CycleMahesh Review: Suhel Banerjee’s miniature migrant epic is a feat of inventive remaking

Suhel Banerjee’s CycleMahesh crystallizes through punctuations. Born in imaginative, fluid spaces, its portrait of a migrant laborer changes shape the minute we try to pin it down, define it. Opening in a play-like setting, with a person trapped, it hurls key questions right away: “Does the fire of hunger produce poetry? Does music die in it?” This is the closest the film stretches to spelling out its themes. Otherwise, it’s sprawling and slippering, dislodging assumptions. Threading sketches, handheld, phone footage and stately compositions, Banerjee straddles documentary and fable.

As the early intertitle states itself, the titular Mahesh appears in many forms across fiction and non-fiction. We follow multiple manifestations of the twenty-year-old who had a minute of fame during the pandemic, when he cycled 1700 kms over seven days, going from Maharashtra to his home in Odisha. The film puts together re-enactments of snatches in his journey—the exulting high as well as sudden inconveniences of being on the road.

He does confess to twinges of fear while embarking on his journey. Who knows what the road holds behind an unexpected curve? “Cycle means courage,” he says, but doubts of sustaining through also linger. Divided over a seven-day span, CycleMahesh is infused with formal freedom that’s spirited yet bracing. It’s an openness of horizons Mahesh himself desires but remains out of view. The film becomes a conduit—a bridge and a gulf between Mahesh and the viewer. Belonging to a lower social strata, he has just few options—which are pressed on us with acute force. As we trail him across various avatars and topography, his resilience isn’t framed as heroic but tragic, forced by contexts that forever tie him down.

There’s a sense of calm in the film juxtaposed with interruption. It believes in no distinctions. Fiction bleeds into non-fiction, creative interpretations fusing with hardy verite approaches. Banerjee’s filmmaking isn’t hemmed in by rigidities of style and temper. He wants us to sweep over the vastness of terrain with a bird’s eye-view but also splices us into the moment’s uncertainty. Survival is rocky, prone to being tossed around. What’s the salve? Banerjee destabilizes projections of Mahesh, turning it jagged and fleeing fixed scope.

CycleMahesh is free of strictures—rolling through shifting landscapes, captured with both sublime wonder and palpable texture by cinematographer Prateek Pamecha. Forest, valley, mountain and rivers—Pamecha presents a man who cleaves through them all. We are continually directed to take in sunsets leaking through the earth, torch-shimmers on crabs cutting through darkness, the sheer expanse of rock and village standing vulnerable. Instead of imposing, all of this is done with a gentle guidance. Occasionally, carefully set compositions are pulled back, revealing meticulous arrangements by the hand at play.

The director himself intervenes as does the crew. At one point, we watch the director trying to persuade traffic police about filming permissions. Elsewhere, the layout of the film’s opening—a scene from a play with Mahesh in an open cage of hunger—interposes. Even the real-life Mahesh pops up, a shy, blushing presence, thrilled at having so much fuss being made about his life. For once, he feels that his existence is consequential, that he does matter. Though he knows it’s all just momentary, that he’ll have to revert to the grind of survival, there’s joy and lightness in this interval. Yet, this liminal phase simultaneously stains itself with aching realizations. This is a moment of suspended time he can only indulge in for a while—like the minute of fame that he got when his cycle-story broke out in national headlines, this shoot will pass.

There are amusing bits like a scene where the director tries to shoot the real-life Mahesh cycling. But he quickly calls for a cut. Mahesh is being too performative. So a fictional lens, with several actors filling in, gets to render the story. Before we know it, magic, myth and mysterious visions come along.

How do lives like Mahesh’s look like when narrativized, put on film? What’s the epistemic violence instantly propping up? With endlessly renewing self-reflexivity, CycleMahesh complicates the act of looking at marginal lives. It wrestles with questions of negating harsher edges. Instead of scrubbing out those, Banerjee insists we confront, square with how Mahesh can break out of the loop. His friend Mamta is the one lending perspective to surviving in the village. While one has to move out for work, there’s also the threat of permanent displacement. Development projects on the cusp ram through the village, evicting people from their homes. CycleMahesh brings forth this instability. There’s no oar to latch onto. Is there any escape?

CycleMahesh screened at New Directors/New Films 2025 (April 2-13)