Village Rockstars 2

Village Rockstars 2

(c) Flying River Films, Akanga Film Asia

VERDICT: With ‘Village Rockstars 2’, Assamese director Rima Das reunites with the cast of her highly-acclaimed 2017 festival hit in a mesmerizing portrait of a teenage girl guitarist’s struggles with nature and culture in northeast India.

How does an indie filmmaker conjure up the sequel to an experimental, no-budget festival hit about a cute ten-year-old that’s high on ambience and low on narrative? While some would choose to fall back on the conventions to gain access to the mainstream, Indian filmmaker Rima Das has done the opposite: Village Rockstars 2 comes with even less of a storyline than its first installment. Bowing in Busan’s Jiseok competition, this latest outing from the self-taught, multi-hyphenate cineaste is a near-impressionistic and ceaselessly captivating montage showing the quotidian existence of her teenage protagonist in a village in the far-flung Indian province of Assam.

What Village Rockstars 2 lacks in dramatic twists, Das compensates with camerawork oozing poetic beauty or electric energy at every turn – imagery she spliced together to produce a tapestry of utmost poignancy and authenticity. No longer the starry-eyed, guitar-craving 10-year-old that she was in the first film, Bandita Das delivers a natural yet nuanced performance as an adolescent contending with the joys and humdrum realities of her provincial existence, a youngster at once content and confused about her observations of the passing of time.

The film begins with a group of kids gathering in the fields at dusk, making trinkets out of weeds. They sing and pluck at a guitar, an instrument Dhunu (Bandita Das) cherishes and handles with care in between the days when she performs with a local band. With these opening sequences, Rima Das seems to be picking up where she left off seven years ago, when she chronicled a free-spirited child’s attempt to acquire a real six-string and defy traditional tenets of girlhood in the process. Now that Dhunu’s got it, one might expect to see a film about her onward journey as a fledging musician – a rural and more subtle equivalent, perhaps, to films like We Are the Best! or Linda Linda Linda.

What Rima Das sets out to do, however, is outlined in a subsequent scene, when a teacher instructs Dhunu and her classmates to write an essay about the two topics deemed the most important to them: the floods in Assam and “your aim in life”, and in that order. Indeed, Village Rockstars 2 is less a film about human beings fighting against nature but more about them living in it, as Dhunu and her mother (Basanti Das) learn to embrace the good and the bad, as divined by the gods. Serving as the film’s sole cinematographer, Rima Das manages to capture the most vivid moments in which her characters’ display their rugged ways of accommodating the frequent monsoons and rising waters besieging their lands.

We do get to see Dhunu playing music and also touring small towns with her band. But we actually see more about these budding musicians’ encounters and experiences off stage: the rows with misogynist concert organisers who refuse to hand over their performance fee because of they lack a male singer, or their camaraderie as they work in the fields together to earn some extra money in between gigs.

Desire, deception and death do pop up in Dhunu’s life, but Rima Das doesn’t overplay these events as earth-shattering melodramatic milestones in her protagonist’s young life. Rather, they seem to be stations Dhunu is bound to travel in her journey through time, moments that are as significant as the ones in which the teenager removes bloodsucking leeches from her legs, or goes around town looking for a job to bring home some extra cash. The screenplay simply moves from one event to the next, without any of them being shaped as a moment of foreboding, pending closure or catastrophe. In parallel with Rima Das’ camerawork, Shreyank Nanjappa’s sound production and design is crucial in providing the film with its necessary natural ambience.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, production design, editing: Rima Das
Cast: Bhanita Das, Basanti Das, Junumoni Das, Bhaskar Das

Producers: Rima Das, Fran Borgia
Music composer: Pallab Talukdar
Sound designer: Shreyank Nanjappa
Production companies: Flying River Films, Akanga Film Asia
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Jiseok Competition)
In Assamese
107 minutes