Chippa Review: Sunny Pawar is endearing in this spellbinding fable

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Chippa Review: Sunny Pawar in a photo from the film (courtesy Netflix)

Throw: Sunny Pawar, Joyraj Bhattacharya, Sumeet Thakur, Gautam Sarkar, Masood Akhtar, Kalpan Mitra

Director: Safdar Rahman

Evaluation: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

A charming little film celebrated in several festivals, Chippa fell on Netflix almost without knowing it. Written and directed by Safdar Rahman, it has no star power. Not that he needs it. Chippa is a winning combination of heart, imagination, craftsmanship and an engaging Sunny Pawar.

A brave ten year old boy who has nothing to lose but the intelligences that help him survive on the streets of Kolkata lives on a path outside a Park Circus hospital. On a whim, he leaves one night in search of someone who can read Urdu because he has in his possession a letter from his absent father.

Chippa is a children’s film. The city is seen through the eyes of a homeless child. The glow of the neon lights is therefore necessarily less harsh and the nocturnal desolation of the districts of the city less melancholy. But the film does not hesitate to reveal an urban belly of prostitutes, alcoholics, migrants and construction workers who struggle to get by in a charged environment against them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KZoD_wTm0

Sunny Pawar (young Saroo in Lion; young Gaitonde in Sacred games) offers a fiery performance as a titular character, whose indomitable spirit transmits warmth and luminosity. Even in situations where the boy faces a suspicion of danger or collapse, Chippa stands firm. He has no idea what the letter contains, but he is curious to know. The letter could carry the promise of a new dawn.

Chippa is a spellbinding fable of hope and healing, simple, comforting and life-affirming. If one were to quibble, the film could be blamed for having romanticized the difficulties of the blessed life of the titular character. But, then, it is the fairy tale of a poor little boy who will not let the end of the stick prevail over him.

The positive coating on the film comes from Chippa himself. His faith in people – and himself – never falters. Yes, he takes his heels once and freezes in fear and confusion in another, but his spirits are still about him.

It was on the eve of his tenth birthday that Chippa came across his father’s letter. His daggers are drawn with his cranky great aunt (Mala Mukherjee), who sells samosas and constantly accuses him of not having given him a hand. The letter gives Chippa an excuse to flee. Despite his depressing circumstances, he sees the world with wonder and optimism.

Not surprisingly, finding someone who knows Urdu in the bowels of the city (and in just one night) turns out to be much more difficult than Chippa’s innocent mind can anticipate or understand.

During his nocturnal wanderings, he meets people who ignite his lively imagination, a trait which allows him to frequently erase the realities of the here and now and to transport himself in dreamlike worlds which are far beyond his scope.

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Chippa Review: Sunny Pawar in a film photo

He comes across a mailbox. He has some letters coming out of it. He takes them out, crosses the street, sits on the sidewalk, takes a drawing book from his little backpack and draws the Eiffel Tower which he sees on a postage stamp. The film uses animation to capture Chippa’s whimsical flights: his rough interpretation of the Parisian monument triggers a jump into a dream landscape in which a French woman writes a letter to him.

The film avoids the visual clichés of Kolkata. It does not offer a plan of the Howrah Bridge, the Victoria Memorial, the Hooghly or Durga Puja festivities. This Kolkata is a city that comes alive when the crowd and the cacophony withdraw, when the population falls asleep and the creatures of the night, the inhabitants of the street and the workers of quarter of cemetery have the free course of the roads deserted.

Chippa meets a taxi driver (Sumeet Thakur, last seen Extraction and Commando 3), a sympathetic gendarme (Gautam Sarkar), a former restaurant owner (Masood Akhtar) who can spin a whole thread, a postal truck driver (Joyraj Bhattacharya) and his simple-minded assistant (Kalpan Mitra), who, like the taxi driver, is a migrant to the city.

The night is long and the adventures of Chippa lead him in other small episodes which show the public the joyful side of his precocity. In a sequence, baffled by a group of transgender people, the boy runs away. In another, he advises a drunk man (Veer Rajwant Singh) in front of a bar to hail a taxi instead of going home in his own car.

Chippa is far from the unfortunate peasant of Jagte Raho who is mistaken for a thief when he enters a middle class residential complex in Calcutta in search of drinking water. The boy asks a group of people he meets to help quench his thirst after a roadside tube well does not give water. But he never gets into the kind of problem that Raj Kapoor’s character encountered in the 1956 film. He’s just a boy who hasn’t figured out how unfair his life has been.

It’s both Christmas and Chippa’s birthday. He is in a generous mood. He buys soan papdi for a cop on whose motorbike he hitchhikes and orders tea for a newspaper seller (Chandan Roy Sanyal) whom he meets just before dawn. Almost everyone he meets triggers an aspiration in the boy. For a moment, he wants to become a taxi driver, the next day, he wants to play the trumpet during large weddings. He never stops dreaming.

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Chippa Review: Sunny Pawar in a film photo

Chippa is a love letter to the streets of Kolkata as they are when everything is calm. From the point of view of a boy endowed with a wisdom that belies his age, the city has a concrete but nebulous quality. He breathes both the magic and the weariness of the world, captured in evocative frames by the director of photography Ramanuj Dutta.

The musical score of the Belgian composer Cyrille de Haes, in collaboration with Dibyokamal Mitra’s The big other, offers a soundscape that captures both the calm and the poetry of the night, in addition to the resolute soul of those who rise above the fatigue of a hard day to keep life flowing in the veins of the city when sleep descends on large areas. Chippa is a film of transition to adulthood that touches an instant chord without playing too much.

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