A fire in the mountains that no one can put out

Alan McAlex. I am happy I did not look this name up before I pressed play on Fire in the Mountains. I headed into it with zero expectations, oddly despite the inescapable awareness that its director was Ajitpal Singh, a filmmaker who earlier gave us the excellent Tabbar, probably the most underrated web series ever made for Indian audiences. McAlex, who co-produced this project that was interestingly made before Tabbar, earlier backed two films that I passionately gatekeep — Liar’s Dice (2013) and Killa (2014). By the time the final credits rolled, I knew one thing for sure. Which is that no matter what happens to the mainstream Hindi film that’s currently in a very precarious position at the moment — Indian cinema is in safe hands.

Enough diversion. Fire in the Mountains begins with an ineffaceable frame, chasing a woman’s two feet as she paces up to a bourgeois family who have come to spend a long weekend in the mountains. Chandra, which is the name of the protagonist (Vinamrata Rai), then begins a protracted round of negotiations with the family and a rival homestay owner over room tariff. Shaving her price down drastically since there isn’t a paved road up to ‘Swizerland Homestay’, her unassuming establishment, she manages to sway the tourists. This is her life.

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Based on a composite of the group of women in Sarmoli, in Uttarakhand’s Munsiyari that have earned much repute as successful entrepreneurs running flourishing homestays — is Chandra, and her life revolves around work. Piles and piles of it. The arrangement of shots in the narrative of Chandra toiling — carrying bales of grass, cans and buckets of water and also her wheelchair-bound son up and down the hill, chopping up vegetables and rustling up meals, carrying out room service for clients, making endless visits to the village headman — adds up visually and sensorily and creates the tension and resentment that drives the narrative forward.

Singh has the gift for telling unapologetically powerful and damning everyday stories. These are quotidian horrors that may as well have unfolded in the viewer’s midst, as Tabbar earlier exhibited. Great films, as Fire in the Mountains shows, aren’t afraid to firmly stick to the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim. Through the central problem of the plot — the road, which promises to bring Chandra’s labours to fruition — Singh exposes the faultlines of a family whose story you otherwise wouldn’t be in the least interested in.

The film also shatters somewhat the rose-tinted view of mountainous cultures as composed of simple-minded, unostentatious and amicable-to-a-fault people — as though no problems exist in their lives (partly thanks to the rise of tourism in these regions). And it’s scary impressive that all he needs is two hours to plot problems of institutionalised orthodox religious beliefs, patriarchy, alcoholism that’s almost pathological in its prevalence — and, quite importantly, the loneliness of children in their most vulnerable phases.

The performances are earnest and felt, though most of the actors are unknown even to the internet. While Rai steals the show with a measured performance that explodes into a magnificent final act, Sonal Jha, playing the manipulative sister-in-law, offsets the anonymity of the cast with a simmering intensity, shining particularly in one brief frame where she gazing into a mirror with an interrogative blankness.

Fire in the Mountains is full of finesse and powerful scenes. It is crisply written and beautifully shot. It just deserves a more giving audience. Give up your safeties and welcome difficult home truths.