At the core of Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is a philosophical question that haunts couples who have spent a lifetime together: ‘Which one of us is going to die first? I pray to god it’s me.’ In Kapri’s film, that question rests on a dramatic, practical scaffolding: Padam and Tulsi are an octogenarian couple living in a remote village in Uttarakhand, where there are more sheep, goats and cattle than people.
Those who remain are also contemplating leaving. The central anxiety that Padam grapples with, then, is whether there are going to be enough people to carry the body to the cremation site when the inevitable happens.
Life in isolation
The seeds of that thought are sown early in the film, when Tulsi falls sick and we see the lengths Padam has to go to summon help: his calls to two villagers working in a nearby field are swallowed by the wind and he has to bring out an instrument to make himself heard. We then see how they carry the old lady in a traditional Himalayan palanquin all the way down to a road navigable by car, which then takes them to the nearest hospital.
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Kapri takes his time to settle us into the peculiar rhythms of mountain life, unhurried, lonely and often difficult. In such a place, where you are exposed to the elements, you need people to survive. And in the absence of their son, who, we learn, left home 28 years ago and never returned, the old couple find support in a few young men. When one of them gets a job in Mumbai, it makes Padam sad and desperate, pleading with the boy to stay, even bribing him with cattle.
Things, however, seem hopeful when they receive a letter from their son. And for a bit, their lives revolve around his return. There is celebration — a feast for the villagers; Padam taking a bath, for the first time since 1857, he jokes, in honour of his son’s return — but there is an unmistakable sense of an impending disappointment. The things that happen in the film are tragic, but they happen in a way that feels like you are watching real people living in real places.
A lived-in realism
That sense of authenticity comes from the film’s subject itself, which is rooted in an actual demographic crisis in Uttarakhand mountain villages. And Kapri achieves it through a marriage of fiction and non-fiction elements. Padam Singh Kapri, the director’s uncle, and Heera Devi, who play Padam and Tulsi respectively, are both non-professional actors from a village like the one depicted in the film.
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And even though there are moments when you can tell that they are not trained screen actors, they bring a lived-in realism that has no substitute. Padam Singh’s face, in the glow of the Himalayan light, can seem like a map of time, while Heera Devi brings a combative energy to the couple’s chemistry.
Landscape and loneliness
Kapri has worked with non-professional performers; the protagonist of his feature film Palm (2018) was a two-year-old girl, and he’s tried his hand at non-fiction with his lockdown doc 1232 KMS (2021).
Pyre is a kind of marriage of those instincts. Completely shot on location, it frames the characters as part of a larger spatial context, often resulting in wide shots of the landscape, or with the camera luxuriating in the shapes and textures of the wooden houses (cinematography by Manas Bhattacharyya). These choices aren’t merely scenic; they convey the isolation of the characters and their connection to the land.
The film’s O’ Henry-esque twist at the end feels a bit contrived, but it doesn’t undo what the film achieves otherwise. Ultimately, Pyre is less concerned with death than with the fear of being left behind, and the indignity of having no one around when it arrives. In its portrait of a world slowly emptying out, the film finds poignancy in the simple, stubborn business of growing old together.