Movie Review: Gattu

Quality cinema for children is a rarity in Bollywood-obsessed India but the scenario may be beginning to change for the better. Gattu, Rajan Khosa’s first film since his much applauded 1997 debut, Dance of the Wind, provides a welcome boost to a neglected stream of big-screen storytelling aimed at pre-teen and teenage moviegoers.

The defining attribute of this charming little gem is that it does not talk down to its target audience. In telling the story of an illiterate boy who grudgingly works in his exploitative uncle’s junkyard in Roorkee and dreams of being the small town’s champion kite-flyer, Khosa adopts a highly original, empathetic and even tone.

Gattu is neither preachy nor sentimental. Far from it. But the film not only strikes an instant emotional chord but also makes its larger point about the bleaker aspects of the Indian reality, placing itself in the context of what is eventually a high-spirited tale of a disadvantaged boy’s triumph over his station in life.

The film does not romanticize the plucky youngster’s plight not does it seek to unduly prettify the setting. Satya Rai Nagpaul’s camera captures the dusty town with all its grime and grimness visible all the way through. A junkyard, a garbage dump, a cramped school toilet and sundry unadorned terraces in the heart of the semi-urban spread are the principal spaces where the action takes place.

But the focus of the film is squarely on the wide expanse of the blue sky – a simple metaphor for the little boy’s overwhelming desire to break free from his rather miserable existence.

Gattu is a loner. His only companion is a lamb named Tiger. He spends his paltry savings to buy milk for the animal. The boy is not averse to taking recourse to occasional lies and sleights of hand to fund his hobby.        

Gattu (played by first-timer Mohammad Samad with remarkable spontaneity) grows on the viewer quickly as he withstands the angry admonishments of his uncle and duels constantly with his friends and rivals in the bylanes of his neighbourhood in the ultimate mission to get the better of Kali, the invincible black kite whose strings are in the hands of a mysterious flyer.

Every time Kali is spotted in the sky above Roorkee, Gattu mounts a challenge only to come a cropper. The boy has his kite strings cut seven times before he realizes that the only way he can settle scores is by flying his kite from the highest roof in town – atop the government school.

Gattu cannot read and write but he is a boy with a fertile imagination that helps him wriggle out of tight spots. He gets into many especially after he bluffs his way into the school by filching a student’s uniform off a clothesline and joining a class.

He risks detection at every step but keeps his wits about him. When three classmates see through his ruse, he cooks up a story about his being an agent who has been sent to the school by his boss to protect the premises from a terrorist attack.

The classmates, two boys and a girl, become his accomplices as Gattu plots to break into the locked school terrace and have another go at Kali.

The threads of the story are pretty simple but never simplistic. Khosa does not soften the predominantly downbeat air of the film for a moment, and even as Gattu ends on a high note it does not let go off its sardonic tenor.

As the curtains come down, the officious school principal (played by Jayanta Das, last seen in Vicky Donor) leads his students in assertively belting out Sare jahan se achcha Hindustan hamara. Gattu definitely knows better. You cannot resist a mild chuckle.

Produced by Children’s Film Society, India, Gattu is in the multiplexes in a limited release. Head to the nearest screen it’s playing on and buy a ticket. It would be money well spent.