Filmmaker Ritesh Batra might only be four films old but his filmography couldn’t be more impressive. After striking gold with his debut, The Lunchbox, one of the most beloved transnational Indian films, he ventured out to the world to work with some of the most iconic screen legends in history namely Charlotte Rambling in The Sense of an Ending and Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in the beautiful, Our Souls At Night – a love story, like The Lunchbox, that transcended peripheral barriers such as race and age.
But Batra it seems couldn’t get past his first love and muse, Mumbai. He returns to it to do what he does best – tell us a simple story of two lost souls who find comfort in each other’s company in a maddening labyrinthine metropolitan. This sequel of sorts to The Lunchbox may not be as captivating but it’s just as warm, generous and deeply affecting.
Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddique) and Miloni (Sanya Malhotra in her most trenchant performance yet) are dejected everyday Indians – Miloni is miserable with her middle class existence while Rafi is one of India’s many thankless, faceless street vendors.
Their meet-cute is aptly at the Gateway of India where Rafi, who takes photos of visitors at the historical monument, takes Miloni’s photograph and from then on, an unlikely symbiotic friendship blossoms between the two. He needs her to convince his visiting sansakari grandmother that they’re to be wed so she can stop pestering him while she needs him as an escape route from everything.
The funny, if not a bit derivative, scenario thankfully doesn’t drive the story, the characters do, making Photograph much less of a situation comedy than a gently told ethnography of Mumbaikaars captured on film.
Some scenes truthfully do drudge along but Batra injects enough humor, beauty and imagination including a moving (and surprisingly not-at-all jarring) spectral encounter to keep us fascinated.
