Tatsam Mukherjee

There’s one significant challenge to making ‘screen-life films’ (films that unfold almost entirely on digital screens). Once you commit to its visual grammar, you’re tied to them till there’s a good reason to break out of it. No matter what, all your exposition needs to happen on the small screen, key plot points need to be hashed out during video calls, and the filmmakers need to keep imagining newer screens – ranging from iPad, mobile phones, CCTVs, GoPros, webcams, paparazzi lenses, TV screens etc.

Early on in Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal – four men can be seen discussing a woman’s complexion. “She seems fair, doesn’t she?” one of them asks, only to be shut down by the other: “It is all make-up. Didn’t you notice her elbows? They gave it away.” The woman, actually a young girl named Savita (Nandini Chikte), barely out of her teens, in her final year of college pursuing B.A (Sociology), is being looked at as a prospective bride. Those men could be talking about livestock. Such is the ‘marketplace’ for arranged marriages – especially in India, where such casual indignities are fair game.