Wanderers
Kathmandu fears whatever lies outside the rim of the mountains that cage the Valley in.
The pieces in this film-commentary series were originally written in between September 2013 and November 2014.
Jerryy, the last big hit among the ‘motorbike’ crowd, was a road-trip movie, at least the first half of it. Come to think of it, there have been quite a few such movies in the past few years. Most Nepali thrillers, it seems, have been stories of young men and women who travel, get into trouble. Among movies reviewed here, Chihaan featured a bunch of young men who travel to Pokhara for a weekend and end up gang-raping the woman who will come back to send them to their graves. Ek Din Ek Raat was a lot more sophisticated in the way it told its story, but it started similarly: a bunch of friends set out from Kathmandu, reach a place where they know not what they do, get into trouble, are finished off one by one.
Chhadke, written and directed by Nigam Shrestha, also starts with a journey: two men take the same bus to Chitawan, and their fates become intertwined. How they treat the forest determines the outcomes of their lives. But it is still the story of a journey: one man returns home and still sets off on the path of violence and crime. The other enters the jungle and finds the forest spirit within.
Kohi... Mero, directed by Alok Nembang (and disclosure: the screenplay written by me), also featured friends traveling to an exotic locale – across the Himals, to the lime-dashed alleys of Marpha and Kagbeni. But there the shtick was used weakly, to add to nothing but video choreography opportunities. At least in Jerryy there is the moment by the lake when Jerry is looking at the girl and seems to experience an internal change. The Zhingrana trailer playing at the theaters suggests a story-line similar to that of Ek Din Ek Raat: a group of friends travels to a strange locale, their trip ends in disaster.
In Talakjung vs Tulke, the protagonist is chased out of his village, and upon arriving at the city, changes outwardly, so that, upon his return to the village, he is able to say - ‘Bhanesi aafnai gaaunle ni chinenan!’ (Look – my own neighbors don’t recognize me anymore!) In Tsering Rhitar Sherpa’s Uma, the urban landscape allows for the muddle and mystery that makes possible the fatal confrontation between a brother his sister. Without the confusion of alleyways and crowds of faces in which to disappear, the interaction would have been different, direct, more emotional than ideological – which was the nature their interaction in their native village.
I don’t remember, from the Nepali movies I have seen in the past year, anything similar to Talakjung vs Tulke, which is to say, with protagonists who come to the city to be transformed. But it seems urban boys and girls are driving out in hordes to the countryside – be it the Terai or the hills or mountains – either to get devoured by local evils, or for a fundamental transformation.
There is nothing new about the genre in which protagonists travel far from their familiar surroundings, and are transformed in the process. All pilgrimages are that: arduous travel that turns the focus inward, forces the pilgrim to watch closely the divine within themselves, and come to a new understanding of their faith. But, how is the road-trip genre being used in Nepali movies, and what does the trend say about the makers and consumers of such fare?
It is possible to claim that Kathmandu fears whatever lies outside the rim of the mountains that cage the Valley in. It is also possible to claim that Kathmandu views the rest of the country as a tourist destination, and sees Nepalis from elsewhere as either servants who will bring food (Jerryy), or women to be seduced, raped, discarded (Chihaan), or as barely civilized barbarians whose rituals of blood and violence will somehow ruin the lives of the urban wanderers (Ek Din Ek Raat, Zhingrana). While none of the movies catering to the ‘motorbike’ crowd – young people who arrive at the cinema in their school uniform, riding a motorbike to each couple – have as sophisticated a political point to make as did Uma or Talakjung vs Tulke about the urban-rural divide, they do seem to have a current running through that unites them against the rural. The movies being made for the 18-24 year old Kathmandu boys and girls seem to hate the rest of the country either by thinking of it as a dangerous place where only disasters wait and where the locals are untrustworthy and opportunistic, or as the place from where the servant underclass arrives into the city. Forget about imagining the rest of the country in its nuances of linguistic and ethnic diversity or of the many, many grievances they might have against the city.
With the rise of the multiplex theater, the divide between movies aimed at a specific class or region and other classes and regions has been growing. That is tragic. Of course, there will always be many different kinds of audiences, and as long as they represent wallets capable of purchasing theater tickets, filmmakers will be discerning enough to match cinema fare to ticket fare. But to assume that the rural audience is not capable of understanding a movie in the same manner as the urban audience understand it is to discriminate in the worst of the ways, through a lowered expectation of intellectual and aesthetic capability. It is perfectly alright to make another Jerryy or Ladduu, but to refuse to look at the people who populate the picturesque countryside that serves as a rich brat’s playground is to fail as a political storyteller. It would be just as wrong to make a movie based in a village and only show a person from the cities as a purse of clichés – go back to the movies from the 90s and you’ll see this trope repeated endlessly. Let us hope that this artificial divide between the rural and the urban in Nepali movies will soon disappear.
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Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Bhekh Bahadur Thapa’s A Life in Public Service into English.
