Review: Photograph

A sweet, low key, and complex romance, Photograph finds writer-director Ritesh Batra returning to his native India after a couple of forays into English language cinema with a renewed sense of vigor and purpose. While the overall storyline of potentially mismatched people drawn together out of convenience is well in line with Batra’s previous efforts in the country (perhaps most notably his more unabashedly crowd pleasing romance The Lunchbox), Photograph is more of a showcase of his talents as a skilled dramatist than as a director (putting it more in line with his underrated, darker and more recent English language effort The Sense of an Ending). A story about the ways human connection in India has been stunted through centuries of antiquated tradition and religious practices, Photograph is a passionately made film about people who feel little of that emotion in their own lives.

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a man from a small town trying to make it in the big city of Mumbai. He earns meagre wages that he mostly sends back home to his grandmother (Farrukh Jaffar), lives in cramped, close quarters with a roommate, and makes a living hanging around the Gateway of India and offering to take tourists’ pictures for a fee. One day, he snaps a photograph of a younger woman named Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a local who seems to be wandering aimlessly and deep in thought. Miloni, who comes from a close-knit, traditional Muslim family, is having serious doubts about an impending arranged marriage to the son of one of her father’s closest business partners. She leaves her picture behind, and Rafi uses it to convince grandma – who keeps pestering him to settle down and start a family – that he has a fiance. When grandma announces that she’s coming to visit him in Mumbai, Rafi has to track down Miloni and ask her if she’ll pretend to be his partner for a few days. She agrees with surprisingly little reluctance and something starts to blossom between them.

I hesitate to say that Photograph is a stereotypical meet-cute romance. Tonally, Photograph is well in line with Batra’s previous efforts, which means there’s a lot of specificity in terms of the world and characters being created, but plenty of gray area when it comes to the relationships between all of the story’s moving parts. There’s an undeniable chemistry and kinship that can be seen between Rafi and Miloni, but Batra wants viewers to question if these feelings are friendship or love. There’s a suggestion hinted at that both can co-exist at the same time, but also a heavy insinuation that their backgrounds and upbringings have created cultural, economic, and social gaps that might never be bridged. Both of them feel hopeless and awkward, but they have good heads on their shoulders and they still want to listen to their hearts in spite of everything the outside world tells them to the contrary. Siddiqui and Malhotra deliver naturalistic performances that jive perfectly with the lived-in and well realized material Batra has given them.

Photograph isn’t in a hurry to bring Rafi and Miloni together outside of their calculated deception (which is played rather seriously and for as few laughs as possible in a novel twist for the romance genre), nor is it a film where the characters will make grand, sweeping realizations about their lives and each other. Batra is less concerned with hitting easily recognizable plot points than he is in the smaller details of Rafi and Miloni’s conversations. It’s a good fit for India’s sometimes dizzying ideas behind traditional courtship, where caste systems and religious pressuring are still commonplace. Rafi is being forced by his grandmother into being something bigger in the world, while Miloni’s dominant father wants to bubble wrap his daughter and force her into another family of his choosing. Even if there wasn’t a hint of romance in the air, it’s easy to see through Batra’s details why they would be drawn to each other. Neither could fully understand what the other is going through, but they’re both content sitting down and listening to the other, especially during a particularly poignant dinner on a rainy night. Neither of them has full agency over their own lives, and both harbour considerable amounts of regret and guilt, but in each other they can find moments of peace in one of the world’s largest, noisiest, and most complicated cities.

Employing plenty of of sweeping pans and gorgeous panoramas that allow viewers to become wrapped up in the Mumbai landscape while nicely mirroring Rafi’s profession, Photograph is the work of a filmmaker who seems re-energized by returning home. Batra isn’t afraid to pepper his film generously with loving local colour including verbose cab drivers, movie theatres with rodent infestations, a running gag about the differences between kulfi and soft-serve ice cream, and a slightly corny side plot about a defunct brand of cola that Miloni loved as a child. Through the details of their world, the relationship between the main characters comes into sharper, richer focus, and the film becomes a lot more rewarding that if this similar story had played out anywhere else in the world.

Photograph isn’t afraid to look at romance as something that takes a long time to establish and the pressures some people face at the hands of others who think finding a partner is as easy as a business transaction. Photograph is so well structured and detailed that it ultimately doesn’t matter if Rafi and Miloni get together or eventually drift apart. It’s sweet without being saccharine and leaves plenty to the viewer’s imagination. It’s Batra’s most humble and unassuming film to date, but also quietly stunning and emotionally resonant.

Photograph opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and International Village in Vancouver on Friday, May 31, 2019. It opens in Montreal on June 14 and expands to additional Canadian cities throughout the summer.

Check out the trailer for Photograph: