Rhythm of a Flower review: A biopic told through the lens of beautiful illustrations and finding meaning in nature!

MAMI Mumbai Film Festival: Amit Dutta’s first ever animated feature film is all about what you interpret from the story by reading between the lines!

Rhythm of a Flower review: Sometimes through the medium of animation, makers are able inspire us more than a live action film. Such is Amit Dutta’s Rhythm of a Flower aka ‘Phool Ka Chand’, based on the life of Indian classical singer Pandit Kumar Gandharva. The film takes us through Gandharva’s childhood in a rural village to his youth, his years as a teacher, right up to when he got bedridden with tuberculosis at the peak of his career. But more than Gandharva himself, there are two other main characters that carry the film throughout. 

One is the animation by Allen Shaw. Each frame is hand drawn to make it look aesthetic and it feels like it’s straight out of a story book. The second is nature. Gandharva’s various different definitions of elements in music are shown through metaphors in nature and people. For instance, in a scene where the camels are walking or a woman is carrying a haystack, they define the meaning of madhya laya in music. There are birds throughout the film, right from the first scene and it’s all because Gandharva can literally hear them chirping from the window and make a raga out of it. There’s also a scene in the film where we can see the first time he truly fell in love with music. The vinyl record player engulfs his younger self and he gets lost in the many layers of the song that he was listening to. In a way, this says that music completely consumed him from early on. The film also portrays how Gandharva could not sing anymore because of his disease, but while he was still bedridden, he rehearsed in a very low pitch by the window.

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In Rhythm of a Flower how one thing transitions into another, for example, how a sun clock transitions into a bird, or a tanpura transitions into a tree, all co-relate to how bandishs intertwine with each other. Along with the illustrations, the film also has Kumar Gandharva’s many renditions playing in the background to honor his work. But the film also has moments of complete silence, almost as if it wants us to meditate through the visuals. We also have a lot to take from the film in terms of the ideologies that Gandharva stood for. He believed in staying away from the crowd to understand the true meaning of music. He kept his passion alive even at a time where he couldn’t sing anymore. Having said all of this, since the film is also open-ended in many ways and heavily relies on the audience’s interpretation of it, it can also be confusing at some points. In a swarm of biopics that are all about the hero saving the day, Rhythm of a Flower, through its peacefulness, tells the journey of an artist who, one day, bloomed into a flower. 

Rhythm of a Flower had its world premiere at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year!