Prashant Bhargava and Patang (The Kite).
Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (The Kite) has had a marvelous festival run thus far, playing at Berlin, Tribeca, Vancouver, Monterrey, and a host of other major film festivals. It has been warmly recieved by all, including a wonderful review from Roger Ebert:
“[PATANG is] one of this year’s best sleepers, directed by Chicagoan Prashant Bhargava. An affluent Delhi businessman returns home for a visit with his grandmother, mother and sister-in-law to Ahmedabad, at the time of the famous annual kite festival. The storytelling is effortlessly made part of the hypnotically beautiful visuals, and woven into a kaledioscope of colors, faces, music and a little romance. Bhargava is masterful in the way he allows his story to emerge from his mosaic, instead of spelling it out by the numbers. Evokes the old and new Indias side by side as well as I’ve seen done. Recommended.”
I couldn’t be more proud of what Prashant and his team have accomplished. Prashant is an old friend - we first met on the festival circuit in 2005 when I was touring 19 Revolutions and he was showing his brilliant Sundance short film Sangam. His short remains one of my most moving and memorable festival memories, a gorgeous meditation on loneliness and home. Watch the film here - it’s worth your time and will indelibly change your life.
Prashant is one of those rare combinations of visual art and performance - he’s an actor’s director with an amazing aesthetic eye, which is something we all aspire to become and yet few of us reach those vaunted heights. But it’s not like this happened overnight for Prashant - Patang took seven years for him to make, a process that tested every moral and creative fiber in his body. With hundreds of hours footage captured, I’ve never seen a film that has pushed back on its filmmaker so much, and conversely I’ve never seen a filmmaker take on his own footage with such surgical compassion. Prashant cared for and evaluated every single frame as if it were a stand alone painting, a process that would most surely drive most men completely mad.
When watching Patang, one can’t help but take in the naturalism of the actors. To call it a ‘documentary style’ film is doing Prashant and his actors grave injustice. They play as if no camera were present at all, they just simply happen. Greater still is the fact that these ultra-naturalistic performances play effortlessly over a backdrop of extreme stylization, which makes everything all the more remarkable. Prashant films the Indian city of Ahmedabad through a vibrant kaleidoscope of filters, effects, flares and blown out colors, and the visuals of Patang are some of the most electric I’ve seen in any recent film. It employs a visual language that hearkens experimental video art far more than any kind of documentary realism.
The confluence of hyper stylized visuals with ultra-naturalistic performance lets Patang sit firmly in the middle ground of expression, and it is because of this that the film has an undeniable sense of comfort. The film feels like a warm, lucid dream, where real people inhabit the realms of imagination.
Over a two year period I would occasionally meet up with Prashant in the south side of Chicago and see how his editing was going. Looking at the evolution of his edit was like watching a sculpture reveal itself in a raw piece of marble, refinement coming with the most microscopic of adjustments. It was an incredibly frustrating process, one that required a systematic cycle of demolition and rebuilding, of killing beloved visuals and performances for the sake of narrative, of finding hidden gems through the collision of random images pulled from hundreds of hours of coverage. The enormity of Prashant’s workflow and process still blows my mind.
Readers of this blog will know that I’m an ardent fan of Japanese cinema, and Patang, while hailing from India, is as close to classic Japanese filmmaking that I’ve seen in our current cinema. Prashant invokes the spirit and pacing of Ozu while composing his images with the details of Kurosawa and the sheer beauty of Mizoguchi. The film is filled with what is termed in Japan as makurakotoba, or ‘pillow words,’ except that these epithets are expressed in a visual language, and the story is largely told in the silent space between words. Backstories are told in the eyes of actresses Seema Biswas and Suganda Garg, histories are etched into the peeling walls of Ahmedabad, and innocence bleeds from a young man’s first kiss. All of it is captured with a sensitivity and love that simply saturates the screen. It’s quite an understated achievement of paradoxical filmmaking, an exercise in restraint that is never afraid to go over the top.
Naturally, I’m biased about my feelings on Patang because I believe in it, I participated in it as an Associate Producer, and I wholeheartedly believe in Prashant as a filmmaker. During the time we made our respective films, I learned so much from him in regards to performance and overall filmmaking, and in turn I was honored when Prashant asked for my opinions and perspective during his edit. I actually wrote about this experience a long time ago in the very early goings of this blog, you might find it all the more amusing reading it now, knowing what you know.
Patang’s next festival stop is its homecoming dance at the Chicago International Film Festival, screening on October 11th, 13th and 14th. Future festival screenings can be found on the film’s website. Seek it out!
Oh and I’d be remiss if I didn’t reference this little pop-culture gem.
