Oscars voters have always had a soft spot for movies about movies – and Last Film Show should very much fit their bill as they survey the candidates for the Best International Film Academy Award. India’s submission for the category is a lushly-lensed feature aimed squarely at showcasing the magical allure of film and the mystical allure of tangible, touchable celluloid, packaged within the very accessible narrative of a village kid’s rite of passage from a rebellious urchin to an aspiring filmmaker.
Teasing a thoroughly engaging performance out of his non-professional child actor Bhavin Rabari, Indian director Pan Nalin manages to elevate what could have been a saccharine, feel-good narrative into something endearingly magical. Based on his own childhood experiences in the backwaters of the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat, Last Film Show – which bowed at Tribeca before being snapped up by Samuel Goldwyn Films for U.S. distribution – bears witness to the power of cinema as an enthralling agent for personal and social change.
Set in 2010, Last Film Show revolves around Samay (Rabari), a mischievous nine-year-old whose provincial family has seemingly fallen on hard times. While an upper-class Brahmin by birth, Sanay’s father (Dipen Raval) can only earn a living running a tea stall at the local train station. Still, the patriarch retains the airs of his priestly caste, and that includes a disdain for popular culture – and that, of course, includes movies and all the sensationalist entertainment they generate.
It’s during one of these rare forays to the picture house – for a screening of a lavish Hindu devotional film about the goddess Kali – that Samay gets bitten by the movie bug. And so begins the loud and long-haired boy’s initiation into the world of film: dabbling with shards of stained glass to produce filtered light, and using advertising pictures on the back of matchboxes to string together incredible stories to tell his friends.
Samay’s aspirations receive a further boost when he befriends projectionist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali). Having tasted Samay’s packed lunches – the scenes in which his mother (Richa Meena) prepares them merit a culinary-themed film – Fazal agrees to allow the boy to watch movies from the projection booth, as long as he gets to eat her food every day. Here, Samay learns how to work the machines, and the viewer is treated in loving detail to films whirring through old-school projectors, courtesy of Swapnil Sonawane’s cinematography. This delicate and imaginative camerawork also brings Samay’s subsequent adventures vividly to life, such as his and his friends’ stuttering efforts to hold film screenings in a derelict house with pilfered film reels, self-built DIY equipment and raw foley work.
Beyond the expected narrative of a boy-done-good – based on Nalin’s own story of leaving his village at an early age to try his luck at filmmaking in the city – it’s on a visceral level that Last Film Show shines. And the film’s spiritual level peaks in its final reel, when Samay is thrust into a junkyard in which he sees projectors and celluloid being destroyed and then regenerated into something else, the ghosts of films past, reincarnated in everyday items of the present.
Here, the film lives up to the director’s somehow fancy description of being a “Pan Nalin flight”. That is, a flight into fantasy, fueled by the spirits of all the auteurs he name-checks as his idols in the credits and the finale: the Lumieres, Andrei Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray. The latter is apparent from the very beginning, when we see Samay running on the railway tracks like in the iconic sequence in Pather Panchali.
While taking a few mild jabs at the political situation in India of the day – such as Fazal’s bitter comment about how “the future belongs to storytellers who tell lies”, a thinly-veiled critique of nationalist ideologues who fanned the fame of sectarian violence in Gujarat and beyond through propaganda – Last Film Show is first and foremost a love letter to cinema. And it’s an evocative letter which should go down well with people of all ages and times.
Director, screenwriter, production designer: Pan Nalin
Cast: Bhavin Rabari, Richa Meena, Bhavesh Shrimali, Dipen Raval
Producers: Dheer Momaya, Marc Duale, Pan Nalin
Cinematography: Swapnil Sonawane
Editors: Shreyas Beltangdy, Pavan Bhat
Music: Cyril Morin
Production companies: Monsoon Films, Jugaad Motion Pictures, Stranger88 Production, with Virginie Films and Incognito Films
World sales: Orange Studio
In Gujarati
110 minutes
