Rafi sort of gets by working as a street photographer, selling souvenir photos to tourists at the Gateway of India. One day, he takes Miloni’s picture, but she disappears to avoid her overbearing family before Rafi can complete the transaction. He repurposes her photo, sending it to his grandmother Dadi, hoping to allay her fears that he will never marry. When their paths cross again, Miloni agrees to pretend to be his fiancée, for the sake of his Dadi.
As you might expect, Miloni and Rafi start to develop some kind of feelings for each other during the course of their play-acting. Of course, the radical differences in their respective life-experiences lead to complications, but this is not a farce or even a rom-com. Very little is played for laughs. The narrative itself is pretty simple and straightforward. Instead, Batra’s screenplay is all about discrete, fleeting moments of beauty—and the pain that comes later.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra will make you absolutely ache for this almost-couple. They have real, heartfelt chemistry as Rafi and Miloni, but the characters’ relationship is so chaste, it hurts. There is so much left unsaid between them, because it can’t be said. And it doesn’t need to be verbalized for us to understand it. They are the film, but Farrukh Jaffar ratchets up the poignancy even further as Rafi’s loving but shrewd Dadi.
Batra also makes canny use of the Mumbai locales. Much like the worlds of its characters, the city sometimes looks grand and stately and at other times appears to be grubby and desperate. Batra does not exactly wrap things up in a neat little bow, which seems to have divided those at the film’s screening, but that is how life goes. You just have to focus on the good parts while they last.
Honestly, “Photograph” is about as bittersweet as cinema can possibly get. It is a classy film, with Peter Raeburn’s elegant score heightening the wistful vibe.
Very highly recommended for mainstream audiences, “Photograph” will be released on May 17.
