Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma: The Fable put me in the mood for Signs, M Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film that made alien crop circles a thing. That film was also about a father and his two kids on a plantation, confronting mysterious attacks on their vegetation. Both films deal with the supernatural, with the suspicions of a village, with the involvement of the police and with the precociousness of children.
In this film, we meet Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), the owner of a 5,000-acre orchard outside a Himalayan village, where he lives with his family: his wife Nandini (Priyanka Bose), their daughter Vanya (Hiral Sidhu) who comes home from boarding school, and their son Juju (Awan Pookot).
Shot on film, Jugnuma is a throwback to the time it’s set in, the spring of 1989. The serrated texture of the images is gorgeously old-world, with a rich colour. Cinematographer Sunil Borkar’s work beautifully complements the unhurried rhythms of both the film and the village itself. Life on the orchard carries on at a slow pace.
A Family at Odds with Their Surroundings
Consider their names: Dev means god; Nandini is a name associated with the Hindu goddess Parvati (and she even sings a hymn to Shiva); Vanya is a forest spirit; Juju is a West African word for the supernatural, also a play on the first syllable of the film’s title.
Together these names—tinged with an otherworldly feel—establish the slightly off-kilter nature of this family, which is further detailed in the context of their rural surroundings, where genuinely bizarre situations unfold alongside the more ordinary contrasts of the rich and poor.
A striking example of the former comes in the film’s superb opening stretch: a single tracking camera shot, which follows Dev through his house and into the orchard, where we discover his hobby.
Dev straps a life-sized pair of homemade wings onto his back and, without preamble, launches himself off a platform to fly around the mountains. Apart from a single conversation later in the film with Vanya, in which they discuss the success of his wings, Dev’s highly unusual pastime is treated with as little surprise as Vanya’s decidedly earthbound one: horseback riding. (The debutante Sidhu is a trained equestrian.)
The family is the sort that speaks to each other in English and the staff in Hindi, reads Reader’s Digest, watches the Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant starrer Charade in the evening, and teaches the children to correctly pronounce ‘rhododendron’ at the dining table.
Their aesthetic is far removed from the world of the village, where families sit on the floor to eat, attend blingy weddings with loud music and tell their children fairy stories to put them to sleep.
A Blend of Lore and Reality
One such story is told by Radha (Tillotama Shome), a village woman whose husband works at Dev’s orchard. Radha’s one big scene is, in retrospect, the film’s centrepiece. The bedtime story she tells her young son is about fairies from the fairy world (parilok)—fairies so entranced by Earth that they settle here and forget their origins.
This story comes to have greater significance as the film proceeds.
But for the most part, the film carries on in the realism of the everyday. Dev and his manager Mohan (Deepak Dobriyal), who is also the narrator, undertake their annual pesticide spraying in the orchard. But their work is interrupted when fires abruptly begin to wreck the trees. No explanation or culprit can be found, and with a corrupt police force sniffing around, suspicions rend the peace of village life.
In his voiceover narration, Mohan insists that the mountains are an idyllic space where all people live in harmony—but this rosy picture quickly crumbles as Dev and the police begin to suspect the villagers. The village folk, protesting their innocence, turn their suspicion on an unusual group: horse-rearing nomads.
These nomads are the other anchor (the first being Radha’s story) of the film’s fabular fancy: they never speak, keep to themselves, wear stark, plain clothes, chant sonorously in the depths of the forest and tend to their horses.
The villagers have accepted them unconditionally—until, of course, the unexplained fires break out. As Mohan intones, ‘halki si thokar, aur achchhay-bhalay insaan bhi bikhar jaatay hain’ (a small hit, and even good people cave).
Vanya develops a wordless relationship with one of the nomads, a handsome, light-eyed young man (Jeewan Adhikary) who communes silently with her. This leads to a strangely beautiful scene between the two of them, one of the film’s rare instances of showing instead of telling.
An Imperfect Balance
Despite all its subtleties, Jugnuma struggles at times to find a consistent voice. The various strands tie together quietly, but at times the film drifts with a sense of directionlessness.
The film exists in a strange place: it wants to be enigmatic in its storytelling, but it also tells us everything, in its own time. As a result, if we’re paying attention, the answers are clear well before the ending—which thoroughly underlines them anyway (just in case we weren’t paying attention). And the investigation into the fires becomes a routine police procedural, putting a damper on the more whimsical aspects of the plot.
It’s also a problem that some of the actors get less to do than they deserve. Bose, in particular, is wasted on a character with no personality and precious little to do—all we know about Nandini is that she sings.
Dobriyal is very good as Mohan, the manager, though his role too exists largely in service of the story.
Some of the unknown actors struggle with stilted dialogue delivery, and Sidhu is perhaps a little too callow an actress to fully bring Vanya to life.
On the other hand, the non-actors playing the villagers, who were workshopped on the sets, are all complete naturals. And Bajpayee keeps it all running smoothly.
But perhaps some of this is down to the fact that Jugnuma is not about individual character development: it’s really a very simple story (true to its title, a fable) about a misfit family, dressed up in silky atmospherics, wrapped in the mysteries of mountain life.
And in its simplicity lies its beauty: Reddy does not reach for mythic resonances or real-world commentary. He keeps focussed on his world.
Indeed, in its gentle epiphanies and faith in the fanciful stories of childhood, Jugnuma is a film that M. Night Shyamalan would be proud of.
The film, presented by Guneet Monga Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap, released in theatres on September 12.
(Sahir Avik D'souza is a writer based in Mumbai. His work has been published by Film Companion, TimeOut, The Indian Express and EPW. He is an editorial assistant at Marg magazine.)