“Fire in the Mountains”: the mother of all struggles
Pauline Kael once described “Shoeshine,” Vittorio De
Sica’s neorealist heartbreaker, as “a social-protest film that rises above its purpose.” De Sica may have been motivated to expose the economic injustice and official cruelty of postwar Italy, but the movie, grounded in the hard circumstances of two impoverished Roman boys, finds an incandescent core of poetry and tragedy in the story of their friendship.
What Kael observed about “Shoeshine” is also true of “Fire in the Mountains,” Ajitpal Singh’s tough-minded, openhearted debut feature. Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.
That is especially true of Chandra (Vinamrata Rai), Singh’s beleaguered heroine. The title seems to promise an explosion of rage, but for most of the film Chandra smolders and sputters. Her daily routine is an endless cycle of chores, errands and demands. She lives in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, near Tibet and Nepal. Her house clings to a hillside overlooking a spectacular Himalayan valley, and the camera follows her up and down the same steep, narrow paths to the village in what seems like an endless loop.
She is never empty-handed. If she isn’t lugging well water, groceries, freshly harvested tea or the suitcases of tourists who have come for the mountain scenery, she is carrying her preadolescent son,
Prakash (Mayank Singh), who otherwise uses a wheelchair. At home, more burdens await, piled onto her by an independent-minded teenage daughter (Harshita Tewari); a resentful, widowed sister-in-law (Sonal Jha); and a husband (Chandan Bisht) whose kindness only occasionally peeks out from behind clouds of alcohol and frustration.
Chandra is expected to manage all of their needs and moods, without much help or sympathy from anyone. She saves money for expensive medical treatments for Prakash, even though the doctors (and the audience) know that the boy’s legs work just fine. Dharam, her husband, whose halfhearted business ventures always end in failure, wants to use the cash for a religious ritual. Meanwhile, Chandra petitions the creepy, dishonest leader of the village to build a long-promised road. As indignities accumulate, her exhaustion does battle with rage, and suspense builds around the question of whether she will collapse or explode.
But Chandra is neither a martyr nor a superhero, and “Fire in the Mountains” is more than a catalog of her miseries or a hymn to her indomitability. The beauty of her surroundings doesn’t make her life any easier, but Singh uses the sublimity of the landscape as a reminder that aesthetic delight is ineradicably woven into the fabric of life, no matter how grim or oppressive life may otherwise be.
And family life, however strained or dysfunctional, is never without an element of comedy. Much of the time, Dharam is more foolish than menacing. “You’re so lovable when you’re sober,” their daughter says, and Chandra sees that, too, even as she bears the brunt of his sullenness and his outbursts of temper. As the daughter, Kanchan, a prizewinning student who posts flirty, PG videos on social media, Tewari brings a hint of salty teen-comedy energy. The household, with its shifting allegiances and frequent misunderstandings, teeters between melodrama and sitcom. (There’s also an element of satire. Radio and television broadcasts frequently trumpet the modernizing achievements of an unnamed prime minister, rhetoric that is mocked by conditions in the village, where nothing ever changes.)
Chandra is everyone’s scapegoat and foil, as well as the engine that keeps it all running. Rai’s performance is a marvel — blunt and subtle at the same time, as committed to the character’s failings as to her virtues. The unfairness of her situation is overwhelming, but she doesn’t always treat the people around her fairly, either. This is especially true of Kanchan, whose academic success and curiosity about the world bother Chandra in ways she can’t explain, or even acknowledge.
It’s a complicated family, and yet “Fire in the Mountains” observes its potential fracturing with impressive clarity. Singh, who came to filmmaking late — he wrote his first (as yet unproduced) screenplay in 2012, at 33 — has a storytelling knack that feels both hard-won and intuitive. There is an elegant simplicity to this movie, but nothing about it feels easy.