Little Big Wonder

The interactions between senior bureaucrats, played by the laidback Chatterjee and the too-huffy Shah, and Bose’s Praveen Kumar, the cop with a conscience who spots the talent in Poorna, come off stilted, strewn with such expository lines as “slum-dog mountaineers”, and tumhara dil toota hai, iska matlab yeh nahin ki tum kamzor ho.

Also, the transition from being trained, to reaching the final basecamp which leads to the peak, seems a tad too hurried. But you do want to see this girl, putting all the obstacles behind her, make that climb, and you share her delight when she reaches that goal.

We forget the adults muddling about in their offices when the film focuses, with warmth and empathy, on Poorna (Inamdar, wonderful), and her cousin Priya (Mariya, equally good) who are sparkly, bright-eyed and true.

Through them, the film is able to pull back and show us how abject poverty and deepseated patriarchy impacts the ‘girl child’, and how, the intervention of the right person at the right time and place can break through the state’s status-quoist indifference: welfare schemes to help the poor can stay on paper, and most often do, when there is no will to execute them.

That Poorna manages to change gear from her expected trajectory (forced marriage, tooearly motherhood, and the extinguishing of a spirit), on to the path of selfhood, happens because of the happy confluence of a coach (Tripathi) who loves his job, and an official who truly wants to change lives.

Sometimes fairytales can come true. Climb this peak.