Crossing Bridges: Country Roads, take me to home, to Arunachal

If you are likely to be moved to deep emotions and tears by the idea of a Mumbai-based IT professional rediscovering his remote countryside roots in North-East India, and making the life-defining move of permanent homecoming, you will most likely feel you have a seen a minor classic. On the other hand, if you distance yourself and assess the film on merit, you are more likely to feel that it is a well-intentioned film which draws from multiple sources and uses clichéd allegory to make a moral statement, but not a classic by some distance. Either way, Crossing Bridges, not pacy or entertaining, has enough merit to be watchable.

Crossing Bridges is a very simple narrative of an IT professional, Tashi, who is forced to return home, to the North-East, from Mumbai during the recession period. Tashi has been away from his home for 8-9 years, and his culture is almost alien to him. Now, Tashi doesn’t have a job and is forced to stay in the village. Tashi is an only child. His parents want him to stay back forever, and tend to the field, but Tashi is keen on finding another job, and going back to Mumbai. Sadly, along with his job, Tashi has lost his girl-friend too, who has ‘eloped’ with his best friend to Delhi. Whereas Tashi has a laptop, a mobile phone and camera, he misses a TV and a car, luxuries he soon buys. And then he meets Anila, a substitute teacher in the village school, who helps him cross the symbolic bridge.

Writer-director Sange Dorjee Thongdok, who belongs to the Sherdukpen tribe of West Kameng district, is the first person of his State to pass out from a film school, the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) at Kolkata, in 2008. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Delhi University. His father, a government servant, wanted him to follow suit. But destiny willed otherwise, when Sange went to appear for the SRFTI entrance test at Guwahati, and was selected. Prior to this film, Sange Dorjee had made two short films--Pratyabartan and Evening Café.

About Crossing Bridges, he says, “It is my first feature film; it is about my people and my journey. Whenever I used to come back home, things seemed quite alien to me. As it was my own story, I felt it would work well -- I would be honest in my treatment and in a way it would be a safe narrative to attempt for me. Through the protagonist's life, the audience would see my world unfolding in front of them.” A great fan of Iranian cinema, he is highly influenced by Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi. His favourite quote comes from Kiarostami: “Strip away all the bells and whistles, and what you have is a subject and a camera.” These are the only things you need to shoot a film really. The rest are all etcetera.

How does it all add up? Sange is inspired by Swades. He even pays homage to the film by playing a scene on video. The Mumbai angle is well-handled, confined to occasional phone calls and an off-screen voice. You have to look a little deeper and then it might be apparent that the witch and her victims is an allegory to China, which shares a border with Arunachal, and has been making claims on Indian territory for decades. Contrasting this with swadeshi (indigenous), Sange has a scene at the TV showroom where the owner sells him a set that he has designed himself, and that can work without electricity (a scarce commodity in many parts of India, including Arunachal) for an hour. You must appreciate the way in which the character of the teacher is woven into the script. Not so, the way the giggling foursome go around in a vehicle. Symbolic to the point of being utterly predictable, crossing of bridges at various nodal points in the story would have elicited ‘there he goes again’ kind of responses, had Sange not managed to keep them coming-up just about naturally. Also, watch-out for the school class where Tashi is reading a lesson about Holi, and how a girl-student's innocent question leads to micro treatise on alienation. Contrived it might seem, but Sange executes it with so much honesty that you get taken in with the flow.

The name Crossing Bridges came about when Sange and his unit were crossing a river on foot and the Director of Photography (DOP), Pooja Gupte (an SRFTI batch-mate), suddenly said, “How many rivers are you making us cross, Sange?” That led to Crossing Rivers, and it eventually became Crossing Bridges. Crossing Bridges was shot on a Canon 5D camera and edited by Sanglap Bhowmik, another final-year batch-mate from SRFTI. Photography is commendable, the gorgeous locales apart, while the editing, obviously slow-paced, follows the demands of Sange’s story and treatment. Some cuts are awkward. Anjo John’s musical score underscores the narrative.

A word on cinema in Arunachal Pradesh. Film, as an industry, doesn’t yet exist there. Also Arunachal Pradesh doesn’t have any trained professional DOP or an editor or a sound engineer or other professionals and artists needed for a film crew. Crossing Bridges is the second film to be made in Arunachal Pradesh but is the first-ever directed by a native of the state. In 2006, a film in the Monpa dialect, Sonam, was made by Assamese director Ahsan Muzid, and premiered at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Crossing Bridges, premiered in September 2013 at the Mumbai Film Festival last year, won the Best Feature Film in Sherdukpen award at the National Film Awards. It came with a Rs.1,00,000 (US$1,700) award, which about 1/35 of the cost.

Before the shoot, Sange did a three-month workshop with members of the cast. All the names that constitute the acting credits are unknown, except for the lead actress, and she too is known for achievements far removed from scaling acting peaks. Phuntsu Khrime plays the protagonist, in a performance that is a bit laboured, studied, probably still under the workshop phase. The female lead is given to mountaineer Anshu Jamsenpa, mother of two, hailing from Bomdila, one of the locations in the film. Anshu created a mountaineering record by climbing Mt. Everest on 12th May 2011, and again on 21st May 2011. She repeated the feat on 18 May 2013, thus becoming the only Indian woman mountaineer to climb the world’s highest peak thrice. Anshu adds regional star value, and guess what, she acquits herself well. Most of the remaining cast-members are playing themselves. Though that may not be easy in all cases, there are no such issues here. They all blend with the landscape.

The film is partly in English and the local dialect is sub-titled in English.

Rating: ***

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNck_xV8BGc