Kannada director Natesh Hegde’s assured first feature Pedro (2021) was shot in his own village and followed a farm labourer whose unwitting mistake exposed harsh truths about his milieu. Hegde describes his haunting second film Vagachipani as a “companion piece” to Pedro (2021) in terms of its setting, the caste hierarchy, the cruelty of the feudal order and prejudice towards outliers.
Not for Hegde the bucolic or quirky charms of the countryside. In his short films as well as his features, a verdant landscape serves as scaffolding for deterioration and debasement. The village is a viper pit, hissing with grievances old and new, hypocrisy and overweening ambition.
“There is no warmth at all, there is the feeling that deep down beneath the polish, we are operating in a different system,” Hegde told Scroll. “This is the way actually we treat each other.”
Vagachipani (Tiger’s Pond) has been selected for the Forum section at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival (February 13-23). Co-produced by Mumbai filmmakers Anurag Kashyap and Ranjan Singh, the rural vice drama solidifies 30-year-old Hegde’s reputation as a pitiless purveyor of human iniquity.
Hegde’s screenplay, based on a short story by Kannada writer Amaresh Nugadoni, unfolds as a slow-burning investigation of sorts into the rape of a mentally challenged adolescent. Pathi is among the residents of a deceptively pretty village, where locals gather to propitiate a folk goddess and bow to rice mill owner Prabhu’s diktats.
The crime is interwoven with other subplots. Prabhu’s writ, enforced by the Malayali migrant Malbari, runs large in the village, eclipsing the dreams of his own family members, including his brother Venkati. Prabhu’s decision to contest a local election complicates matters.
“What attracted me to this film’s story was the character of Pathi,” Hegde said. “I once saw a girl who used to live at a bus stop. Nobody knew where she came from. Sometime later, I saw that her stomach was bulging. Then she suddenly disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to her or her child.”
Amaresh Nugadoni had written about a similar incident in one of his stories in the 1990s, which Hegde loosely adapted for Vagachipani, he added.
One of the film’s motifs, a game of dice, informed the multi-strand structure. “In Pedro, we follow one guy and we are connected to him,” Hegde explained. “But in this film, there are multiple characters colliding with one another. It’s like gambling – we don’t know which way the dice will roll. Pathi is the only human character. Everyone else is motivated by greed or power.”
The unhurried storytelling reaches a kind of stasis and then suddenly picks up the pace – “everything falls apart, like a pack of cards”, Hegde pointed out.
Hegde’s interest in the violence that festers in plain sight within tight-knit communities has been present since his first short film Kurli (2017), about a boy accused of stealing from an upper-caste landlord. Kannada actor-director Rishab Shetty was impressed enough by Pedro and Hegde’s second short film, Distant (2018), to co-produce Pedro as well as support Vagachipani.
The new film is more-high profile than Pedro, which starred the director’s father, Gopal Hegde, in the lead role. While Gopal Hegde returns as a secondary character in Vagachipani, the film is led by Kannada actor Achyuth Kumar (who played the villain in Rishab Shetty’s Kantara) as Prabhu and Malayalam filmmaker Dileesh Pothan as Malbari.
For Pathi, Natesh Hegde cast Sumitra, who is from his village. Although Sumitra isn not as developmentally challenged as Pathi, she is on the spectrum, Hegde said. “Her age and mind are not synced,” Hegde added. “She has an animalistic nature – for instance, she doesn’t like wind or fire. But she could understand what we were saying. She knew that she was acting and that a film was being made. She didn’t design her character like a conventional actor would. Her family knew she would be playing a rape victim.”
Natesh Hegde himself plays Prabhu’s brother emotionally stunted brother Venkati. “He is a tricky character, a traumatised child, and I felt it was better to do the role myself than convince someone else,” Hegde said.
Hegde had been wanting to work with the reputed actor Achyuth Kumar for a while. Dileesh Pothan, the director of such acclaimed Malayalam films as Maheshinte Prathikaaram and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum as well as an occasional actor was cast in Vagachipani because of his girth and his skill in portraying Malbari’s vulnerability.
“I admire Dileesh as a filmmaker, and he is a very nice guy to work with,” Hegde said. “Malbari is a misfit, an immigrant who is trying to be one of the villagers.”
Pothan’s casting is also a reminder of one of the films Vagachipani resembles. Malbari’s blinkered loyalty towards his master comes at a personal cost. As a Malayali in Karnataka, Malbari is a bit like Thommy, the submissive servant of the monstrous landlord played by Mammootty in Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s acclaimed Vidheyan (1994).
While Hegde did not have Vidheyan in mind while embarking on Vagachipani in 2022, the filmmaker say he was inspired by classic Indian arthouse movies on the atrophying nature of rural feudal structures. Cinematographer Vikas Urs’s lush colour palette, intimate close-ups and immersive frames give Vagachipani a sense of timeliness, even though the story is taking place in the present.
The effect was achieved by shooting on 16mm film stock. “I wanted to shoot on 16mm because it’s very precise,” Hegde asserted. “I didn’t like the coverage way of shooting [in the digital medium], meaning that you shoot with multiple angles and then chop it up later during the edit. I wanted to shoot Pedro on film too, but I didn’t have the courage at the time. You can’t demand such things for a debut film. This time, I was particular.”
Hegde was aiming for a feeling that “the film has been discovered from somewhere” – that Vagachipani exists outside and beyond the boundaries of time. “It’s a kind of fable, we are not explicitly saying that the film is in the present,” he said. “The images are not very polished, they are kind of rough. We have the present currency but a very old car. It’s a mixture. The look and colour tones are of dried grass.”
Pedro travelled well on the international festival circuit. Vagachipani too is likely to get wide exposure because of its Berlin selection. For Hegde, the challenges the second time round are the same as well as different.
“You know how it is when you get touch hot milk and get burnt – I guess I have learnt something,” Hegde said. “I have gained confidence, which helps. But I am also the same guy – I am blunt. What I have realised is that there are people who want to watch films like mine, rather than treating me like someone on the margins.”
Also read:
Kannada film ‘Pedro’: A crackling chronicle of rural disquiet
