How do we solve a problem like Maria? The nuns in The Sound Of Music sang about Julie Andrews without eye-rolling sardonicism. How do we define a film as artless and ingenuous as Sing Geetham? Brimming with love and hope, it defies every present-day filmmaking convention and redefines the concept of cinema as a field of fabled fertility, irrigated by tender care and nurturing.
For nearly the entire playingtime of two hours plus—and it does feel playful and mischievous all the way — the characters in a fictional gold-mining village called Kuberapuram keep singing. The last time something similar happened on screen, it was in 1990 in Amol Palekar’s Thodasa Romani Ho Jayen in which most of the conversations were written in the form of poetry and songs .
Thirty-six years later, Sing Geetham creates a similar spell, when the villagers, driven by greed, cut down the very last tree to dig for more gold. This act of devastation causes the village deity, Lord Kubera, to curse the villagers. They must express every single emotion through song.
This curse proves a blessing for music composer Devi Sri Prasad, who has blasted a ‘fun’-tuning every day conversations into musical beads of buoyancy. This musical format, akin to what was attempted in Evita, Les Misérables , and recently in the musical version of Hamlet, tends to stretch out its cuteness a little too far at times.
This, however, is never a burden for the narrative. A feeling of fertile ebullience, and a mood that can be described as the opposite of cynicism, runs through the narrative, giving to the overall mood an irresistible joie de vivre.
The cast is vast. And game . The newcomers playing the romantic leads, Ayaan and Ahilya Bamroo, have a fresh-faced enthusiasm and energy which are used with gusto to prop up the ecological message on how plundering the land is bringing us closer to doom every day. The newcomers’ inexperience works to the narrative’s advantage. If they are uncorrupted, they complement the mood.
Interestingly, the villain of the peace is a woman (Shalini Kondepudi). Eventually, she too is singing the same tune as the villagers: for civilization to survive, the rules of existence must change. And that includes our movies where guns, gore, and grime are glorified to the point of sickening abundance.
Sing Geetham’s singing-ness is after a point, self-indulgent.
For all its leaps into excessive exuberance, there is always the next joyous song to mine. Sing Geetham tells us how important it is to keep the child within us alive. More than its cinematic qualities—all of which are geared towards contouring the sense of joyous surrender to Nature – this film needs to be celebrated for its innocent energy, like a toddler running nonstop after learning to walk.
For producer Nag Ashwin , this is a passion project. For the audience, for all its excesses of juvenescence, Sing Geetham is a liberating experience , bringing to the screen that rare, almost extinct feeling of experiencing the primeval pleasure of unalloyed joy.
