‘Pushtaini’ movie review: A gentle yet gripping indie that scratches beneath the surface

A still from ‘Pushtaini’
| Photo Credit: Pushtaini Film/YouTube

Our society has yet to come to terms with the sad reality that sexual exploitation is not gender-specific. Perhaps that’s why our mainstream cinema either ignores the sexual manipulation of boys or considers it as a device to generate some humour. For a change, Pushtaini, a small film with a big purpose, begins on a film set where a struggling actor, languishing on a couch, struggles with his lines.

Like an emaciated cat trying to roar like a tiger, Aryan Shaw (Vinod Rawat) is fumbling to hide the simple mountain boy Bhupinder or Bhuppi from the camera. Soon, we discover that his set is perhaps purposefully designed into the script as his launchpad, for Bhuppi has come through a painful process of ‘casting couch,’ a euphemism for sexual favours in exchange for work.

The slimy line producer has a video that can shut Bhuppi’s career down but somehow the frustration of getting blackmailed breeds in him the natural flair that was missing from his performance. It is something Rajkumar Rao, playing hero in the film within the film, advises him to bring out but till then Aryan and Bhuppi were two different people.

To escape the trap, Bhuppi treads back to his ancestral land in Uttarakhand and the scenic vistas open the crevices of the past in the young man’s mind that made him run away from his reality to the city of dreams. As the purpose of the title starts to make sense, we find that Bhuppi is suffering from daddy issues which feel far deeper than we encountered in Animal. There is a sister who feels that he let the family down and an aunt who holds him responsible for his father’s unnatural demise. Then there is a will that is in the hands of his father’s employer Yashpal (Mithilesh Pandey) whom Bhuppi doesn’t want to face because of a childhood trauma that hasn’t healed and perhaps created flaws in his personality. It creates an emotional cesspool where the soundscape and the landscape become integral to storytelling.

In the journey to find his truth, Bhuppi finds a co-passenger in Dimple, a life coach (Rita Heer), who is also seeking answers to questions that have been troubling her since childhood. While Bhuppi avoids intoxication, for it takes off the layers that he has covered himself with, Dimple is into weed and vodka to keep moving against the gravity of the situation and landscape.

The film finds its humour and levity with Hemant (Hemant Pandey), a taxi driver and Bhuppi’s childhood friend, who drives him and Dimple on this journey of self-discovery. Hemant is a prototype of those small-town men who judge women by their food and lifestyle choices.

Rawat has not only played Bhuppi/Aryan with gentle intensity but has also directed, produced, and co-written Pushtaini. While finding answers to Bhuppi’s quest, he touches upon issues of unemployment, migration, and economic hardships in the hills making people prone to manipulation of different kinds without making a show of it.

Like his property, Bhuppi’s problem is also ‘Pushtaini.’ People on the margins faced and hid sexual exploitation then; they are uneasy to talk about it now. Time and space don’t seem to matter. They seem destined to suffer and move on with a straight face. Rawat has depicted this helplessness and reconfiguration in Bhuppi by weaving the events into a gripping narrative that doesn’t seek mercy for being an independent film.

In terms of technique, for a large part, Pushtaini gives the feel of a good, personal student film. It has a beating heart but the loose ends in writing and acting have not been properly soldered. At times, the rawness in expressing emotions and language works to the film’s advantage but then there are sequences where low-hanging metaphors are plucked for effect.

That said, Pushtaini is better than many decorative products on display in theatres at present. One hopes it finds a way through the heartless distribution system that is skewed towards tentpoles and where ancestral hold on the system still works.

Pushtaini is currently running in theatres