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Canberra Today 13°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Siddharth’ (M) ****

siddharth1HURRAH! A feature set only one level above the nadir of Indian society.

Why hurrah? Writer/director Richie Mehta spurns Bollywood’s shams to tell it like it is among one-man micro-businesses supporting families for whom any tiny scrap of fiscal independence beats working in somebody else’s sweatshop.

Meet chain-wallah Mahendra (Rajesh Tailang), who walks along narrow streets choking in indescribable filth looking for folk needing a zipper repaired. His wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) cares for their daughter in the single room where the family sleeps, sits, and cooks on the floor with only a mattress and a cupboard in the wall for furniture and no visible sanitation arrangements

The fourth member of the Saini family, 12-year-old Siddharth, has gone to work in a city eight hours away by bus. A message comes. Siddharth is missing, believed abducted. The main body of the film is Mahendra’s odyssey searching for him.

This résumé may strike you as depressing. Indeed, there’s not a lot of laughs to lighten the film’s impact. But those attributes should not deter compassionate folk from watching the film. Courage, determination and sacrifice more than outweigh them. Optimism defies commercial realities confronting the family. Saving the bus fare would take 40 days. By then, who knows what might have claimed Siddhartha – the organ trade, the sex business and slavery are all possibilities.

Mahendra has only one faint clue – a location called Dongri where it is said that charities care for street children. Nobody he asks in Delhi knows where it is. Without even a photo to help such a charity to locate the boy, he takes the overnight train from Delhi to Mumbai.

I sat alone at the first Canberra screening of “Siddharth”. I hoped to find in it a remembrance of things past, when Indian films told stories about real people without Bollywood’s modern pollution. I was not disappointed. It is indeed bleak, but it’s also beautiful and rewarding in unexpected ways.


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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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