Sabar Bonda Review: Sneaks up on you with gentle, growing power

Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) opens with a death. Anand’s (Bhushaan Manoj) father has passed. He and his mother (Jayshri Jagtap) travel from Mumbai, the place of his work, to the ancestral home in rural Maharashtra. It’s where he spent his childhood. But he is deeply wary of going back. He must do it for his father, at least. Ten days of mourning rituals need to be followed.

Assailed by intrusions of relatives and community, grieving itself gets no dignity to just be, exist in retreating privacy. Anand is expected to be available for visitors dropping in. He longs to move into a secluded pocket within, unbothered or unsummoned. Anand resists the return to the village. He knows all too well the slant of invasive questions that’ll hit him the minute he’s back. In Kharshinde, a tight-knit community, being under elders’ purview-these put several impositions on living. Prodding about marriage-and one especially within the community-is immediate. He is thirty; when is he going to settle? Anand’s singledom stirs public unease, like any individual outside the hetero norm.

Choices he might harbour elsewhere, in the anonymity of Mumbai, are made to get in line with wishes of others. It’s claustrophobic; when a reunion with a childhood friend, Balya (Suraaj Suman), offers wandering outside prying gaze, relief surges in. Anand’s relatives don’t take kindly to his straying through the village, insisting he stay home. But as long as his mother is okay with it, which she is, he tries staying distant from the extended family. Anand accompanies Balya on his farming, taking the animals to graze. The relationship grows in intimacy. It could well have echoes of the equation the two shared years ago. Have you forgotten what we were once? Balya asks with a dash of imploring.

Moments Anand and Balya share in vast, rolled-out fields, blanketed by tree-shade, shimmer with soft, unguarded intimacy. Sun-dappled, these hold furtive worlds unto themselves, sheltered from coercion and obligation. There’s pressure on Balya as well to get married. But him being a farmer, proposals are hard to come by. The one that pops up, he wards off, much to his parents’ impatience.

Kanawade designs a sweep in intimacy from tentative clasping to snatched joy. When the two are together alone, it feels like nothing else in the world matters. For once, endlessly hovering inquisitiveness, forceful assumptions are gently cast aside. The intimacy is rendered as matter-of-fact as sublime. The camera, which otherwise maintains a resolute distance in its wide framing, registers depth of the rekindled connection in closeups. Exquisite passages follow; when Balya tenderly kneads Anand’s hair, there’s a sense of lightening. Amidst loss, bliss of this bond shows glimmers of a life with possibilities. These scenes are aglow with sumptuous grace, the journey from flickering tactility to full-blossom ease with each other’s bodies all-encompassing.

Sabar Bonda treats sexuality without fuss or overwrought drama. Here are none of the regular beats of struggling to come out vis-à-vis parental rejection. Anand’s father knew of his queerness, as does his mother. Both have been quietly, staunchly understanding, reassuring in their care. His father was glad that he had opened up to them, she tells Anand. Sabar Bonda playfully, subtly plays with the status of unmarried men in the village, some of whom might as well be queer. Balya is one. An early instance suggests his casual relationships with men, rendezvous hitched at night. The film refuses to cede any room to queer-drama-staples of denial, self-negation, tussle within oneself. Nor does it buckle to miserablist templates. There's enough fortitude in both the men. Queerness is a relentless see-saw between a public front and private self: two parallel lives, which Sabar Bonda crystallizes with piercing economy.

Kanawade never underlines, overstates what shines through in brevity-infused long takes. Luminously lensed by Vikas Urs, Sabar Bonda exerts and extracts from stillness. A sense of calm limns it, perforated by and cloaking the emotional churn of bereavement, identity constantly besieged until it is compelled to assert. Anadi Athaley, who’s edited the film, lets scenes breathe in their full breadth, mapping the slow release of a wrenching weight, curling towards sex and moments thereafter. Sabar Bonda’s tonal hush bears, radiates a lifetime of navigating yearning with countless binds. Loneliness-specifically, queer loneliness-is a restless, daily negotiation, a looming fate. This was what worried, pained Anand’s father, who saw how he spiraled in heartbreak when his lover got married. What Anand now is faced with is a life where his biggest support system is gone. 

Kanawade, who also wrote the screenplay, integrates natural spaces-fields and lakes-as refuge. Illuminated with centrifugal force, comfort the men find in each other, their entwined bodies-sensual closeness in Sabar Bonda is lit with unforced, unfazed candor. But can the relationship proceed into the future, outside time-bound circumstances in the village, with hope and sustenance? Manoj and Suman inhabit, navigate unspoken expectations, the doldrums preceding a major decision with ease and absolute immersion. While Suman brings alive a quiet unabashed conviction, Manoj taps beautifully Anand’s steady recognition of the contours of his feelings, learning to clutch onto it amidst intense grief. He is resplendent in his permeability, delivering a fine, slow-flowering, internally calibrated performance seeping deep into you. Joy must be seized, not shied from. Sabar Bonda is a luscious, moving marvel. This is the first ever Marathi film to premiere at Sundance. It’s a radical, breathtaking start.

Debanjan Dhar is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.