Court
Director: Chaitanya Tamhane
Talent: Shirish Pawar, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Vira Sathidar, Pradeep Joshi
Release Date: 25th March 2016
The courtroom documentary has experienced something of a renaissance in popularity in recent times, but Chaitanya Tamhane’s fictional courtroom drama might, by dint of its social realist form, make a claim to being more real than any of its factual counterparts. In it, a radical folk musician and poet Narayan (Sathidar) is charged with abatement of suicide after a sewage worker is found dead just days after he gave a performance in which it is alleged he encouraged sewage workers to kill themselves.
Courtroom footage is interlaced with scenes from the personal lives of the defence, prosecution, Narayan himself and the judge, painting a nuanced picture of the social and class divides in which they persist. Bureaucracy and corruption, meanwhile, seem to oppose the possibility of Narayan receiving a fair trial. Though its scenes of litigation are generally quite weak, and perhaps too simple to be engaging, the film’s examination of its characters’ home lives is excellent, provocative and sometimes unsettling. A fine debut from a promising talent.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
