23 January,2022 07:51 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from Unpaused: Naya Safar
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The first season of this timely anthology, Unpaused, I remember, showed up on Amazon Prime Video in December, 2020. Most of us believed then the worst of COVID-19 was behind us.
Surprised, almost, but lauding separate filmmakers/units for having pulled off highly competent, professional short films, as a feature-length anthology. It felt like a visual novelty of sorts. While the world was barely stepping out of a lockdown.
This second, equally accomplished compilation, similarly set during the pandemic, is evidently about the âsecond wave'. That took place less than six months since the first Unpaused. A fatal catastrophe that struck, in some form, practically every Indian home. In a way that no event in recent history can arguably match.
And that this anthology does a fair job with empathetically fictionalising and calmly surveying. Putting in place perfect characters and stories to match different worlds, differently targeted by the same virus, depending on circumstances that defined their lives.
Whether that be, in the first episode: a young, double income, no kids' (DINK) couple, going about their day, over what had, by then, become a fully adjustable, professional normal called âWork from Home' (WFH) - a term that actually meant working over weekends, for harried employees before.
Besides usual terms and conditions of a sequestered life, between the young WFH, married couple - the way the superb leads, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Priyanshu Painyuli, simply look at each other on screen, cannot be written down in a script - what Nupur Asthana's The Couple also highlights is how some employers behaved, when the chips were down.
Downsizing further still. Joblessness compounding problems of corona. Humans not caring for human issues is obviously a bigger problem than a virus. Because there's no vaccine against it.
Some simply call it capitalism. The best of us got reduced to "statistics", as expressed in this short film. What's left unexpressed is how only the few billionaires became multiple times richer than they already were.
This short might hit home harder, particularly for those similarly hit by such HR âtough calls'. God knows how many there are. And yet, if you consider, an MBA grad with an engineering degree, losing her job, may hardly be the same in the pyramid of tragedy, as a man who makes a living off burning the dead, at a time like this.
That's what the fifth and final episode of this omnibus looks at, with the film, Vaikunth, directed and enacted by Nagraj Manjule (Sairaat). The signage/graffiti outside the lead character's crematorium reads: "Yahaan ameer aur gareeb ka bistar ek hi hota hai (The rich and poor share bed here)!"
Bookended between these two extreme scenarios - living in a "luxurious prison," as my little nephew calls it, to fighting for daily existence - the filmmakers behind this anthology pan the camera across people, who we know still had to go out and risk their lives.
Getting littler in return. As with the brilliant Geetanjali Kulkarni in the second episode, Ayappa KM's War Room, playing teacher turned temporary healthcare worker, answering desperate calls on the municipality helpline.
Or the young delivery boy in the fourth episode (Shikha Makan's Gond ke Laddu), couriering packages for star-ratings. Or indeed, in the third episode (Ruchir Arun's Teen Tigada), a bunch of robbers who have nowhere to go with their truck full of loot, because there is lockdown outside.
The ideal way to watch an anthology such as Unpaused: Naya Safar is to adequately pause between separately clickable, 25-miniute episodes, soak in the substance of what you caught, and then play the next. That way, you won't suffer at all.
Which isn't to suggest the films are of equal quality/merit. Can't be. Most such compilations are short film contests, with personal favourites, and inevitably one film that universally stands out. This is as much a pandemic genre of its own. Not that you should let this influence you in any way, but on my list, it's clearly: E1>E5=E2>E4=E3.
The conflict over whether such an anthology must be classified as feature film or series remains, of course. In my head, it's a series, what else. Nobody watches a feature over five instalments.
What uniformly unites this lot still, beyond COVID-19 as the central theme, is its outlook. That's positive. I mean it by the filmmakers' response to the tragedy. And not positive for corona, which is a negative for the world. Millions died. No one we know in this series does.
And yet for an eternally amnesic race, this series, like so much else, serves as important fictional record for the future. Something I felt we had nothing of, from the 1919 Spanish Flu - hardly a mention in our history books. That are otherwise full of WWI and India's freedom movement stories from the time, which obviously didn't affect as many nooks and crannies of the planet.
Don't wanna speak too soon in January, 2021, that this shit is close to over yet. But we should see this engaging series, and save it still. Sab yaad rakha jayega - important to remember.
