Balan: The Boy

There is an incredible time jump a little over halfway into Chidambaram’s Balan: The Boy. A police station hide and seek battle between a police constable and a lost little boy (Adiseshan) occurs in parallel with the search for his identity, conducted by the police officer, the one who’s given the constable babysitting duties. We move between the officer’s investigation outside and the game in the station as the nonplussed constable launches a frenetic search only to hit a wall. With a medium size hole in it small enough for the boy to crawl through. A painful realization dawns on her face and a match cut takes us to a bus window with the solitary face of a teenager speaking a language from another part of India. The whole sequence is hardly a few minutes long, but Chidambaram, cinematographer Shyju Khalid and editor Vivek Harshan take us on such a delirious ride that we transcend time.

The Boy, directed by Chidambaram, calling it a painful ode to lost innocence and a boyhood that never was—a heartrending drama about a son’s search for his mother, even when the film wanders a little too far from its core. Vishal admires how unengineered the storytelling feels; rather than a constructed plot, it plays like someone recalling the most vivid memories that defined his childhood. He traces Indhu (Farzana), who gave birth to the titular Balan in prison, as she and her son move from city to city, terrain to terrain, even religion to religion, assuming fresh identities and back stories while she reminds herself to trust no one. Vishal lingers on the duo’s outlaw spirit, the recurring sense of the past catching up with them, and the moments—a shopkeeper’s request, a marriage proposal, a heart-shaped earring—that each become Indhu’s cue to flee.

Balan is an unusual ode to motherhood. The mother at its centre is nothing like the women we are accustomed to seeing in our cinema — she is neither an all-giving angel nor a noble soul overflowing with love and compassion. Instead, she is grim, reticent, wily and manipulative. Yet, she remains a remarkable mother on her own terms, and that is perhaps her only real identity.