Pho­to­graph

I think the trade descrip­tions act may find us at fault for call­ing this film by Hin­di direc­tor Ritesh Batra a love sto­ry. Love is cer­tain­ly inferred, and it may even blos­som out­side the time­line of the film, but this is more about long­ing, and the feel­ing of not being able share or express pri­mal feel­ings of roman­tic amour.

Batra hit rom-com pay­dirt with his extreme­ly love­ly 2013 debut, The Lunch­box, about an unlike­ly cross-town courtship with added nib­bles. With Pho­to­graph he attempts to locate some of that old mag­ic once more. And he does, occa­sion­al­ly, but it’s spread a lit­tle thin­ner here, and the mechan­ics of the unlike­ly romance – so very well-oiled in The Lunch­box – occa­sion­al­ly sound a lit­tle creaky.

It all kicks off on a moment of hap­pen­stance, as a well turned-out but stone broke tourist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Rafi (Nawazud­din Sid­diqui) deliv­ers his hard-sell spiel to well-heeled waif Miloni (Sanya Mal­ho­tra) as she wan­ders flight­i­ly in front of the majes­tic Gate of India. Nei­ther are talk­ers, or smil­ers, or expressers of sim­ple emo­tion. She even­tu­al­ly relents to hav­ing her pic­ture tak­en, and the result­ing shot, which is print­ed out on the spot, sud­den­ly alters the course of their lives. We have to take their word that it’s great, because the audi­ence nev­er actu­al­ly get to see it.

It then tran­spires that Rafi is being bad­gered by his over­ly-talk­a­tive (in a charm­ing way) grand­moth­er to get hitched, and so sends this trea­sured snap to her claim­ing that he has found his bride. Then – you guessed it – he has to hook up with this mys­tery maid­en once more so she can help play out his juve­nile ruse. Far from there being a grand arc to their bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship, it instead runs the gamut from ner­vous apa­thy to imper­cep­ti­ble flirtation.

The film is packed with awk­ward paus­es and pin-drop silences, as Batra attempts to milk the sen­ti­ment out of peo­ple who feel too con­fined by their social and eco­nom­ic stand­ing to express them­selves with any sem­blance of self-assur­ance. There are best friends on hand to dole out for­tune cook­ie advice, and con­cerned par­ents who do not like their daugh­ter con­sort­ing with an unre­pen­tant mem­ber of the under­class­es. All bold genre sig­ni­fiers in a work which at least shoots for some­thing pur­er and more artful.

It’s all very well put togeth­er, and the two leads serve him well, yet Batra’s inces­sant focus on the poet­ic beau­ty of the unspo­ken ges­ture saps out some of the base-lev­el inter­est. By its final third, you almost want Rafi run­ning down a plat­form as Miloni waves a hand­ker­chief from the win­dow of a depart­ing train – just some kind of release of ener­gy, or an accep­tance of the fact that, hand­some though it is, this is still a fan­ci­ful screen romance at heart.