when home is not where
the heart is
by Douglas Messerli
Tanuj Bhrama (writer and director) Dear Dad / 2016
As the reviewer Subhash K. Jha begins his piece in the Hindustan
Times about
the 2016 film, Dear Dad:
It takes
a whole lot of guts to make a film on alternate
sexuality
in India, especially when you are a first-time
director.
Tanuj Bhrama has pushed the envelope out of
the
closet as far as possible. And then some.
We learn almost from the
very beginning of this film that the central character, Nitin Swaminathan
(Arvin Swamy), married with a son and daughter, has recently come out to his
wife as a gay man and that she is seeking a divorce. She, quite rightfully
insists, that Nitin also explain the situation to her son, Shivum (Himanshu
Sharma); so begins a road-trip drama to Mussourie and other Indian nature spots
that is not so very dissimilar from the journey the gay figure of Evening
Shadows takes
with his mother. And, like that film, the central purpose of the trip is reveal
and explain his homosexuality, which in both cases ends at first in confusion
and anger before final assimilation.
Yet, unlike Rangayan’s lean
telling, wherein he reveals the love the hero and his friend feel for one another,
Bhrama’s Dear Dad has little to do with sex—Nitin is single and apparently has no lover, nor
do we get a glimpse at his sexual preferences, although he does mention that he
is not attracted to “all men.”—so that the film becomes a statement of the
father and son relationship more that it is a gay film.
If the movie represents, at
first, Shivum as a fairly typical self-obsessed kid, far more interested in his
cellphone and a “celebrity” (Aman Uppal) whom he spots at a local restaurant (requesting
a signature), it suddenly shifts when the two stop by Nitin’s parents. There
his overly-loving mother greets Nitin and Shivum with joy; but it is the sad
empty relationship between Nitin and his dementia-inflicted father that provides
deeper psychological perceptions.
While Shivum seems mostly
bored in the company of his father, Nitin quickly leaves the arms of his loving
mother to attend to the old man, who has been left in the yard with shaving
lotion pasted across his face, apparently awaiting his daily shave from his
wife. It is an almost a surreal scene, as Nitin takes up the razor—hinting at
both true love and perhaps a little hate—to accomplish the task of shaving his
father. During the gentle scrapes of the razor he explains, knowing the father
will comprehend very little of what he is saying, that he is a gay man. The
camera focusing on the older father and son, however, gradually pans away,
revealing that Shivum has overheard the conversation.
Through this device, quite
early in the work, Bhrama sucks almost all the expected drama out of his
cinema, while for the rest of the film the focus shifts to the hurt and angered
son who must suddenly come to terms with a father who he has never truly known.
The only bit of drama,
other than the son’s growing angst, is provided by the fact that the duo again
encounter the “celebrity” (we’re never truly told why he is famous) along the
road, hitchhiking, Shivum insisting that they give him a lift, if no other
reason than to put another being between the intensity of his father and him.
The two, father and “celebrity”
even share a bedroom—hinting even that the easy-going and quite accepting “guest,”
could have shared Nitin’s bed. Yet Bhrama does not suggest any sexual actions, and
the “celebrity” expresses a kind of
standard “heterosexual trope”: “But you’re married, with kids!” So too was the hero’s uncle in Evening
Shadows.
However, it is the “celebrity” who, after Shivum
has fed his father something to make him very ill, who nurtures Nitin to health
again and who advises the boy that he must accept his father for who he is,
admitting that he too left his father out of hatred, and hasn’t been home in 15
years. By film’s end, we recognize that his journey has been one to see his
family again.
Shivum moves on to his
boarding school, still harboring anger that “things can no longer be the way
they were.” He, so a pop song proclaims must still grow up and “learn to fly.”
Which he eventually does, winning top honors in mathematics in his school.
For the honors celebration, his mother, with
her new lover (“Isn’t he a bit old?” asks Nitin; “Well at least he’s straight,”
she quips. “Ouch,” is his response); but the loving Nitin, after a long emotional
scrapbook of images from Shivum’s and his close relationship years earlier,
does unexpectedly show up to congratulate his son, who finally is able give him
the inevitable hugging forgiveness.
If this is not a great queer
film, it is an important one simply because within a very homophobic culture it
takes a different trajectory, exploring a married adult coming out—with all the
numerous issues that decision represents—as opposed to the more common young
man coming out to his parents or to himself. Yet there seems to be something
missing here, particularly when Shivum asks his father, near the end of the
movie, “are you going home?”
The film might truly have
explored this question further. For a man who has had to abandon everyone and
everything in order to no longer live a “false life,” where is home? Clearly
for such an individual, “home is not where the heart is,” but in a larger world
of possibility and desire. It is quite clear that for Nitin his love lies with
his son and younger daughter. But his access to them will now be limited, and
his ability to show that love or any love will lead to constant searching.
Yes, this is a brave film,
a work that truly explores what is next in mid-life after you made a major
decision to change your lies into truth. Where do you go from there, and how to
obtain whatever dreams or even illusions are left?
And for those left behind,
well patriarchal relationships, as this film makes clear, are always so far
more difficult that matriarchal ones. Just ask Freud.
Los Angeles,
March 19, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March
2019).
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