Starting off as a grim critique of the violent exploitation of India’s rural working poor and ending with a sweepingly sentimental montage highlighting the undying, lifelong love of an old couple, In the Belly of a Tiger hops between a variety of styles and emotions which can be a challenge. What remains true throughout, however, is director Siddartha Jatla’s unwavering empathy towards his subjects and his ability to tease so much lyrical beauty from the worst and best of scenarios, in a heartfelt ode to human resiliency.
There are echoes of his directorial debut Love and Shukla, an intimate urban drama about the ebbs and flows of a lower middle-class couple’s relationship in the stifling environment of a big city. An international co-production backed by funds from the U.S., China, Taiwan and Indonesia and featuring a slightly more multinational production crew – the most eye-catching perhaps being composer Shigeru Umebayashi, renowned for scoring Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love – In the Belly of A Tiger deserves a roaring run through the festival circuit after its premiere in the Berlin Forum.
At the centre of Belly is a family of five – the old couple Bhagole (Lawrence Francis) and Prabhata (Poonam Tiwari), their widowed son Saharsh (Sorabh Jaiswar), and his two daughters (Jyoti and Sonali) – returning to their ancestral village on the vast plains of northern India. Having sold their land years ago to relocate to the city, where they tried and failed to better their lives, they come home to find that despair has doubled during the years. Most people can no longer sustain themselves on farming and are now earning a living at the local brick factory, where they are paid a pittance and treated as disposable material.
As Saharsh joins the queue and then the toil, he experiences first-hand the exploitation and violence prevailing at the factory – and how the workers resign themselves to their sorry fate, as if it’s some kind of self-sacrifice on their part for a future they can’t see. This is mirrored in how some react to another more visceral predator in their midst: in a desperate act akin to that shown in the ancient Japanese countryside in The Ballad of Nakayama, old men are offering themselves as fodder for a prowling tiger, in the hope that their surviving families will receive some kind of compensation from the authorities.
Inevitably, that’s what Bhagole and Prabhata consider doing, as Saharsh struggles at the factory because of his frail physical state and inability to cope with the humiliation meted out to him and his co-workers. Through static, meticulously framed shots of the dusty, barren village in daytime (nearly all of them with the factory’s smoking, phallic chimney looming ominously large in the background) and in the night (where people shuffle through dark forests and lie plastered in front of a neon-lit liquor store), their desperation is made visibly palpable. It’s hard not to be moved by a confused, drunken old man pleading with Saharsh to show him the way to his land – he doesn’t remember where it is, or maybe even whether it’s still his.
While most numb themselves with ganja and alcohol – and that includes Saharsh, whose grief for his dead wife makes him to dwell in reminiscences of their blissful past – Bhagole and Prabhata remain resilient. Echoing a colourful village play interwoven into the story, in which the Hindu deity Vishnu preaches love and salvation to humanity, the couple insist in living and doing the best they can, keeping their son and his grandchildren’s spirits up and sustaining their faith in each other.
While the villagers’ mortal conditions will perhaps hardly change – and Jatla, to his credit, doesn’t provide a feel-good ending in which people are saved and the powers-that-be get their comeuppance – the pair’s positivity wins out, in a final sequence where lotuses bloom all over the land, in one of the many visually ravishing sequences Jatla deliver with skill and eloquence.
Editor Akhmad Fesdi Anggorro, making his first foray outside his native Indonesia after years of work on award-winning festival hits such as Kamila Andini’s Berlinale 2022 competition title Nana: Before, Now and Then, manages to help Jatla keep all the narrative strands coherently together. Jatla might still need some more time and space to strike a balance between his jet-black social critique and magical-realist romance, but The Belly of a Tiger is already one impressive step towards his search for cinematic nirvana.
Director, cinematography: Siddartha Jatla
Screenwriters: Amanda Mooney, Siddarthia Jatla
Cast: Lawrence Francis, Poonam Tiwari, Sorabh Jaiswar, Jyoti, Sonali
Producers: Sarada Uma, Fang Li, Bhavana Goparaju
Editor: Akhmad Fesdi Anggorro
Music composer: Shigeru Umebayashi
Sound designer: Resool Pookutty
Production companies: Bhairavi Films, Wonder Pictures, Jeevi Films
World sales: Flash Forward Entertainment
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Forum)
In Hindi
91 minutes