Berlinale 2024: The Steadfast Beauty of Manoj Bajpayee’s The Fable

Director: Raam Reddy

Writer: Raam Reddy

Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Priyanka Bose, Deepak Dobriyal

Duration: 119 minutes

Director Raam Reddy’s second feature The Fable had a press screening on the first day of the 74th Berlinale; the last slot snuck into the night. I was three films in, bleary, but not bulldozed, and as The Fable opened against the Himalayas — a long, uninterrupted shot, like how PS Vinothraj’s Kottukkalli opened (also at the festival) — something flickered. The distorted grain on the screen, the way light fell on surfaces, on skin; the way apple blossoms shimmered — this was shot on 16mm film. For two hours the film hawed and hemmed, weaving in threads of magic realism before receding into reality, with shaky politics and steadfast beauty. The film swirled in my head, or, perhaps, just the images did — how can you separate one from the other? The following day, I cancelled another screening, ran across the city, sweating in wintry Berlin, to catch The Fable again. Think of the recklessness of this choice, when there are over 220 films to choose from and squeeze into 10 days. 

It is spring 1989 and Deepak Dobriyal’s voice, from the present, invites us into this fable. The caretaker of the 5,000-acre orchards of Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), he narrates in an ominous tone that something happened here. We are introduced to Dev’s family, his wife Nandini (Priyanka Bose), his daughter Vanya (Hiral Sidhu), son Juju (Awan Pookot), and two dogs Alex and Jack. It is a portrait of a complete family, no chinks. 

The camera follows Dev as he applies cream to his shoulders — why just the shoulders? Wait — and then, as he walks down the stairs, you can hear Nandini asking him to taste the jam she pulped, to which he replies she should ask Juju instead because “he has a better tongue”, or something to that effect, and almost on cue, we meet Juju, running with the dogs; Dev greeting him with a quip as he walks into a shed, and through the grainy darkness we see him attaching wings to his shoulders, then walking off to the edge, and, then, flight. 

This is all one shot.

This cannot be real. But this cannot be magic, too, because the film invests so much logic into this flight, right from the cream, to the discussions on the types of wood and density of feathers that Dev is tinkering with to perfect his flight. 

This is a choice that is supposed to feel magical even as the voices around it insist on its realism. 

It is this shimmering tension, where the seams between magic and reality refuse to make itself known that the film often feels unstable. If you want to be generous, you could see this as an abdication of categories. If you want to be cruel, you could see this as an inability to commit to one. The film evokes both, often together. 

Through the Cracks of Story

At first, the choice to have an outsider narrate the story of this family is odd, because he does not have access to their inner lives. The question looms — is he only narrating the story because he survives it? Even so, it becomes clear that a lot of the narrative flourishes of this film are not inclusive of logic. The film is floating above such demands, and this itch gets increasingly notorious as the fable unspools. 

Dev sees one of his apple trees burnt. Then, a few more. Something rotten is afoot. Is it because of the use of pesticides that the villagers might be chafing against? Is it the group of nomads on horses who have been roving the hills nearby? Fireflies dot the landscape, like digital pixels in film-shot frames, looking incongruous, but rippling the skies with awe, nonetheless. Mid-way, Tillotama Shome, who plays the wife of one of the workers on the orchard, narrates a fable of angels who, travelling the universe, find themselves stuck on Earth, needing to be reminded of their true identity, so they can unshackle and roam the galaxies. There is, apart from this, a sexual awakening, a leopard, deeply felt croons by the fireside, and death. 

The film, as you can probably sense, never fits. Scenes exist, building up on nothing, building up to nothing. Manoj Bajpayee is playing a character who is supposed to have a certain, broken-in relationship to English, but he often sounds like he is reading dialogues, written with a studied stiffness. Dialogues don’t flow but have this staccato rhythm, which is overcome, somewhat by the easy screen presence of all actors present. These are, after all, landowning people, with relations that go back to colonial deference.

A Semblance of a Film

There is a troublingly trite description in the beginning, of how all the kids — Juju and the kids of the villagers — play together, without any trace of difference between them, as though blind to the hierarchies they come from. (If there is anyone who is perceptive to the subtleties of class differences, it is kids.) But, in the same breath, the film is also very sensitive to privilege. When Vanya enters, surprising her mother by coming earlier from college, she tells the house help who is coming to take her bags that she will carry it, but when he insists, she doesn’t think twice before giving him her bag. Later, when Dev visits one of his workers who has had a personal setback, he says he is there to offer his support, but is, instead, asking for the worker’s help, for him to come back to work. These are kind people, but also people used to subservience. This comes out in the cracks of the film, but not on its surface. Odd, isn’t it? 

Then, what we are left with, at the end, is only a semblance of a film. The titular fable looms excitedly over the film, because it is neither clever enough to be cracked, nor emotionally rich enough to swirl the film’s surface. I looked at my hands like I was holding merely strips of cloth, or pages of a manuscript. There was something incomplete about the film, its ambiguity was not productive or generative, but final. Undeniably, it is also hypnotic, with Sunil Borkar’s camera always on the shoulder, Himanshu Kamble’s haze-streaked colour correction, producing a hissing rapture that makes you want to come back to it, a recursive desire, to make more sense of this ambiguity, this incompleteness, knowing fully well, the whole will never cohere. And yet. And yet. 

Film Companion’s coverage of the Berlinale is made possible by the support of Goethe Mumbai