As its title suggests, Cargo director Arati Kadav’s new short film is about an astronaut and…a parrot. The film-maker’s passion for science fiction and magic realism is rooted in its story. The narrative device – where a crisis-stricken astronaut finds an unlikely listener at the other end of the radio – is a nice ode to a scene in Gravity (2013) in which Sandra Bullock’s fading character accidentally contacts an Inuit on Earth. The narrative itself – where an astronaut is reduced to a parent pining for a child – is a moving nod to both Interstellar (2014) and First Man (2018). The mission (which we hear of in sputtering radio snippets) involves building a colony on Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s four moons and the setting of the 2013 sci-fi indie, Europa Report. Here, the frantic man’s frequency band connects to that of a fortune-telling parrot. With minutes of oxygen left after an explosion leaves him untethered in outer space, he is left with no choice. He wants to send a message to his daughter. But with technology turning him into a cruel punchline, the most traditional messenger – a tropical bird – becomes his only hope.
It’s a lovely one-liner. More so for a 15-minute short that bridges the void between the said and the unsaid, between human truth and humane imagination. Not for the first time, Kadav’s low-fi design infuses heart into the moment, while counting on our perception of this movie genre to join the (lens-flare) dots. The DIY vibe is just the right mix of playful and poignant; at its core, it’s about a man who loves his little girl to the moon and back. Kadav consistently crafts the sort of life-affirming tales (including her 2016 short, Time Machine) that elevate this minimalist treatment, and vice versa. Again, it made me feel like an emotionally intelligent adult and a wide-eyed child at once. It’s not an easy thing to do as a filmmaker – to amplify the ‘sigh’ in sci-fi without compromising on the depth of its tropes.
What distinguishes The Astronaut And His Parrot, however, is also what made her feature-length debut Cargo (2020) great: Socio-cultural specificity. Despite its universal tone, the world-building is distinctly Indian. In terms of the country’s present and future, this identity is the film. And it’s a very hopeful one. The astronaut is a Muslim engineer, Iqbal Ali (Ali Fazal), on a colony-establishing mission called ‘Project Dwarka’. The fortune teller’s house is in a city that resembles Dwarka, a famous Hindu pilgrimage site. The parrot – a bird that symbolizes the mount of the God of Love in Hindu mythology – is named Manohar. The moon, both literally and figuratively, shapes Iqbal’s final message to daughter Afreen, whose flashbacks are beautifully woven into his mindscape. He’s running out of oxygen against the backdrop of a planet, and a nation, whose atmosphere is eroding.
At first, it feels like a tragedy. Of all the places, a temple town becomes the point of contact for the Muslim man. How will his words ever reach his daughter? Will a bird be able to do what humans cannot? Ultimately, this is precisely what defines the film’s artful marriage of science and spirituality. When Iqbal tutors Manohar to repeat his message of love, the commentary is as tender as it is powerful. That he expects, by some miracle of fate, for the message to reach his child made me imagine a scene where she actually hears it one day. We don’t see this happen, of course, but just the thought of a grown-up Afreen being struck by a bird’s chant is gratifying on multiple levels. It reminded me of the sacred longing in Father and Daughter (2000), the Oscar-winning animated short about a girl who grows old at a shore while waiting for a father that’s lost at sea.
The Astronaut And His Parrot is an elegant companion piece, one that reveals the warm link between religion and storytelling. It also conveys the new-age difference between the ruthlessness of a project and the chastity of a place. Iqbal Ali is undone by a multi-billion dollar project named after a pilgrimage site, but he is revived by a bird that must imitate his devotion at a Dwarka-like town. All the subtext doesn’t distract from the intimacy of the staging. One of them is floating, the other is set to fly. So much of what we derive from this seemingly simple story emerges from our ability to engage with the world around us. For a short film that unfolds in space – and the void between who we are and what we believe – perhaps there’s no bigger compliment.