The LURU Review: Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma: The Fable

Don’t ever wish to be anything but what you are.

Fairy tales were bloody, dark, and spooky until animated films and comic books got their hands on them. In the older versions of these stories from India: loyal tigers take on demons to repay a debt, wandering magicians kidnap princesses, wise kings are burdened by ghosts who ask riddles, and fish laugh at queens. There were no grey zones in these stories; the morals were pure and the punishments rotten.

Don’t wing it

Over the weekend, we watched Jugnuma: The Fable (2024), the sophomore film of celebrated Bangalore writer-director Raam Reddy. From the very first shot of the film, we’re in a world that shifts between the fantastical and the grounded. We follow a man, Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), as he routinely makes his way through his grand house in the mountains and walks through a beautiful garden, exchanging pleasantries with everyone he encounters. He enters his workshop in the outhouse, casually straps on a pair of wings, laces up a pair of boots, and continues through a forest. He arrives at a runway of wooden planks, races to its edge, and jumps into the misty valley below. A few moments later, he reappears, soaring through the spray of clouds like a giant falcon.

From this striking, timeless, magical sequence, we’re immediately plunged into the mundane affairs of the family’s magnificent fruit orchard, spread across three hills. The orchard has been in Dev’s family for generations, inherited for good service to the British; we’re somewhere in the North India of the 1980s. The daughter, Vanya (Hiral Sidhu), surprises her mother, Nandini (Priyanka Bose), by coming home early for the summer holidays; the little son, Juju (Awan Pookoot), and the German Shepherds — Jack and Alex — jump up onto her. There’s much laughter and joy. Dev joins them after his short flight. They are the picture of familial happiness—but only for this brief moment.

The next morning, it all begins to spiral out of control. Dev comes upon a single burnt fruit tree. Soon, there are fires tearing through the ramble of this orchard. They are mysterious and unbridled, seeming to break out without human intervention. Orchard workers appointed as overnight sentries are nearly engulfed putting out one of these fires; they were unable to hear it start or find its source. There’s a rumour: in one of the villages, an old man died from the pesticides used in the orchards; a backpack spray tank was found under his bed. There’s also a peculiar pack of silent monks roaming around with their horses and squatting on the orchard’s premises. The increasing bewilderment surrounding these events sours the trust among the family, the devoted estate manager Mohan (Deepak Dobriyal), the corrupt police, the loyal workers, and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages.

Flame and fortune

Through the course of this slow-burning film, the investigation into the source of the fires offers up ordinary and extraordinary explanations. Jugnuma: The Fable succeeds when it sticks to the otherworldly, the technical aspects of filmmaking singing together harmoniously. Sunil Borkar’s cinematography paints the eerie possibilities of mountain air, the colourist Himanshu Kamble gives the 16-mm film the vintage hue of recalled memories, and Nithin Lukose’s haunting sound design underscores the fantastical elements of this film.

But Jugnuma trips up when it tries to iron out real problems: the friendly orchard owner’s transformation into a suspicious shut-in; the tussle between economic classes with a yawning privilege gap; climate change and the human hand in it; and nature’s revenge.

There’s an early moment in the film when the family cuddles together on the front lawns of the house, naming the constellations in the clear, twinkling sky. But, they fail to notice the fireflies glimmering around them. Shots such as these speak to Raam’s gift for effortless storytelling; it is when he tries to force the point that we seem to want to refuse it.

The details: Jugnuma: The Fable is presently having a limited run in theatres