In a short 30 minute film, Chaukathi recites the anguishes of womanhood and how their freewill has been chained by the conventionality of our world. And, that too, without using neither antagonism nor protagonism. It simply testifies without judging any single character in the movie.
Chaukathi was the most apprized film of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF) last year and was selected in the non-competitive category at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, a first for any Nepali language film or filmmaker. Rauniyar says that it was merely an attempt for him to retell the childhood memory of his sister-in-law but it has turned out to be something much more profound. In a land where everyone is seeking their rights and identity; women are still forgotten and neglected. Chaukathi provides them with not only a voice but a somber cry!
Shot with two H.D. (High Definition) digital camcorders in a budget of mere 100,000 rupees, the dialogues in the movie were mostly improvised spontaneously with some scenes completed in lengthy single takes. Though the film has been able to garner utmost pragmatism from their improvised modus operandi, it seems to wither away at times. Nevertheless, the lackluster moments are easily engulfed by Rauniar’s powering realism.
The movie is a tale about two women, Trishna (Asha Magarati) and Saraswati (Ranju Jha), finding one another via their mutual pain of being a woman living in a man’s world. Trishna is a suburban and divorced enumerator of Census Bureau of Nepal. She isn’t a ‘feminist’. She is just struggling to survive as a lone woman in our patriarchal society.
Saraswati Gupta, 25, lives in a village in Terai where her importance is as mere as that of a grass – profoundly significant yet deliberately derelict. With marriage, she lost not only her dreams but also her maternal name. She is just ‘Barmajhiyawali’ now, named after the place she comes from. She isn’t happy but she is content with her two children and a husband that brings her pani puri when he returns from his job as a spice vendor.
When Trishna, suburban enumerator asks her if she could talk to her to gather some census data, she replies, “Come back after my family members come home. “Aren’t you a member of this family”, Trishna asks in a sardonic tone. Saraswati is wordless but her eyes are filled with disdain towards this harum-scarum of a woman.
But this tryst will soon change the life of both the women, especially that of Saraswati. Trishna hasn’t just come uninvited to her home but is soon to impinge her soul. Trishna’s bohemian lifestyle soon allures Saraswati and both the women find themselves singing and eating corn together.
But all is not well in the world of the freewheeling enumerator as well. Trishna, recently divorced and a single mother, soon finds herself engulfed by painful nostalgia and longs for a functional family while looking at Saraswati’s family.
While Saraswati doesn’t have any identity, Trishna is struggling to keep up with her newfound sovereignty. Its not that Saraswati has an abusive husband or a scorned life; she is just taken granted by the society that surrounds her.
Director Deepak Rauniyar and actress Asha Magarati at Cannes Film Festival, Paris.
All these societal issues could have easily turned Chaukathi into a humdrum ‘development’ story but that is where Rauniyar’s clever cinematic poetics comes to work. It is a film driven by issues but Chaukathi doesn’t generalize these two characters. Their story might be general but the characters are very affable.
Chaukathi is a timid film that will awe you with its profound subtlety and effortless poesy. Ranju Jha gives an astounding performance and though from the theatre background, melodrama is kept to a minimum. With her performance you almost feel that the film is a scripted documentary.
And Rauniyar achieves all that with clamant crudeness and confounding cinematic flair. And, yes, he does get away with it. Improvised script and slapdash production has gifted Rauniyar’s film with profound pragmatism and the quintessential ingredient of all – poignancy!
Apart from being selected in Cannes, Chaukathi has been recently nominated in the competitive category for the Ahemdabad Film Festival in India.
It is currently being screened at the Kumari Cinema Hall at 6:00 pm.
