The unspoken subject of Mithya is violence, and the big zinger here is our recognition that the movie is showing us the makings of a juvenile delinquent -- perhaps the finest since Truffaut unleashed his Antoine Doinel, applauds Sreehari Nair.
Sumanth Bhat's Mithya starts out as the story of a grieving child, but its range of meaning is so imaginatively fresh that it reveals a new vision of human experience.
Mithun, the 11 year old at the centre of Bhat's movie, has lost his parents in a twin tragedy. The boy, however, is determined not to be a whining calf.
If anything, the status of an orphan has refocused him -- he's now more alert than ever.
Though he rarely speaks, Mithun's intelligence is there for us to read, as are the questions bubbling up inside him.
We are with him when he races the elements and with him through his fleeting ecstasies.
When asked to smile, his lips twist into a swoosh-like formation; and even this convulsive movement strikes us as an attempt to communicate.
Athish Shetty, who plays Mithun, never leaves the screen, and filling it with his special brand of spontaneous radiance, he ends up giving one of Indian cinema's most transparent performances.
There are more than a few square conventions being dumped here, and it helps that the terms of the movie are laid out in its initial scenes.
Though we go in expecting a cherub-victim, Mithun is closer in temperament to a Dickensian pauper-prince whose wits become sharpened when his illusions are destroyed. This is a picaresque hero called on to play a tragic part at a blithe young age, a Hamlet without words.
He's also a proud Mumbaikar who has been grafted into Udupi, and the script rather audaciously allows him his feelings of snobbishness, not to mention his roguish appeal and sly individualism.
Working with Cinematographer Udit Khurana, Sumanth Bhat photographs Mithun so that we can freely observe his strategies. Quick of eye and deft of hand, this orphan knows the time-tested art of putting on a distracted face before casually filching something.
Not only is he not crying out for our sympathy, Mithun can barely stand the kindness of others; and his benefactors include a bullying bunch of relatives from his father's side, some fumbling law-keepers, and an aunt and an uncle who have taken on the risk of 'informally' adopting him.
When a tussle breaks out for the ownership of the orphan, the movie expands in scope to give us unexpected character notations: We see that the aunt is attractive in a way that women with beak-shaped noses sometimes tend to be, and we see that the uncle's shiny pate is actually a wisdom centre.
As these adults discuss the cause of his parents' death (Suicide? Murder?), the boy stations himself outside doors and inside alcoves, overhearing theories, amassing facts, details, hearsays.
We see him learning, course-correcting, deliberating, we see him licking his wounds, growing up a little.
We are held in a daze by how non-schematic the storytelling is, and Udit Khurana's evocation of Udupi is an endorsement of the movie's feeling tone.
This is an Udupi of brown quarries giving way to spurts of green, a mirage of nature, modernity, and greed.
When it rains in Udupi, it feels like a retreat to an innocent past, this sudden shift of perspective mirroring Mithun's confusions, and it is as though the mildly howling wind, the hesitant puddles, and the wet pepper trees are conspiring to show us the boy's state of mind.
The look of the movie, the nimble-footed cast and above all, Sumanth Bhat's tough-minded humanism give Mithya an evanescent quality. Together, they turn this into a tale of 'adolescence, interrupted'.
Let me not reel in the cannons: The allusion to the much-acclaimed Netflix show is intentional, for Mithya is the greater work.
Be forewarned that we are not dealing with sacred entertainment here, the kind that feasts on accumulated citations and secretes olive branches.
In fact, it's nothing like those made-for-film-festival thingies that try to compensate for their lack of dramatic stakes by treating you to pretty visuals and solemn faces.
What Sumanth Bhat and his team have served up is 'great drama'.
But the difference between aestheticised soap operas such as Ullozhukku and this one is that this is great drama as Strindberg and Renoir meant it to be.
Though its emotional draw is lucid enough (who among us hasn't imagined the death of one or both of our parents, and shuddered at that thought?), Mithya has no easy villains and it illuminates the humanity of its characters rather than diminishes it.
Prakash Thuminad plays the boy's rapidly balding uncle, while Roopa Varkady plays the emotionally confused aunt, and we see the husband and wife differently with each passing frame.
In the beginning, they come across as a couple of eager beavers who are too eager to be kind.
By the end, they help the boy by asserting more facets of their own personalities.
A tiny detail of his being a rickshaw driver is unloaded upon us in such a feathery manner that it gives him a special shade we may not be prepared for.
To show her threading eyebrows just seconds before the boy bursts into her salon and demands his bicycle is to give her a dignity independent of the main narrative.
Though this is Mithun's story, Bhat brings the people surrounding him into focus so unassumingly that it's almost as if we had figured them out by ourselves. Even their moments of clumsiness function like windows into their souls, their wiggly, jittery souls.
As a police officer tries to explain the complexities of the law to the two sparring families, he gropes for an exact clause from the penal code to make his case.
A relative who goes too far when speaking ill about Mithun's mother gets his face daubed with a splash of the creamiest-looking falooda.
When it comes to expounding character, Sumanth Bhat and Udit Khurana know the value of small surprises.
Those few extra beats of lingering on the aunt's smile speak to the purity of her affections.
The uncle's drunken frustration in a sequence hits you harder because it's captured with his back to the camera.
I just loved Prakash Thuminad and Roopa Varkady in their respective roles, and I loved the scenes of this miserable couple struggling to make Mithun feel at home. And as they strive to establish a connection with the orphan, we come to understand their domestic chemistry better.
The persona of the uncle benefits immensely from Thuminad's world-weary look -- it's a look one associates with autodidacts and gamblers, with pitchmen who are also marvellous conmen, a look more suited to engravings than oil paintings.
With Thuminad in the role, it feels plausible that the uncle would brush off his wife's pleas to counsel the thieving boy.
It feels equally plausible that, unbeknownst to her, he would choose a private moment with the boy and put the screws on him.
This is a movie that sees the goodness and cunning of its characters as part of the same human continuum; and though its generous eye would have been enough of a coup, Mithya is also a brave movie.
You need the confidence of genius to base your entire story around an 11 year old experiencing a series of epiphanies.
And there's something of the artist's gall in the way Sumanth Bhat takes us staggeringly close to the orphan's sorrow but never once privileges his condition.
By and by it dawns on you, the uncomfortable truth: The protagonist of Mithya is his own adversary.
On those rare occasions when the boy (he looks like a young Gulshan Devaiah) bares his full set of teeth and laughs heartily, we get a sense of the mischief-maker who has been put in abeyance. And we can intuit that it's his natural exuberance and rebellious streak that's slowly being modified into violence.
Yes, the unspoken subject of Mithya is violence, and the big zinger here is our recognition that the movie is showing us the makings of a juvenile delinquent -- perhaps the finest since Truffaut unleashed his Antoine Doinel.
I don't know about you, but I remember the scenes of little Antoine being slapped in 400 Blows more vividly than all the Mexican standoffs that cinema has had to offer me.
Those slaps are so sudden and reverberant that they intensify our feelings, and we realise that we don't have the emotional resources to deal with the experience.
The violence in Mithya is of this very kind; it's violence that erupts from the looseness and texture of life, the sort of violence where a pinprick feels more bruising than a stab in the ribs.
When you filter a hard-edged aesthetic through the consciousness of a child, you are pretty much risking sacrilege; and yet it is this disruptive approach that informs the movie's unique visual style.
Sumanth Bhat and his elves have thought up a world that seems wondrous and full of possibilities one moment, and the next moment, congenitally dangerous.
A world where a lazy conversation patiently waits for its tipping point even as a forest fire builds up in the background.
A world where a beautiful three year old, deep in the pleasures of her first swim, spits laughter and makes whoopee, even as the river around her becomes a mysterious and dark place.
I don't recall seeing camerawork of this quality in an Indian movie anytime recently; it's quite literally an ode to 'sweatless precision'.
And the lines similarly achieve a kind of poetry while always sounding easy-come, easy-go, with everyday Kannada meeting Hindi and English words at random corners and attaining a dramatic logic totally unexpected. (I didn't need subtitles after a while).
Ordinarily, a plot like this one would have been turned into a cautionary tale, which is the movie director's version of 'playing the schoolmarm'.
On the other hand, what comes screaming out of Mithya, what's evident in its every aspect, is Sumanth Bhat's love of children.
The sure touch that marks his filmmaking doesn't conflict with his complete acceptance of childhood pursuits. I think it's a sign of his artistry that Bhat never questions the usefulness of such pursuits.
He understands that to an 11 year old, the sound of leaves being burst on a palm or the sight of pebbles bouncing on water has the same effect as exquisite music.
Mithya too aims for a kind of musicality and achieves it, which in the case of the movie is a fine sense of proportion about its people and their entwining destinies.
A tragedy that befalls a child becomes the tragedy of an entire ecosystem. And instead of softening its orphan, the movie takes us deeper into his unresolved grief and ever deeper into his shady instincts.
In the final scene, when Mithun braces himself to perform an unspeakable act of cruelty, you can see Athish Shetty's face rotting as evil thoughts pass by it.
That scene stops your heart.
And when the boy goes to the pits of his self-confined hell and comes back, you feel purified, as though the last strain of violence has been drained out of you.
A cinema culture that lives on camera pyrotechnics and thunderous dialogues, in which bloodletting is considered the norm for social revolutions and beheading the baseline for establishing savagery, a cinema culture like that forces us to think and respond mechanically.
We needed something this quiet and observant to jolt us back into coherence.
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