As you open the website to know more about this heart-warming movie you find this one line that grabs your attention and force you to think, “The greatest act of courage is to forget”, isn’t it true? Doesn’t it force you to think and think and rethink? I’m sure it does. And I’m sure this movie will leave you with many questions and you will fight yourself to find the simple but very hard to accept answers. Lessons in forgetting is a story of redemption, of real people, of dependency, of second chances, of love, of betrayal, of women, of the symbolism, of hope. It’s an adaptation of Anita Nair’s book by the same name.
I happened to see this beautiful movie, this year at IFFI, unfortunately this is the only movie I could watch and fortunately this was the movie that I watched on that one fortunate day I could visit IFFI. The story is how a single father, J.A. Krishnamurthy, fondly called as JAK, comes to India from the US, to find out how his teenage daughter, Smriti, ended up in a hospital, comatised. Helping JAK with finding the clues is a single mother, Meera, clueless about her husband walking out of their marr
iage, suddenly, leaving her alone with their 2 growing children and her mother and grandmother. Its JAK’s desperate attempt to closure that brings Meera and him together in finding the reason behind his daughter’s gruesome condition. The movie is about how a ordinary father discovers the unfamiliar world of his daughter. The sub plot subtly touches the subject of female foeticide.
Amazingly wrriten by Anita Nair, and fantastically directed by Unni Vijayan. The screenplay leaves you with the wow feeling. Adil Hussain (JAK), Maya Tideman (Smriti) and Roshni Achreja (Meera) keep you engrossed in the movie with their super-effective portrayal of the characters. What amazes me is the background music by Ganesh Kumaresh, it keeps you glued to the screen. Every particular frame is just amazing, from the one with which the movie opens, the beach, with the wooden boat, the one in which she is raped, drums rolling, the same wooden boat hitting her head, to the frame where her father walks behind the baby Smriti collecting the shells. Every little character puts life in the movie and keeps you engrossed till the end, not giving you even a moment to move you attention away from the movie.
This movie kept me crying the entire time, not female foeticide, or because of the father’s emotions but because the gruesome reality that ‘with power, comes freedom’ freedom to fight, freedom to stand for a cause, ‘with no power, you suffer’, you cannot stand up for something you strongly feel about, you have no freedom, and ultimately you will be killed by someone or you will just kill yourself out of desperation. It brings me to a hard reality that no matter how developed you call your country, women will always have to be protected, they will always need men to help them, and they will always remain dependent. In the end of the movie JAK (the father) says something like this (I don’t remember his exact words), ‘I always taught my daughter never run away from the things that terrify you, and I was just being a responsible dad’. Doesn’t this leave you with some questions too?
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