Hearth and Home
(Alaav)

Hearth and Home takes an uncompromising look at extreme old age, when the body can do nothing and the mind very little. Prabhash Chandra’s camara introduces us into a flat, an intimacy, yet maintains a certain distance in line with the chosen angles complicated by the decoration of this living space, which bears on its walls the presumed trace of an artistic legacy. We will never know who this man is, this pious sitar player who is caring for his old mother, her fragile, slender body, a dried flower, and never know who this woman is. At the end of this chaplet of static shots, the son, who seems sequestered here by the passage of time, is filmed on the brink of the vertiginous prospects of his own ageing.  But beforehand, the film has unfolded a collection of utterly trivial and tender gestures to describe a son’s love in which dedication mingles with devotion. AR