and the Universe is achieved with minimum violence in Raam Reddy’s deeply melancholic meditation on the wounds that we inflict on those who cannot talk back.
Manoj Bajpayee is excellent with the silences that this work of muted rumination demands from him. He lets his eyes do most of the talking. He is not alone. The rest of the cast, down to the smallest character (for example, Keshav, played by Ravi Bisht who is a hill-man suspected of arson), seems to know the nature of beast as far as the beasts of Nature are concerned.
It takes a while to figure out what Raam Reddy wants to say, or rather, wants us to know. Jugnuma is not an easy film to watch. It does away with all the safety zones of filmmaking, focusing on the feelings behind the spoken words.
There is a longish cameo by Tillotama Shome, playing a wise hill woman, who explains the relation between Nature and the universe to her young son.
I am not too sure this has any relevance to what Raam Reddy is aiming to tell us. The jigsaw pieces of existence do not really fit in the askew nature of things in Jugnuma. They are not meant to. This is a film about the pursuit of the truth of human existence rather than getting there. It has no answers to the puzzle of the universe. But its relentless voice of probing gradually sinks into us in waves of sagacity.
The cogency of Jugnuma is reliant on the actors’ ability to understand that comprehending the conundrum of the universe is not possible. In other words, understanding that there is no real understanding. The nature of the narrative is such that we the audience remain as much outsiders to the mystery of the forests, and the fire that engulfs the trees, as the characters.
Jugnuma is an enchanting expedition into mountainous mysteries, forest fires and burning silences. The conversations are brief but brimming with significances underneath.
Manoj Bajpayee and Priyanka Bose are brilliant in their shared silences. Their conversations seem routine but are symptoms of breaches that words, or their absence, cannot heal.
“Is the tea still warm?” Manoj’s Dev asks Priyanka’s Nandini.
“A bit,” she replies from distance.
How would she know this without touching the tea? What other secrets, far deeper, does she secrete?
At some point in the world of wordless wisdom Dev and Priyanka’s daughter Vanya (Hiral Sidhu, impressively expressive) takes off into the jungles for a tryst with a nomadic stranger. But that is another forest fire altogether.
