The Song of Scorpions movie review: Nostalgia for Irrfan Khan and visual magnificence are not enough

Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Irrfan Khan, Waheeda Rehman, Shashank Arora, Kritika Pande, Shefali Bhushan, Sara Arjun, Tillotama Shome        

Director: Anup Singh

Language: Hindi

In an unforgettable scene from the American prison drama Shawshank Redemption, the convict Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins’ character) misuses the privileges he has due to his proximity to the warden, and plays The Marriage of Figaro over a public address system for all the inmates to hear. So profound is the impact of the opera on its unlikely audience, that as the music soars over and through the entire complex, every single prisoner stops what they are doing to stand still for a while and just listen. I was reminded of the power of music to overwhelm and move humans in this fashion in an early scene from The Song of Scorpions as Aadam (the late Irrfan Khan) sits listening to Nooran (Golshifteh Farahani) sing.

Irrfan had a similar power. He could move an audience with the use of his most distinctive facial feature, his eyes, allowing them to shine to variously indicate a glint of wickedness, a glint of amusement, flirtation or, as in this scene, unshed tears. Nooran’s voice is so beautiful, and Aadam is so smitten by her, that his eyes well up with unexpressed emotion.

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Nooran and Aadam are the lead players in The Song of Scorpions written and directed by the Geneva-based Anup Singh who gave us Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost. Singh uses silences, singing and the sands of the Thar desert to sustain the lyrical quality evoked in that opening passage through the rest of this film. As the plot progresses though, the atmosphere he builds and nurtures is unable to cover for a script that is too thin to merit a full-length feature, too lacking in detail and too pre-occupied with exotica.

Nooran in The Song of Scorpions is a singer and healer who is routinely sought out by residents of the region to save them from death by scorpion stings. According to local lore, the only antidote to a scorpion’s venom is a special song. Not everyone can sing it. Nooran is learning from her grandmother (Waheeda Rehman).

Meanwhile, a man called Aadam has been wooing Nooran. She is not interested. One day, Nooran is brutally assaulted. Aadam continues to court her. The Song of Scorpions then chronicles the community’s reaction to the attack on her, and her own struggle to get back to being herself.

The Song of Scorpions has been designed to give off a fable-like vibe. An air of timelessness pervades the narrative as long as the camera stays among the dunes and with people in traditional attire. Occasional appearances of motor vehicles yank us back to reality, with what purpose I cannot tell, but these jolts are never so startling as to dilute the film’s immense visual appeal or entirely kill its atmospherics.

Cinematographers Pietro Zuercher and Carlotta Holy-Steinemann mine the stunning locations to great effect, serving us a desert that is both stark and mysterious, the camera rising high to capture the magnificence of the unending desolation and with equal felicity descending to stare right into the mobile faces of its lead duo. Generations of filmmakers have explored the Thar with incredible results, a memorable recent example being Raj Singh Chaudhary’s Thar (Hindi) that rested heavily on the shoulders of Shreya Dev Dube’s fabulous camerawork. The Song of Scorpions nevertheless has something new to say through its images. The desert in this film, it might seem, hides nothing, yet it can bury a man in a jiffy, and in the night, it transforms into a giant, intimidating keeper of secrets.

In one of The Song of Scorpions’ most striking shots, the camera tilts up, allowing a tree to fill the frame, in sharp contrast to the arid land that has occupied most of the space on screen until then. At another point, the camera watches over Nooran’s dwelling from afar, then changes its angle to rise above the rim of the house and take in the blazing sands in the distance, where a line of trees appear like little bonsais on the edge of the horizon. Extreme close-ups of Nooran’s face, an overhead shot of Aadam curled in a foetal position on the ground – on the visual front, The Song of Scorpions never ceases to deliver. It is not as rewarding though in the rest of the storytelling, the story and its politics.

Clearly, the sparseness of the landscape is meant to mirror the narrative style. But minimalism cannot be a camouflage for lack of substance. The Song of Scorpions’ bare-bones form gradually yields diminishing returns, until a shocking twist raises expectations before it sinks under the weight of its haziness, needless stretching and a disturbing attitude to gender that is particularly disappointing since it comes from the maker of Qissa.

The script delves into Nooran’s character with some depth that is ultimately marred by her motivations in the climax. Aadam’s characterisation and his motivations are consistently blurred. The film is also unclear about its own stand on his worst actions (which I cannot reveal here, in the interests of avoiding spoilers), and while the suggestion seems to be that the audience should be the judge, the precise nature of what he does makes that position untenable.

An equally problematic aspect of The Song of Scorpions is the pointed romanticisation of self-destruction by a survivor of a sexual crime as an act of revenge against the perpetrator. This is done largely by returning once again to the realm of myth, folklore and the exoticisation of Nooran in the end. It is not possible to share more about the plot here, but in a society where women are told – traditionally and even today – that rape is a fate worse than death, such treatment of the subject and such a stance from the film are unthinking to say the least.

The Song of Scorpions had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2017 but is now being released in theatres in India for the first time. The fact that it is coming to us three years after Irrfan’s untimely death adds a layer of poignance to the viewing experience. That said, though Irrfan is always lovely to watch, it has to be noted that the writing is not the only factor generating confusion with empathy for the morally condemnable Aadam in The Song of Scorpions – his acting does too, which is a troubling thought. The Iranian origin actor Golshifteh Farahani is excellent, except when her accent slips through in some early scenes, which begs the question why an India-based Indian actor was not cast in the part. The rest of the cast are competent in their limited roles, but could someone explain why the wonderful Tillotama Shome was wasted in sketchily handled scenes in a brothel?

The language the characters speak is a version of Hindi used in Rajasthan that was decipherable to me, a non-Rajasthani, in large parts, but had me struggling in several places in the absence of subtitles.

The charisma of both leads, the cinematography, music and nostalgia for Irrfan are The Song of Scorpions’ USPs. I wish there was more to recommend it.

Rating: 2 (out of 5 stars) 

The Song of Scorpions is in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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