Let’s picture Qala. Draped in a saree of the finest materials adorned with jewels and a golden voice. Beauty is in her hands, may it be that of the body or that of the brain. A playback singer trained in Indian classical music under a Gharana whose musical stylism is well known and a golden disc awardee for music sales. Press lauds her as the voice of a generation and she laughs and waves at them high up from her house. Let us now look beneath the surface. Born to a mother who despises her, looks down on her, and wishes Qala did not “kill” her twin brother in the womb. Wrapping her in shrouds of secrecy and lament, a mother who easily ignored her daughter to give way to another singer, constantly berets her for being worth nothing and talentless. Brought up in a household of darkness, secrets, affairs, hush-hush deals, and dangerous lies alongside a stranger who is destroyed, a mother who denounces her, and failing psychological stability.
Let’s picture a student. Adorned with marks, grades, and accolades in their early years of schooling. Extracurricular and academic excellence is in their hands. Teachers laud them as a jewel of a student, a model who will excel at everything. Fast forward to the final year of high school where failure in entrance exams is a truth for them. A vicious cycle of angered looks by parents, berating, undermining, and comparison. Brought up in a household where marks define happiness, colors of melancholic blue all around, shrouded in the darkness of failure in an exam.
The similarities in situation and circumstances are eerily similar. Even the consequences of these surroundings have been eerily the same: multiple headlines of student suicide and the end of the movie overlap alarmingly. Yet nothing changes, no heed taken, no empathy shown.
Watching “Qala”, you are bound to be distracted by the incredible set designs, the mesmerizing costumes, and how masterfully the world of music in the 1930s is brought to screen. If Indian films truly got the attention they ought to get at an international level, Qala’s costumes are worth an Academy Award for Costume design. Yet the movie itself pulls you back, each time you sense a tad bit of warmth, a bit of colour, you are strongly pulled back. You are left in a dark room, cold and blue.
As expected from the insanely talented Tripti Dimri whose debut in “Bulbbul” shook the cinematic world, “Qala” is yet another psychological drama that allows you to break free from the classical linear storylines to a world where a lot is deliberately left unsaid between the lines for the audience to ponder on. The storyline of the movie is not simply about one thing or the other it is a combination of innumerable ideas, thoughts, and maybe even mediums. The treatment of the movie is done such that the one who’s watching has to stop at the end and take some solace in reflecting on the movie.
This is Anvita Dutt’s second time working with Dimri, the first time being Bulbbul and the chemistry between them I guess makes the movie shine even more. Dutt's directorial prowess is clear from these two movies.
“Qala”’s story is also primordially that of filial relationships and the broken ties of a mother and her daughter. Much like the Booker prize long-listed book "Burnt Sugar", this movie is a story of a failed mother-daughter relationship where the wound of the daughter is so deep that it has become a festering piece of fatality. As Qala's mother blames her for not being a son, a wound that maybe not the mother but the patriarchal society she has lived through is to blame. There is a scene in the movie where Qala's mother tells her that she can never be an "Ustad" and that she will always be a woman who sings, much like a courtesan. Swastika Mukherjee's role as Qala's mother and her staunch expressions and countenance makes you feel rattled to the bone with hatred for her. Even though at parts you would ardently wish to understand her, you still will feel repulsed.
I think a lot of it is due to the masterful cinematography that Siddharth Diwan does in the movie. When Qala's maternal home is shown in the shades of deep blue or when Qala is shrouded by the warmth of appreciation during the initial minutes of the conference after her golden disc award showcase, the colors, the hues, the texture and the treatment that he gives to the scenes make them feel even more real, sometimes frighteningly so. Amit Trivedi’s music compositions add a layer of intimacy to the movie. In movies that deal with the intensity of the world of Indian classical music, movies like "The Disciple" often use music as a medium and also a character to lay the intricate details that a camera or human acting can't capture.
Qala reminds me of the Natalie Portman starrer "Black Swan" and how it too deals with the harshness of the same kind of atmosphere: a chauvinistic society, a broken filial relationship, self-doubt turned into self-hatred, and ultimately the same ultimatum ending.
As Qala much like Black Swan ends on a heartbreaking note, the audience bites the bitter pill of truth. As snow covers Qala, as she loses her mind and her sanity, as she touches the fever high in her rattled dream, it all boils down to the choices she made and the way her surroundings shaped her and made her choose those paths. There is no happy ending to her story, there never was.
A recurring motif in Qala is a moth. The movie uses lepidopterans to navigate the dark world that Qala is walking around. Death looms around Qala as she steps into the world. Much like decay, death, and despair, the moth represents self-destruction. Qala desperately chases after her mother's affection, her attention, and her validation and burns out in that flame. This a motif we can use to portray a lot of modern symbols that can be attached to today's students. A moth running into the flame pushed by something that even scientists don't know. A student running into the flame of exams and marks pushed by something that we do understand.
Each passing day, we see news of student suicides, it has become as common as petty thievery now. India is among the highest countries to have comparatively high student suicide rates, a data that is questionable because are all student suicides even recorded past the barrier of parents, familial reputation, adult intervention, and authorities silencing data. Yet the truth remains. Thanks to our society's unnatural obsession with academic excellence, pressure both from peers and adults, an atmosphere of cutthroat competition, and an abyss of comparison, worthlessness, and self-doubt when failure touches you, student lives seem to mean nothing to much of us.
How many more Qala would we need to sacrifice and then showcase as a symbolic movie to make people understand the destructive side of our story?