Neeraj Ghaywan’s ‘Homebound’ is a moving drama about a Dalit and a Muslim who are best friends

Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa play the two friends. The film’s first half depicts their struggles in battling discrimination and getting a job, and the second half has them staring at a fate that’s even more horrible. The poetry of ‘Masaan’, Neeraj’s first film, is replaced by hard-hitting prose, and this change in flavour works more often than it doesn’t. That’s the brief review. A longer one follows, and it may contain spoilers.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is the story of two friends from two non-dominant communities. Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) is from a Dalit family, and Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) is Muslim. In the opening stretch, Chandan and Shoaib seem to be wearing identical brown sweaters, and I had to look closer to realise that the designs on their sweaters were a little different. Visually and thematically, the film fuses these two “others” as one, even though they are fighting different battles. When we first see Chandan and Shoaib, they are in a very crowded railway station, where hundreds of young men and women like them are waiting to board a train that will take them to their exam centre. What we see at this railway station is just one bunch. Some 25 lakh such people spread across several such places of transport are competing for 3500 seats in the police force. Chandan and Shoaib write the exam, and then they wait. And they wait. The results aren’t going to arrive anytime soon.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://galattaplus.com/neeraj-ghaywans-homebound-is-a-moving-drama-about-a-dalit-and-a-muslim-who-are-best-friends/

You can watch the trailer / video review here:

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