Gaami Review

Somewhere in the snowscapes of Northern India, a young boy is trying to escape the shock treatments and lobotomies of an illegal medical lab that conducts human experiments. Down South, a Devadasi woman is trying to shield her daughter Uma from a life of prostitution. In Varanasi, an aghora wrapped in rags is seeking a cure for his peculiar disease - the touch of another human is nearly fatal to him. These three stories unfold in parallel in Vidyadhar Kagita's sweeping drama about the human quest for redemption.

While Shankar (Vishwak Sen) treks the snowscapes in search of an elusive mushroom that will cure his touch-phobia, the lab rat burrows through the floor of his cell looking for an escape. These comprise some of the most astonishing shots of the film: the medical facility's dark corridors haunted by a freak (an experiment gone wrong), the cold grey walls of the inmates' cells, and seemingly just outside these torture chambers, a frigid land of incessant snowfall, fog and thin ice, on which trudge Shankar and his travel-companion Jahnavi (Chandini Chowdary). She is after the same mushroom cave - although her reasons are somewhat dubious. When they locate the cave, "My calculations were right!" she beams. But there is still a chasm to cross, and they have nothing more than a rope with which to cross it.

Strictly speaking, not everything makes sense. How would a person not snap like a twig if they jumped off a cliff with a rope (not bungee, mind you) around their waist like Shankar and Jahnavi take turns doing? And what cold logic allows for a boomerang to help fix a taut rope between cliffs? It however sort of doesn't matter - there is more that is going right than wrong. And moreover, these icy adventures are intercut with the emotional warmth of Uma's story. Angry at first that her mother left her behind to become a Devadasi, she comes around and finally accepts her. But then every wrong thing that could happen to a child of her age, happens.

Gaami embraces the darkness and despair within its three stories. Foreboding landscapes and meticulous sound design take the feeling further. It takes long, too long, for the story to shake off its melancholy and turn a corner. People fall off cliffs, and get attacked by feral dogs - and once, even a lion. Nothing goes to plan. Just when redemption seems at hand, a silly twist of fate flings the characters back to the beginning. It is beyond frustrating - it is exhausting. And then comes the Big Reveal: that looming question mark that you can sense right from the beginning - how are the three stories connected? - is answered. However, unpredictable as the revelation is, it doesn't delight. By the end, most of the awe that carried the first half is dispersed by the haze of the edit leading up to the reveal. It feels like an unworthy way to end such an epic feat of filmmaking.

Gaami is the rare large-scale Telugu film that shakes things up. No "big stars" (Vishwak was a newcomer when he was first cast) - just a maniacal focus on technicals that is reminiscent of S S Rajamouli's work ethic and ambition (although Kagita still has a long way to go with his action choreography). Between Harika Pedda's astonishingly nuanced take on Uma, Mohammad Samad's harrowing depiction of inmate 333, and Vishwak Sen's moody Shankar, the film has an emotional heart. But nothing is quite so memorable as the texture of the film - an otherworldly quality that is both poetic and dark. After a eight-year-long process of bringing it to the screen, Gaami's journey may have come to an end, but one gets the sense director Kagita is just getting started.