Udaan : I Drift Along

Last year, I watched a movie by Gus Van Sant called Paranoid Park. It is the story of a 17 year old drifter who commits an accidental murder. For its whole run of 100 minutes the movie is mostly about the attempts of the boy to come to terms with the guilt. It silently follows him while his thoughts drift from his childhood to the incident. The movie is mostly nervously silent, event less and ends like that. It just leaves you with possibilities which are terrifying and mostly devoid of a lot of hope.

Udaan, is a movie which is mostly silent in its own terms. It talks of hope but is not vocal about it. It talks about bad parenting, its impacts but doesn’t take it up as an issue. It is a slice of life about people and their attempts to come to terms with the changes around them. It is about how they find their ways, fighting with the circumstances, making peace with some of them and running away from some of them.

Now I am not putting the protagonists in the two movies in the same spot. For me the protagonist(Rohan,Rajat Barmecha) in Udaan is in a far more hopeful position. But the way the movies end to me is similar. Open with a lot of possibilities.

**** Spoiler Alert *****

Udaan is an honest movie. It strips to a run down house where most of us may be living. It could be your or my first house. And it is for a couple of people. The colour could have very well been Sepia. But the movie doesn’t even grant us that fanciness.

It just layers itself with the situations and the response of the characters. It brings the protagonist to a house where the parent is not exactly friendly. The father(Ronit Roy) is shown to be a disciplinarian. His Pride stems from winning the morning race against his son. You start with expecting this character to break at sometime. But then you are a spoilt viewer. You have been given that privilege many a time. The movie goes on to explain the fears of the father, his reasons for his behavior, but never gives him the courage to face himself. You end up making peace with the fact that he cannot change.

The protagonist is a budding writer.The movie through is ridden with beautiful verses whose words defy the boys age. In one delightful sequence, the boy tries to make his parent understand him with his poetry. The father , though impressed, refuses to concede. The movie titillates you with these moments where you expect the father to give up and that never happens. He is shown softening in some instances, only to go back to his own notions.

The movie takes you places where a drifter would go. You travel with it. You never empathise with the protagonist but go with yourself. You stand beside him and the stay in the moments with him. He does not need you. So you go with your own thoughts in that moment.

The movie as a whole is eventful but the events never lead to anywhere. Those are just moments which one remembers when sitting with an old friend, chatting about his bad boy days. Those are just moments when the protagonist escapes from his life and steals his moments. It just establishes the facts that how some of us wish we could refuse to be institutionalized and keep drifting. It is a trip down the memory lane for some of us and liberation for some of us.

**** Spoiler Alert Ends ****

The movie ends with the characters who start as they were. Just that they move on with some new decisions. There is no change of heart. Just that there are some new equations and new bonds and new hopes some of which are unfounded. Some of us might call it an escape, but each escape is just a new road. As the movie ends

“Kahani Khatam hai, Ya Shuruat Hone ko Hai”

For me who may just be standing 10 years ahead of that boy, am not sure, because the glass is sometimes half full and sometimes half empty.