In The Scavenger of Dreams, his ninth narrative feature, Suman Ghosh, filmmaker and professor of Economics at Florida Atlantic University, forays into the rarely-seen world of Kolkata's garbage collectors, members of an unorganised labour sector who eke out a living on the fringes of a sprawling city that only deigns to throw crumbs at them.
The Hindi-language drama, which premiered on Thursday in the "Window on Asian Cinema" section of the 28th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF, October 4-13, 2023), is an unflinching portrait that foregrounds the struggles of a migrant couple who subsist in a slum alongside a pond that stands in sharp contrast to the squalor around it.
The couple, despite the environment of despair that they live in, discover founts of innocent fantasies in discarded objects of dream and desire. However, Ghosh's sobering screenplay does not shy away from recognising that real life is brutal for people on the margins of urban expanses where models of development and the process of mechanisation only serve to render them increasingly redundant.
Ghosh had another Hindi film - Aadhaar, starring Vineet Kumar Singh as the first man in his village to volunteer for an Aadhaar card - in the 2019 Busan programme. That title hasn't got past the censors and its release is, therefore, still on hold.
The Scavenger of Dreams produced by the director's own Miami-based company, Maya Leela Films, in collaboration with Kolkata's CFP Films, began life as a selection of BIFF's Asian Project Market in the year that Aadhaar played in Busan.
It portrays the travails of a group of marginalised people with empathy and realism, staying true all the way to the realm it depicts. Barring a handful of professional actors, the cast of The Scavenger of Dreams is made up of amateurs, mostly real-life trash collectors.
A starkly realistic portrait of lives that hang by a thread that is forever on the brink of snapping, The Scavenger of Dreams is the first film from Bengal since Mrinal Sen's Parashuram and Buddhadeb Dasgupta's Neem Annapurna (both made in 1979) to depict the effects of displacement and deprivation with such raw power and uncompromising bluntness.
The film homes in on a desperately indigent couple, Shona (Sudipta Chakraborty) and Birju (Shardul Bhardwaj), who barely make ends meet with the latter's meagre income. Birju goes from house to house in upscale neighbourhoods collecting the waste that the residents produce. The couple has a school-going daughter Munni (Munni Mallick).
Birju - somebody calls him a kachra aadmi, someone else liken him to a beggar and he is never allowed to forget that he is an outsider - is a contractual municipal worker who does the rounds every morning with a handcart mopping up the rubbish that the city generates. His wife accompanies him.
The duo dreams of a better life, but they are generally met with apathy by the people that they serve. Even as it focuses on Shona and Birju's hardscrabble life, the script exposes the insensitivity that they have to reckon with on a daily basis, from Birju's cussed employers and the well-heeled owners of the homes from where they collect domestic refuse.
At the start of the film, the couple has just emerged from two years of the pandemic - a period that has drained them financially and compelled them to withdraw Munni from school because she does not have the means to attend online classes.
It has only been a couple of days since the girl has returned to school and the mother is mindful that she has to make up for lost time. Focus on your studies, Shona says to Munni. In an early scene, Birju tests the girl's counting skills. She counts till 20. She jumps from 14 to 16, skipping 15. Birju doesn't give up until she gets it right.
In another scene, Munni is unable to recite a nursery rhyme. Her worried mother calls an older schoolgirl and requests her to help her daughter memorise the lines. They may be stuck in a rut and the tyranny of poverty may have run them to the ground but neither Birju nor Shona is ready to give up on their aspiration to educate their girl.
But sadly, the power that they have over their fate is tenuous. Birju is thrown into a quandary when his employers decide to replace handcarts with battery-operated geared vans. He cannot ride a motorised vehicle. His already precarious existence is made much worse. The ever-present threat of pauperisation stares him in the face.
Not that their life is totally joyless. Stray moments to savour stem from unexpected quarters. A lady gives Shona a leftover birthday cake. Munni digs into with delight. On one occasion, Birju finds a cigarette lighter in a garbage bag, a source of some excitement.
Another time he stumbles upon a used deodorant spray and takes it home. Shona can see that there is nothing left in the container but Birju insists that there is. That, in a way, is a metaphor for their predicament. They never stop nurturing the hope that there is a way out - that is the best that they can do.
The Scavenger of Dreams zeroes in on the couple as they prepare for another day in their lives. Their shanty and its fetid environs are all that they can call their own. The film does not hold out any false hope. But there is nothing in Shona and Birju's demeanour to suggest that they will ever abandon their quest of happiness unless their hands are forced.
Their home is surrounded by objects that are no longer useful. Among them are a bicycle, an exercise bike, a cart and a toy rocking chair. Director of photography Ravi Kiran Ayyagari pans across these superfluous articles until the camera settles on an ailing old man (Nemai Ghosh), whose daughter Asha (Asha Kumari) who has fled an abusive husband and oppressive parents-in-laws to start over as a delivery woman.
The Scavenger of Dreams is a tale of cast-offs that range from the inanimate to the human. No matter how unattainable their dreams are, those that breathe, the likes of Shona and Birju, cling on. The used, broken objects that they bring home serve as starting points for the fantasies that Shona rustles up for her daughter.
It is apparent that the director wants the wheels to turn in the right direction for his protagonists, but his remarkable cinematic essay refrains from hawking dreams. The steadfast eschewal of the unreal, and the magnificently convincing pivotal performances from Sudipta Chakraborty and Shardul Bhardwaj, lend potency and pertinence to The Scavenger of Dreams.
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Sudipta Chakraborty, Shardul Bhardwaj, Nemai Ghosh
