Review of Cactus Pears – a romantic and mysterious story of forbidden love and painful awakening in India | Video

Here is a fascinating style from Mumbai-based filmmaker Rohan Kanawade: compassionate, witty, honest, clear-eyed. It is a story of forbidden and illicit love, or perhaps forbidden and semi-unlawful, with emotional flowers that reveal the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old worker in Mumbai who has to return to his hometown after the death of his father, where he is expected to spend 10 days in mourning, where he has to apologize to his boss over the phone. His father’s last words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him the best food, and the implications of this request are subtly revealed by Kanawade in a later episode in which Anand’s grandmother, a blind man, remembers why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated.

This widow, in one of the film’s many mumbled dialogues, advises Anand to be discreet about his reasons for leaving and why he is not single; The story he is stuck with is that “the girl” was heartbroken. Anand sadly thinks about whether to send this person a message that he has returned to his old village. But more importantly, Anand reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), a poor goatherd and a laborer whose family money was spent for a long time on his sister’s dowry, who shares Anand’s feelings for him. But Balya is being forced to get married in a society where everyone knows, to some degree, that is why she is single and wants to stop embarrassing everyone.

As the 10-day ritual continues, and the time of his father’s funeral approaches, Anand becomes more determined about what he wants his future to look like. The pear cactus of the title is a shameless gift to Anand from Balya; he has figuratively removed their scars ahead of time, a touching act that just goes to show how scars are not to be easily removed in any other area of ​​their lives.