A family struggles to make peace between its tumultuous past, composed of militant maoists, with the realities and prerequisites of contemporary indian society, in the hope that this will allow them to secure a stable future for their children. Far from the glamour and excesses of Bollywood, as well as from the similarly-clicheed images of India’s urban bustle, A Rifle and a Bag slinks into the backstages of India’s social tableau, looking to shine the spotlight on a story that diverges from the official versions proliferated by media channels that are loyal to those in Power.
The film – which premiered at Rotterdam, in the „Bright Future” sidebar – is the first production of the NoCut collective, which is composed of Cristina Haneș (Romania), Isabella Rinaldi (Italy) and Arya Rothe (India), three young directors who studied together at the international documentary film school Doc Nomads. The concept of a collective doesn’t seem to be fashionable in contemporary cinema, but here it’s justified – if we look at the final result – for a series of reasons: first of all because it favours forgoing dominating norms and hierarchies of the industry in the favour of collaborative work, in which tasks are split in flexible and efficient ways; also, because it almost single-handedly evokes an entire history of militant political cinema, in which one Chris Marker or Jean-Luc Godard could travel to the ends of the world to supply hot anthropological documents, which contribute to the emancipation of peoples oppressed by Imperialist forces, etc., etc. We’re not in the same years, obviously – but it’s all the more surprising since the film, which stays loyal to this sparse economy, retains something from the utopic atmosphere of those times, in which everything seemed to be on the path of being invented and reinvented every single day.

A Rifle and a Bag obliquely explores the political points opened up by the interest that is granted to the above-mentioned family. Somi and her husband, who aren’t even thirty yet, are former naxalites – meaning, former „rebels” that militate, gun in hand, for a different, more just means of organizing Indian society, and for the preservation of the jungle and so on – in short, for marxist ideals. The film follows across a longer period of time the ways of life of these people who have publicly rejected the guerrilla, who are now caught up in all sorts of dead-end administrative procedures: for example, the husband cannot obtain his caste certificate which would enable their kids to go to school. When their oldest son, age six, finally is able to go to school, the sequences which take place in his classroom unearths a traumatic process of precocious military drafting, wherein the kids are forced to sing patriotic songs and to show their approval of being drafted in the country’s army. This is the limbo – as critic Ionuț Mareș calls it – in which the family members are struggling: entering a conflictual situation with their former brothers-in-arms and knocking at the door of a society which, even though it leaves the impression of a favorable view on their integration, actually is hell-bent on humiliating them at any given occasion.
This is all the more emotional in the long shot we have of Somi, sitting on the banks of a small body of water, as she – nostalgically – recounts stories to her son about her involvement in the naxalite organization. Initially, the boy horses around – but throughout the course of Somi’s storytelling, we feel, along with the child, that something is gaining momentum, as if the belief in the former utopia could be born again out of a couple of words and memories. Somi’s mind is still there, in the jungle – while she also takes care, in extremely delicate sequences, of her children. It is thus becoming to see such a dignified figure that, although forced to live a precarious life at the margins of society, gives voice to a social concept that is much more advanced than the simplistic slogans thrown around through so-called developed nations.

It is unclear if the film – which questions this militantist worldview quite superficially, rather opting for vignettes of the family’s current domestic life – actually proposes to rehabilitate the ideal of political fight, which is by and large stigmatized, and not just in contemporary India. This interpretative flow is especially motivated by the film’s austere aesthetics, which is composed exclusively of „observational” shots that instill a kind of distance from the subject. After all, the strictness by which the directors cultivate this formal system – almost all scenes are made up of one single shot – simultaneously represents the film’s force and weakness. Its force, because sometimes this distance leads to instances of „profane illumination”, like the one in which the young father confronts the sadness and emotion of his son after a day of school, far from home; incapable of quelling his tears, the father regards – for one second – the camera with a sense of entanglement and shame, and that second concentrates in itself a great cinematic moment. But the limits of the film have to do with the fear of adventuring beyond the predetermined borders of this form, which sometimes feels much more like a convenience than a form of justice at the end – for example, we lack any kind of visually suggestive evocation of the jungle that can be hinted at in Somi’s eyes…
Yet it’s possible that this rediscovery of an utopia by the mother might be favoured exactly because she is in the experience of being in front of the camera – because the film manages to camouflage, if not invert, the power dynamics of a white foreigner filming an indigineous person. The impression that’s left is that, while going against the current, Somi – much more energetic and at ease than her husband – takes the technology into her own hands and uses it exactly to gain wings of her own, to take her struggle to new places. Somehow reminding of Roberto Rosselini’s India: Matri Bhumi (1959), this anthropological gaze, which infiltrates into the heart of India from the exterior, will also have been marked by the process of tracing the shape of a small locus of resistance in front of the state leviathan.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.