Of Mirrors and Its Residents
Long Form Review
In the opening sequence of Imago, the sun rays falling through the open windows sketch the outline of a young girl. As she goes about her daily routine, we catch glimpses of her. The de-focussed shots of her hands let slip details of the protagonist. Our first sight of her is through her own eyes, in the mirror, a face marked with as much inhibitions as vitiligo.
We are introduced to her world, through each place she passes and each person she acknowledges. Her head bowed down and her being absorbing the unaccepting stares of the village folk, she walks on. Her friend, a much younger boy, is her only companion outside home. Unrecognized and silent, she sits in a noisy and chirpy class day after day.
Into her life, then, enters her new Marathi language teacher. He not only notices her but also encourages her to recognize her inner beauty. She sees herself through a different lens. There is an elevated sense of being she experiences. This change in perception towards her own self, is clearly attributed to the teacher who she eventually gets infatuated with. As she faces loss, rejection and pain, she transforms into an individual capable of discerning the reflected and the real.
The movie is a story of metamorphosis which is depicted through the traversal of “image” in the eyes of Namrata, of herself. Mirrors and reflections, literal and metaphorical, keep appearing all through the movie through different connotations. Every character, the grandfather, mother, friend and classmates, become the lens through which she sees herself. Same happens with places. Home, school, woods, an old fort, a lake, all become spaces reminding her of her unattractiveness. Characters and places gradually become the familiar, cocooning her although uncomfortably.
Visual narration plays an integral role as the reflections keep changing. At the beginning, when she doesn’t think she is beautiful, botched mirrors, sideward glances and refracted water surfaces encounter her. When she starts feeling beautiful, the visuals differ. One major sequence that grabs the audience’s attention, is the dream sequence. The foggy, smoky imagery where she wears her best dress with loose hair as she walks past her classmates to her teacher, only to be seen endearingly by him is very effective in emoting the desires of Namrata. Conversely, as he avoids her affection, she walks through thorny dry imagery of a defeated and pained heart. The large expanses of rock, as she walks across plateaus, show her in a diminutive scale, depicting her sense of self in a moment of loss.
The protagonist’s inner state of mind is vividly externalized through her everyday actions. The demure and reserved Namrata, at the beginning of the movie didn’t feel the joy associated in eating corn cobs or flying paper rockets. Halfway through the movie, she feels light as she tosses the paper rocket successfully across the water. She feels content as she buys candies for her friend. Unnoticed, even by herself, she turns into a fierce confident girl when she hits back at a gang of eve-teasing boys.
One thing that the movie gets perfectly right, is the music. Right from the first tone, hope is tuned into the narrative. Slow, rhythmic, slightly cheerful notes punctuate the contrasting melancholic visuals. The dream sequence, on the other hand, has entwined strains of piano and violin. The only song in the movie sung in a young shrill female voice is given weight through lyrics. The audience experiences the village through detailed ambient noises captured in every location, authenticating the atmosphere created.
The movie, through Namrata’s story, depicts the life in a small town. Young girls sharing secrets with trees, talking to pigeons, childish jealousies and encounters with the death of loved ones, fill in heart-warming sequences which make Imago more real.
Imago ends with a montage of Namrata’s village, her mother alone at home, her friend alone by the lake and her teacher alone in the woods. Her cocoon has been left behind. She broke out of it and with it, her image of herself through the eyes of all these people and places. She took flight into a world which is big and populated. Here, there are no mirrors. There is no need for any mirrors. She knows who she is and holds her head high, caught in the middle of a fast-moving world.