Amal

Rating: ****

On the surface, Amal has everything that you’d never find in a summer crowd-pleaser: it’s got subtitles, it takes place in a foreign land, there are no costume characters wailing on each other. But this Canadian film, the feature debut of North York native Richie Mehta (no relation to Deepa), is an as light as air fable about the spiritual wealth of the have nots versus the moral bankruptcy of the haves. It also packs a wallop at the end with a subtle and surprising a twist as anything M. Night Shyamalan could have come up with during his Sixth Sense days of auteur status.

Amal is the name of the title character played by Rupinder Nagra, a simple autorickshaw driver that tours New Delhi daily, ferrying passengers to and fro. Amal is an anomaly amongst drivers because of his honesty and polite manner; he does not begrudge his position on the low end of the totem. He one day drives for G.K. Jayaram (Naseeruddin Shah), by all appearances a common street vagrant, but in reality one of the richest men in Delhi. As he’s dying, Jayaram is searching the city for a last shred of humanity and finds it his humble rickshaw driver. Before dying, Jayaram drafts a new will that leaves his entire fortune to Amal; his estate has a month to find him before that fortune goes to Jayaram’s two greedy sons.

As I said: simple. It’s a fable with archetypes and structure, obstacles and things to solve, relationships to forge. The film is anchored by Nagra’s beautifully subtle portrayal of the titular character. There’s something almost magical about Amal, even if that magic is as simple in his down-to-earth decency. You want to argue the point that there aren’t many people like Amal out there anymore, but that derides the film’s underline insistence that there are diamonds in the rough out there and that perhaps we each need to take up a Jayaram like quest to find them and be enriched by them. Nagra has such wonderful presence throughout the story that you’re have tempted to tap him on the shoulder and say, “Yo, that kid you drive from school? His lawyer mom is sitting on a small, large fortune for you.”

Part of Amal’s magic is the relationships it develops. One subplot involves a young pickpocket who Amal helps after she’s hit by a car. In a stunning act of self-sacrifice, Amal sells his father’s rickshaw to pay for the girl’s operation. There’s also Amal’s mother (Amardeep Jha), who worries about her son always out in the madness of New Delhi’s streets and pushes him to find a woman to marry and settle down with. This leads to a rather light-hearted moment where one of Amal’s fares, the lovely Pooja (Koel Purie), with whom we’ve seen obvious romantic sparks, shows up on the family’s stoop with the present of a carburettor for Amal to repair an abandoned rickshaw. Pooja tells Amal that she used the money she was saving for her dowry, now many think of a dowry as an outdated example of patriarchy, but here Mehta uses it as a beautiful romantic gesture.

This wonderful tapestry of characterization, including Jayaram’s selfish son Vivek (Vik Sahay), creates a real and enriching story to become involved. And the ending, which I will not spoil, is as profound as it is simple. It’s not a gotcha moment, it’s a simple matter of fact and makes you think about your own perceptions and realities and assumptions in an immediate and impacting way. Mehta’s gift is elegance. He can tell a story so simply, you’re not even aware of the filmmaking involved. Amal wraps you up and sends you away thinking that there is hope in the world thanks to its lowliest of citizens. A wonderful film and a must see.