Devashish Makhija’s ‘Joram’ questions the cost of progress in the guise of a solid, moving cat-and-mouse thriller

A very happy Adivasi man, squatting on the ground, sings a folk song as he watches his wife on a rope swing. The frame captures just enough of the area to suggest that it is a clearing, perhaps in a forest. The swing goes back and forth, back and forth, past a tree – and then, suddenly, all we see is the tree. We wait for the swing to retrace its return path, but it has vanished. And we cut to another setting, another “swing” – this time in a cramped room, in a Mumbai construction site. This swing has the couple’s infant daughter, Joram – and it is clear that the passage of time between the two swings has resulted in the couple’s migration from their open lands in Jharkhand to this world of steel and concrete. The happiness, too, has been displaced. The man and the woman (Manoj Bajpayee as Dasru, Tannishtha Chatterjee as Vaano), they hardly smile.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galatta.com/hindi/movie/review/joram/

And you can watch the trailer / video review here:

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