‘Milestone’ (also known as ‘Meel Patthar’); Cast: Suvinder Vicky, Lakshvir Saran; Direction: Ivan Ayr; Rating: * * * and 1/2 (three and a half stars)

BY VINAYAK CHAKRAVORTY

Ivan Ayr’s second feature film opens to nothingness. A black screen stares at you for nearly 30 seconds, almost preparing you for the immersive experience ahead. It is as if Ayr lets you absorb a bit of the bleakness that would seem to define his protagonist Ghalib’s life over the next 98-odd minutes.

Ghalib is a truck driver, portrayed with understated angst by Punjabi actor Suvinder Vicky (he was Joginder in “Chauthi Koot”, for ready reference, among other impressive roles). As the narrative opens, Ghalib is asked to load goods in his vehicle by the depot supervisor. He tries telling me he has a bad back but doesn’t argue about being ignored.

It is a trait we spot in Ghalib repeatedly, as the plot unfolds. He takes a lot of pasting without arguing — yet that’s only when it comes to himself. For, Ghalib instinctively tends to fight for friends and co-workers, too. In his introverted way, he is ready to stand up for a colleague who gets attacked by the laborers’ union or an aging driver who is sacked by the owners because he can no longer see clearly at night.

The storyline (Ayr and Neel Mani Kant) takes time to develop Ghalib as a character and to let the audience understand the character’s mind. This is important because Ghalib rarely speaks or expresses, and one way this is achieved is by letting Angello Faccini’s camera stay with Ghalib in almost every frame of the film (indeed, you would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene in this film without Ghalib). It is a style reminiscent of Ayr’s treatment in his debut feature film, “Soni”, where he used the cinematic idiom to let us fathom how his protagonist, the lady cop Soni (memorably essayed by Geetika Vidya Ohlyan), is given to bursts of rage while struggling to cope with a sense of emptiness in her life.

In “Milestone” (also known as “Meel Patthar”), Ghalib doesn’t give in to rage. Rather, he seems withdrawn in a shell even when he is in a crowd. It is a shell that Pash (Lakshvir Saran), a new young recruit at the transport company, tries to crack. Pash is almost star-struck by Ghalib, but the latter has no doubt that the youngster has been assigned as his helper because the owners plan to eventually replace him someday. The situation is a silent comment on how the employer is increasingly becoming an expendable asset, no matter the dedication showed.

For Ghalib, his struggle to survive life’s ruthless vagaries is compounded by the fact that he mostly always tries to keep everyone happy by doing the right thing. It is apparent in the way he gives in without much of a debate when he is directed by the ‘mukhia’ of his ‘and to “compensate” his in-laws for the death of his wife. The loss of his wife is the plot point that singularly drives the melancholy about Ghalib’s existence, which we will gradually realize as the screenplay moves.

Interestingly, Ayr never shows the two women who dominate Ghalib’mind space. We hear a lot about his late wife Etali, a Sikkimese woman for whom he sacrificed his preferred village life to move into a minuscule big-city flat, but the writer-director avoids using any flashback device to actually show us the character. Rather, he lets us form an impression of Etali from conversations around her. The second woman is Pash’s sister, who supports her young sibling. We hear her voice over the phone but never see her on-screen. Pash’s request to Ghalib that he marry his sister has an interesting outcome — it is met with the only spot of aggression we will get to see about Ghalib in the entire film. Yet Ghalib’s story, despite its dreary essence, leaves us on a note of hope and warmth, as he accidentally happens to converse with Pash’s sister over the phone.

“Milestone” is nuanced cinema. The film demands an amount of participation on the part of the viewer, as layered storytelling draws you into Ghalib’s intricate world of silences. It is your film if you cherish the aesthetics of the moving pictures.