Chello Show offers us a steeped-in-nostalgia story of a young boy in rural Gujarat who is enraptured and captured by the power of cinema. It will remind you instantly of the 1988 Italian classic, ‘Cinema Paradiso’, which featured the relationship between a young boy and a middle-aged projectionist, cemented in a small, dark room from where the movies played. ‘Chhello Show’, or ‘The Last Film Show’, is also meant to be a semi-autobiographical tale of the director Pan Nalin, whose journey from a remote Saurashtra village to a creator of images is reflected in the movie.
- Advertisement -
Samay (Bhavin Rabari), bright-eyed and inquisitive, wants more than just being an assistant to his father, who runs a tea-stall at the village railway station. It’s the kind of cosy stop that used to be part of our travelling history, when trains stopped for a few minutes at nameless outposts for passengers to disembark, and for vendors to sell their wares.
Samay and his pals roam around the tracks, looking for things to do, and they find a nearby cinema-hall which quickly becomes a source of constant joy. Movies are not for us, unless they are about deities, thunders Samay’s father, bound by the privilege of caste which doesn’t cushion him from poverty. But Samay, played by the very expressive Rabari, is not to be deterred. He has found cinema, and cinema has found him, and it is for keeps.
Watch Chello Show trailer:
- Advertisement -
The film does best when we see Samay surrounded by the paraphernalia of cinema in its celluloid age: the projectors, the metal cans which house the reels, the distinctive whirr of the sprockets, the cone of light that streams out of the box to land on the screen, there to become the sights and sounds of a film, and the audience which shows up to savour the experience day after day.
In return for being able to spend his day at the cinema, the time he is meant to be at school, home-cooked food becomes barter. Fazal the projectionist (Bhavesh Shrimali) licks his fingers, as his ‘upper-caste’ pupil learns to be at home with the movies: the former being Muslim and a mentor is both incidental, yet powerful, because it shows the art of cinema being home to all communities and castes.
- Advertisement -
But ‘Chhello Show’ has a familiar problem, and that is the gaze through which some elements are turned exotic or too-pretty. Take, for example, the little kitchen in Samay’s hut, open to the elements, but enough for his mother (Richa Meena) to rustle up dishes that would be more at home at a master-chef’s studio. At one place, the dubbed line calls a dish ‘ravioli’.
Then there is the patina of warm light on every frame, making village life less severe: the bare-minimum village school, the teacher, the station master, the officials who turn up to pronounce a death-knell for the tiny station, as well marking the end of the rundown theatre which runs 35 mm films. A make-shift one conjured up by Samay and his friends in an abandoned building where they ‘make’ movies out of scrap reel, is both romantic and romanticized.
But the film, India’s official entry to the Oscars, does manage to focus on change as an inexorable part of life. Just as the spanking new broad-gauge trains will not stop at the station anymore, the theatre and its projection booth, Samay’s place of refuge and learning, is stripped of its accoutrements. A small digital box takes the place of the massive projectors. But cinema carries on, taking the changes in its sweep, telling us stories.
- Advertisement -
Chhello Show movie director: Pan Nalin
Chhello Show movie cast: Bhavin Rabari, Richa Meena, Deepen Raval, Bhavesh Shrimali
Chhello Show movie rating: 2.5 stars
