A few weeks ago, I watched Astu, a Marathi movie about an aging father afflicted with dementia and his family that tries to cope up with it.
The father disappears — that’s where the plot begins — and while we go through the journeys of both this man and his daughter as she tries to find him, the father ends up tagging along a poor, bewildered man with an elephant (it’s India; we have people who make their living entirely through their elephants that are used in temples, in shows, in processions etc).
After more than seventy-percent through the movie, Amruta Subhash enters the scene. She plays the wife of the man with the elephant. And while the man is eager (while being respectful) to get rid of this strange man who has been tagging along, Amruta’s character pities on this man and vows to take care of him (after the initial knee-jerk reaction of getting him to the cops).
She has so little screen time but of all the people in the movie — excluding the father (played by the venerable Mohan Agashe) — hers is the character that shook my core being.
There are very few things more beautiful than watching Amruta don a character in a good movie. Fortunately for me, I’ve seen her in some of the best Marathi movies I’ve ever watched. First in Shwaas, then in Vihir (when I was in the Girish Kulkarni phase), then in Valu and Firaaq. Not to forget her tiny but memorable role in Raman Raghav 2.0.
Kannada, as she is spoken here in Bangalore, often sounds tough to me. But there are those rare moments when a group of Kannadigas from the countryside board the bus I’m in and then a sing-song, melody flows out of them. This is the rural Kannada infused with so much mellow that it almost feels poetic right off the bat.
In Astu, the role Amruta plays is that of someone from a very rural village bordering Karnataka and Maharashtra. And boy does she speak that dialect. In fact, not just that. She has sung a couple of songs too (in Kannada) for this movie.
What better way to end than to know that she won the a National Award (for Best Supporting Actress) for her role.