(Canada/India, 82 min.)
Written and directed by Sami Khan
Starring: Rupak Ginn, Stephen McHattie, Ravi
Khanvilkar
“Where is here?” This question arises in any Canadian
literature class be it at the survey level or as part of the intensive rigour.
This element of searching and wondering, of directionless and placelessness, is
part of the maple-gazing ethos of CanLit long before the likes of Northrop
Frye and Margaret Atwood put pens to papers. Move the question to Canadian
film, and it’s more or less the same. It’s an internal struggle, something wild
and disconcerting, for characters playing out a story in a vast and diverse
landscape that’s constantly evolving.
Khoya, the new Canadian co-pro from director Sami Khan, internalises this struggle of rootlessness and placelessness remarkably well. The film sees Indo-Canadian adoptee Roger Moreau (Rupak Ginn)—Rog for short, a nice Canadianisation of “Raj”—wrestle with the sense of insecure dislocation in the place he’s always known as home. This element of searching and alienation seems appropriate for a film whose Hindi title translates to Lost.
The film tells the audience how Roger’s parents adopted him
from India when he was a young boy. Now that his mother is dead, Roger tells
his father (Stephen McHattie) that he needs to find his birth parents. It’s not
a disavowal of the people who raised him, nor a rejection of his life in
Canada, that inspires his trip to India. Roger just doesn’t feel at home in
Toronto and he knows he never will unless he experiences the route of his
migration to Canada through mature eyes.
Roger’s journey isn’t so simple. He begins the film in
India, wandering the streets that seem so alien despite being the place where
his life began. He has no connection to the people here, nor the ability to
communicate with them, as Khan conveys by smartly withholding any subtitles
from the Hindi dialogue that peppers the film as Roger searches for a distant
relative. Upon finding his uncle, who serves Roger the first of many teas that he
encounters along his quest, the young man sets off with his papers to the
orphanage that arranged his adoption.
Not so simple. His papers, the administrator says, are
forgeries. This news shakes Roger’s confidence and sense of self, which are
already on unstable ground when the film commences.
So begins another journey as Roger tries to make sense of
his original departure from India. As Roger retraces the clues that connect his
falsified adoption papers and explores the possibility that he might be, at the
very least, a victim of human trafficking, his identity is even less certain in
India than it was in Canada as the likelihood of meeting his birth parents
dwindles with each step. Where is here, indeed.
The motif of the return journey carries Khoya into Incendies territory
(minus the Greek tragedy and incest) as it situates one Canadian story within
larger narratives of people displaced by conflict and trauma. While Khoya isn’t as explosively mesmerising
as Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-winning drama is, it’s a very different kind of
experience, more down to earth and driven by personal history than by high-brow
literary references. Together, though, they’re part of a larger movement and an
opening up of our concept of national cinema just as the idea of “home” expands
and finds a new definition in Roger’s quest.
Khoya flickers
with Roger’s restlessness as he finds himself straddling two nations, neither
of which he comfortably calls home. Khan conveys Roger’s inner conflict by
weaving between India and Canada, past and present, as Roger reconsiders his
identity in light of the information he encounters on his search. Ginn,
similarly, embodies Roger’s sense of alienation in both territories as he
inquisitively looks for himself at different corners of the world. His
character gradually becomes comfortable in his own skin, though, as he
discovers himself by taking in the sights, tastes, and sounds of India after
his search yields unsatisfying rewards. This open and accessible performance
defines the character not by his past, but by his present as Roger evolves and
learns to define home more in the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes sense than in terms of where he gets his passport. (It’s an
inner harmony kind of place.) Warm and serene cinematography by Kevin C.W. Wong hugs the
natural sunlight to play with Roger’s glowing romantic view of India that
contrasts with the cold images of Canada that pepper the film and add an air of
comfort when the searcher finally finds himself.
While the film struggles with a severe logical gap that
appears between the last images of Roger in Canada and the final sequence of
the film in India, Khoya is
thematically satisfying even if it doesn’t make sense from a perspective of
narrative coherence. There’s no swelling release at the end of Khoya and no overwhelming catharsis as
the beautiful score by Daniel Ledwell favours an air of celebration and
serenity rather than pull on the heartstrings. The film simply brings the
peacefulness of resolution, and the confidence in having put the pieces together
and having swept away the fragments. Closure. Coming home.
Khoya opens in Toronto at the Carlton
on June 10.
