Apart from a Hemanth Rao and a Raj Shetty, contemporary Kannada cinema doesn’t have too many filmmakers who introspect about the quality of life. Kuldeep Cariappa’s Nodidavaru Enantare is a film that will haunt your nights and stalk your days.
To say it is about one troubled man’s journey of self-discovery is to say Pather Panchali is about a famine or Bandini about a murder. There is so much to say and so little time.
There are slivers of sheer brilliance in Cariappa’s storytelling, moments that capture our heart and mind by its propensity to tell the truth about life’s uncertainties and betrayals quietly. On the other hand, some of the other moments tend to get too understated, to the point of seeming discordant with the rest of the storytelling.
Significantly, even the weaker portions enhance the feeling of incompleteness that shrouds the protagonist, Siddharth (Naveen Shankar), who starts off as a bit of an upstart. The initial stages in the storytelling show Siddharth dating a wide-eyed, over-friendly girl in his office. He first scolds her for breaking office protocol, then invites her out for dinner, insults her, gets slapped …
Just when I began wondering if Siddharth was a cousin to Arjun Reddy, Cariappa’s screenplay gathers its wits and takes the incalcitrant protagonist through a journey of self-discovery suffused with long beachside walks and bicycle rides in rural Karnataka. The film is beautiful to look at (Ashwin Kennedy’s cinematography is magical), but it is a broken beauty: a landscape of poetic bleakness.
The narration divides itself into four sections. In the first, Siddharth visits his ancestral home to pay his last respects to his dead father. This section brims over with bitterness as Siddharth’s aunt tries to convince him that his father wanted him to marry her daughter (this could be a fabrication fuelled by tragedy).
Disgusted, Siddharth goes on a backpack trekking trip. His encounter with a limbless teenaged shepherd (Rajesh Mariayammanahalli) is tonally the richest of the interludes. In no other part of this picaresque expedition is Siddharth happier as he communes with Nature, with the bright, happy boy as his companion.
In the next section, Siddharth meets a mysterious woman (Apoorva Bhardwaj) who gives a false name, flaunts her sassiness, and advises him to live in the moment. She seems tragically epitomized: the bohemian feminist in search of self, a soul sister to Deepika Padukone in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha.
Does Siddharth get a happy ending with her? I am not too sure. Her response to seeing him suddenly at his doorstep is, “What are YOU doing here?”
Did she mean, “What ARE you doing here?”
Unanswered questions, hazy answers, untold truths, and a bitter confrontation between Siddharth and his missing mother(who had abandoned him when he was 2) augment the rhythm of loss and abandonment that runs through this languorously paced, immensely rewarding cinema about self-discovery, with a steak of hope impaling the drama of desolation.
