Thank you, I needed this. After what Imran Khan has so picturesquely described as the cinema about hairy bloody men, Tighee in Marathi comes as a whiff of fresh air. Hairy men, yes. But no blood. Gentle, elegiac, elegant, and Bergmanesque, Tighee, on the surface, is the story of two estranged sisters, Swati (Neha Pendse) and Sarika (Sonalee Kulkarni), getting together to look after their mother, the difficult and dying Hemalata Ranade (Bharti Achrekar).
On the surface, this sounds like a typical set-up for a domesticated drama. Screenwriter Nikhil Mahajan constantly surprises us, upturns our normal responses, by bringing in elements of the unforeseen. It’s like sudden spurts of a strong breeze amidst an atmosphere of uneasy calm.
Though the sisters played with glorious grace by Pendse and Kulkarnee, they remain at the forefront of the sibling saga; the supporting characters are, well, strongly supportive! There is not an inch of flab in the storytelling. Even when the pace seems languorous, it is with reason: the characters are given an opportunity to regain lost ground when they are slipping and sliding off the wall.
Debutant director Jeejivisha Kale knows her Marathi characters in and out. They may flounder in their conviction; she doesn’t. Even the puppy whom the mother and two daughters adopt, has a life of his own. Nothing is a prop. The screenplay is too busy gathering calm in the chaos to look outside the family range.
About seventy percent into the steeply subdued storytelling, a rather distasteful twist occurs. It changes the entire climate of the chronicle, rendering the family dynamics into casualties of a traumatic legacy. I wonder what Tighee would have been without the twist! Certainly not what it is! And probably not easy with the tragic trajectory it trails into, while harvesting into what Tolstoy called the unique unhappiness of every unhappy family.
Tighee is beautifully shot by Milind Jog. The characters are never seen by us as camera-captured. Angles and profiles are not the point. The emotions are. Giving unconditional heft to the storytelling are the actors. Neha Pendse and Sonalee Kulkarni don’t look like sisters. They don’t need to. Both the actresses sink their sensibilities deep into their characters. Bharati Achrekar’s cranky matriarchal act seems a bit over-the-top. But she is finally a force to reckon with.
The other notable performance comes from Jamini Pathak as Pendse’s creepy boss, always trying to touch Swati in ways that defile the woman much more than in the physical sense.
The sequence where the mother tells her daughters she won’t allow them to be defiled a second time is the moment where Tighee acquires its status as a remarkable film. Greatness occurs in the moments when we are not prepared for it.
Thank God for a cinema that still speaks to us without blaring abuses.
Tighee ends with a beach moment where the two sisters stand together while their disgraced father stands a distance away. At times, just knowing where to stand makes all the difference.
