Tinctoria, Kovarty Reviews: Eclectic Tales Of Suspended, Magically Doused Reality

In Amrita Bagchi’s Tinctoria, a woman unravels as atonement for ancestral guilt and has to make reparations. The vitality of acknowledgement and apology cuts across decades. Denying the crime and brushing it away because it was way back in the deep past, doesn’t close the cycle. It’s still open, seeking a corrective measure—of owning up one’s part in the brutality, even if the guilt has been passed down.

Fashion designer Raka (Puja Sarup) is mounting her new show at her family-owned indigo factory. In shambles now, it’s abandoned, with dilapidated walls. Once, however, the factory that was built by her great-grandfather was a breakthrough. “He was a man of vision,” she notes in the film’s opening voiceover. If it hadn’t been for him, these villages would have remained in the dark, she adds. The glory he brought to the village has been ample, negating the workers’ massacre.

Raka is confident, sneering and does not put up with unsolicited advice. She doesn’t feel the need of adding any apology in her remarks. She points out, with a dash of pride, that she is the one from her family who came back to the factory—that itself must be enough. She’s not remotely bothered about lacing a ‘human touch’. Some of her ancestors’ strong traces of privilege are apparent in her priorities—leave just one carton of water for the workers and haul the rest into filling a derelict fountain.

The narrative suggests that she has a stormy relationship with her father, which is why she hinges on her great-grandfather’s association. She doesn’t seem to care for this shred of personal connection, capitalizing on a part of it only when it seems apt. But she’s brought to witness as the past violently intrudes. Glitches happen. The teleprompter plays strange text, visible only to her. She finds herself yanked out of the present, thrown into a punishing time capsule.

A reckoning with untold stories, history’s gaps and silences, Tinctoria assembles its dreamlike, disconcerting schema in Sunil Borkar’s cinematography. It’s like a series of fugue states Bagchi and Borkar dip us in, swinging between creeping and intense unease. Blue drenches the palette-stains on the drapes, mottled bricks, clothing, tangle of threads, glimmers on the walls. These shuffle forth into Raka’s disintegrating hold on reality—a string of hallucinations, guilt-entrenched, rewiring her view of history and responsibility. Borkar blends the character’s fracturing embodiment, a woman confronted with and purging history’s burden into shifting set arrangements. These destabilized sensations, suspended in time and evoked with terror and redemption—a rabbit hole of compelled re-conditioning—form the most visually arresting sections of Tinctoria.

Along with Swapnil S. Sonawane, Sunil Borkar has shot another film in the series, Kovarty. Set in 80s Kerala, this outing from Rohin Raveendran Nair continues to cement his status as one of the most sparkling, emotionally intuitive new voices. A typewriter arrives in the village of Thozhuthilmukku. It’s as if the place was just waiting for it and is shaken up the moment the object pulls up to its shores. Greeted with fanfare, it becomes an early witness to the shifts in a place. Blessed by a priest, it catches its own name: Qwerty. Typewriter is its “caste name,” he says, that won’t do. The typist Daisy (Rajisha Vijayan) promptly gets to work and thus unfurls an indirect, yet abiding, record of changes and relationships in the village. The typewriter is testament to the first inter-faith marriage in the village. It’s hailed as revolutionary as a bunch of other ensuing marriages.

But a hook interrupts the proceedings right away. In monochrome, we’re made privy to the typewriter’s gaze. Rendered with an aching emotional consciousness, it has its own latent but firm personality. Soon, it takes a liking to Daisy.

In this story of jilted love and unexpected, tender hope, objects express everything from longing to apology to hurt and heartbreak. The ringing wall clock in the office teases the typewriter on its quickening fancy as well as regrets, halting a moment of intimate connection between the two. The clock apologizes, insisting it can’t ignore its job. Magnolias spruce up this delicate dance of courtship.

Anchored in Rajisha Vijayan’s guileless, beautifully transparent performance, Kovarty finds its gentle emotional heartbeat. From bewildered to softening and ruefully conflicted, Vijayan maps every note in Daisy’s inner journey. Bathed in a warm glow, this blushing, prickled unlikely romance is woven with how her selfhood forms.

Delightfully eccentric, the film uses its anthropomorphic impulse to further expand on its narrative of a woman sharpening her individual identity. In a moving later scene, she says how she came to be known as someone worth her salt only after the typewriter arrived in her life. Growing in her professional stature, her agency becomes congruently defined. The backwaters, shot luminously by Borkar and Sonawane, frame this lovely, lambent tale of change—a site of private joy, confession and ultimate loss. There’s such softness in the camera’s gaze it’s unbearably precious-something to be dearly held onto like the typewriter.

Tinctoria, Kovarty are streaming on the MAMI YouTube channel as part of the Filmed on iPhone initiative.