Babil Khan-Tripti Dimri's Qala is dark, deep and tragic

Throughout the two-hour run of this passionate take on unfulfilled yearning and smothered rage,I could feel the budgetary restrictions. The drapery, design and demotions all scream an epic language. But the periodicity, circa 1940s, is at best, quaint. What Qala required was the canvas and scale of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. What it gets is a scaled-down compact kind of epic. A bird trapped in a cage trying to escape into wide-open skies.

This is not to take away from Qala ’s fascinating fable on playback singing and sur-passable ambitions. I have heard Anvita Dutt’s film being repeatedly referred to as a mother-daughter saga. What I saw was more like a motherless daughter’s efforts to reach those scales of excellence that her mother dreamt of for her daughter.

Tripti Dimri as the shunned daughter forever craving for approval from her stonehearted mother struggles through a confounding complex role that a young Tabu would have been at home with. Tripti is not bad at all. Her gawkiness uncertainty and overweening ambitions go well with her rawness and inexperience.

Swastika Mukherjee as the mother is characteristically formidable. She is the monster mother many stars in the past are said to have had, although I don’t recall any playback singer being mother-smothered. Anvita Dutt mixes and matches real incidents from showbiz in the past with flamboyant flights of fancy.

The real drama in Qala kicks in when mom Urmi Manjushree brings home an orphan singer Jagan Patwal ( Babil Khan ), far more gifted than her own daughter. Mom never stops rubbing in the disparity of talent. As a disaster zone Swastika swims beautifully in the deep waters. Babil Khan as her adopted darling surrogate son is like still waters that run deep. Irrfan’s boy with a voice that echoes his great father has a long way to go.

Some of the best-written scenes are in the recording room where Qala struggles with notes and a range that are far beyond her. The same to a large extent is true of the actress playing the Qala. During the rigorous recording (the songs are just about adequate and could have been far more evocative of the period instead of sounding like parodies of Shamshad Begum and Geeta Dutt) a slimy music director Sumant Kumar (Amit Sial, as in tune with his character as ever) takes a break from the recording for some extra-curricular activity with Qala.

Observing the murky deed, a lyricist named Majrooh (no less) comments, “A time will come when such people will be called out.”

A touch of prophecy in a doom-laden tragic story of incommensurate ambitions, desperate measures, progressive madness and tragic endings. Many of these themes were a part of Anvita Dutt’s previous film Bulbbul as well. I am waiting to see her escape the wages of the dark gothic past to claim her place among the contemporaries who count.

A big shout-out to cinematographer Siddharth Diwan for making the frames look much more epic than the budget allows.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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