Tahaan/Halo

Halo

Santosh Sivan’s new film Tahaan, set in Kashmir, is about a little boy’s love for his donkey and his efforts to get the animal back, when he is sold to a merchant. On his journey to retrieve the donkey, nine-year-old Tahaan meets a variety of people and viewers get to see a slice of life in troubled Kashmir.

1n 1997, Sivan had made his first Hindi film Halo, set in Mumbai, about a little girl’s search for her pet dog. And through her eyes, you see a side of Mumbai and its bizarre characters, not seen too often in films. Obviously, right from the start of his career as a filmmaker (he is a cinematographer first, though now works only on his own films), he has an empathy for children and a cameraman’s knack for spotting and shooting the unusual. (In between these two he made Malli, about a little girl, this time in search of a magic stone).

In Halo, seven-year-old Sasha (Benaf Dadachanji) is a motherless child, who, when told by her servant that God grants everyone’s wishes, prays for a companion. The next morning, to her delight, she finds a puppy. Much against the wishes of her father (played by filmmaker (Rajkumar Santoshi), the pup named Halo, becomes her ‘best friend.’

Then, one day, Halo is lost and Sasha is distraught. She sets out to find the pup and meets strange people, like a dog-catcher, a gang of smugglers, a batty newspaper editor, to a menacing commissioner of police. Among her helpers is a kid keeping up a running commentary and another filming the action.

On being advised by a girl who aspires to be a politician, Sasha makes the rounds of the police station and newspaper offices, till finally, a gang of urchins leads her to her beloved Halo. But when she finds the pup, she realizes that someone else need it more.

The tone of the film was zany and mostly comic, unlike the serious Tahaan, but Sivan seems to understand the psyche of a child and is able to, if only for a while, see the world from a kid’s point of view. Just like Sasha is not too intimidated by the perils of city life away from the safe haven of her home, the Kashmiri kid Tahaan, seems to surrounded by, but also strangely unaffected by, the presence of the army and militants lurking around. It’s as if children neutralize the evil around them, in Sivan’s fairytale like world.