Whispers Of Fire & Water Review: More Than Just A Cinematic Gem

Sound plays a preeminent role in writer-director Lubdhak Chatterjee's narrative feature debut, Whispers of Fire & Water. It assumes myriad forms - from the startling to the serene - as it flows in and out of the images, colours and ideas that constitute the film.

The film, a stark portrait of exploitation and displacement, is a personal yet universal essay that wends its way through two diverse landscapes and mines them for visual and auditory vibrations that bear testimony to the plight of a mineral-rich region that has been sucked dry.  

Though the sounds of decay, dispossession and despair, the film delivers an understated but sharp commentary on the plight of the exploited and the marginalised, be they people or places that have all but fallen off the map due to continuing depletion of their mineral and natural resources.  

The drama of sounds and sights that forms the spine of Whispers of Fire & Water has a deep and dispiriting impact on the film's protagonist, a Kolkata-based audio installation artist who is on a project-related trip to Jharkhand's Jharia coal mines.  

An underground fire has raged here for over a century even as extraction of coal has continued unabated, endangering the lives and homes of workers (who operate in extremely dangerous conditions) and inhabitants (who inhale the toxic air and are afflicted with serious respiratory problems).

The city-bred Shiva (Sagnik Mukherjee) is disoriented by what he sees and hears in this inferno, one of the largest coal mining zones in India where lungs and land subside with equal regularity. Shiva hears about a murder, about men gone missing and about other dire developments. He also has an unsettling brush with a not-too-welcoming police inspector (Deepak Halder).

On the brink of being singed by the spectacle of hopelessness that confronts him, he retreats with a migrant mine worker, Deepak (Amit Saha), to the latter's tribal village about an hour and a half away. In a dense forest of vivid hues, where the dominant element is water, Shiva's urban sensibility collides ever so gently with Deepak's rustic purity.

The sounds of the jungle, the calls of wild animals, the colours of the earth, the rustle of the trees and the sparkle of the Sohrai murals on walls of village homes provide the background to the melancholy-tinged conversations that ensue.

Deepak is, of course, just as deprived as the miners of Jharia - he is one himself - because development has bypassed his village. He asks a question that serves to round off his story: why shouldn't the light come to us, why do we have to go looking for it?  

Shiva knows the answer. He begins to perceive himself and the world around him in a new light, thanks to Deepak's direct and plaintive plea - he does not verbalise it in so many words - for a rethink on what constitutes human progress and well-being.

A dirt track that runs through the forest is enticing but dangerous. In one scene, Deepak drags Shiva away as he senses the presence of a wild animal in the vicinity. In another, a CRPF jawan hurls a volley of intrusive questions at Shiva before advising him to exercise caution in the forest. The warning is hardly misplaced for a city dweller in an alien setting.

In the decrepit coal town Shiva explored the earlier portions of the film, a similar track cuts a makeshift playground in half. Oblivious of the world that is crumbling around them, boys enthusiastically kick a football around on this patch of land that they have no control over.            

Whispers of Fire & Water opens with a blank screen that is overlaid with the sounds of the wind, claps of thunder and the patter of rain - and a wail of anguish. Soon after the first images appear on the screen, a local resident says: It's a black hole out here.

Working in perfect unison with cinematographer Kenneth Cyrus and sound designer Sougata Banerjee, the director guides us into the heart of the darkness. Billowing smoke, tongues of fire that loom into sight at nighttime (the light of day conceals the flames), traces of soot all around, and telltale signs of lives cruelly interrupted by an economy that only grabs and does not give anything back in return dominate the frames as Shiva with his microphone wrapped in a furry wind jammer records the sounds.

But can these sounds that he plans to use as part of an audio installation in Kolkata fully capture the extent of the devastation that the region and its people have been witness to for over a hundred years? Can they sufficiently amplify the voices of the voiceless, who have suffered in silence the consequences of lopsided, unsustainable development?

On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of a union leader exhorting the miners to unite and demonstrate their strength to their callous employers. He urges them to snap out of their cycle of servility and inertia. But nothing that Shiva and the audience see suggests that positive change is in the air. Here, fire burns and reduces things to ashes. It does not purify.

In one sequence, clumps of refuse are afire in a dumping yard. They resemble funeral pyres on a cremation ground - a disquieting image that conjures up to perfection the shroud of doom and destruction that hangs over the region.

The film contrasts the crackle of fire with the inexorable flow of water - one destroys, the other holds out the promise of regeneration. It depicts the repercussions of indiscriminate attacks on Nature's riches while it looks up to the forest environment as a source of solace, as a force that can alter the course of how society defines and views the scope and substance of development.

Whispers of Fire & Water is produced by Bauddhayan Mukherji and Monalisa Mukherji of Little Lamb Films (Manikbabur Megh, which premiered at the 2021 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival) and Shaji Mathew and Aruna Anand Mathew of Niv Art Movies (Sexy Durga, Hivos Tiger Award winner at the 2017 International Film Festival of Rotterdam).

Whispers of Fire & Water, which is mainly in Hindi with some dialogue in Bengali and English, is an out and out an auteur film written, directed and edited by one man, but it benefits appreciably from the work of the technicians, including music composer Rohen Bose.

Diving into a yawning chasm between hellfire and flickering hope, and crafting a sombre cautionary tale with varied visual flourishes, Lubdhak Chatterjee, who edited the recently released Bengali film Niharika: In the Mist, has created what is more than just a cinematic gem. It is an essential work of tactile art that will reward viewers who have the patience to peer into its depths.