Anticipation.
High anticipation as the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury prize winner.
Enjoyment.
A quiet, compassionate, slow-paced rural romance.
In Retrospect.
A unique approach to the mixing of grief and love.
Rohan Kanawade’s queer romance follows a bereaved young man returning to his Indian hometown where he must navigate tradition and desire.
Tenderness and loss converge in Cactus Pears, a touching queer Marathi-language romance from filmmaker Rohan Kanawade. This gentle debut creates a strong thematic tension between tradition and modernity as Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), played with a quiet reserve, has had his world shaken by his father’s death. During the grieving process, he is immediately subjected to overwhelming scrutiny from his traditional relatives, with marriage the key focus. The pressure is comic at times but never harmless. Anand’s burgeoning sexuality is not treated as a secret waiting to be revealed. His parents have known and supported him for a long time.
A sense of disruption arrives via Balya (Suraaj Suman), Anand’s childhood friend. Their relationship develops through slow, drawn-out proximity, with an unhurried lingering delivery of each line. Small moments of shared intimacy, including the slow caress of Anand’s hair, imbue the smallest action with a sense of longing. Vikas Urs’ realist cinematography finds these feelings in the contrast between tender wide shots of the environment and vivid close-ups of the men’s faces. Repeated conversations about marriage and ritual can have a circular feeling to the viewer, but this enhances the suffocating nature of these familiar issues. It’s a film that insists queer love can live in the fragile space between tradition and longing.
