Bombay Rose - Unfulfilled Dreams
Thoughts On: Bombay Rose (2019)
A flower seller struggles to keep her sister and grandfather afloat.
Bombay Rose is a fine piece of animation that, as always fills me with gratitude, satisfies the promise of this mode of cinema, utilising a unique animation style to spin a novel aesthetic and tale quite far removed from live-action cinema. With its style reminiscent of Mughal art, it combines impressionism and surrealism with archetypal imagos to conjure a semi-magical narrative of dreams. We are then brought onto small corner streets of Bombay and introduced to social struggles that crush upon the common person without regard for age. And yet we are allowed to see a love story begin to unfurl. While we are refused the typical Bollywood narrative arc (derided with reference to its meaningless stars) by which we are ultimately left satiated in our hopes - as is the clear intention of director Gitanjali Rao who means to remain on the fringes of mainstream Indian cinema - there is contentment to be found alongside the frustration and melancholy of Bombay Rose. We are made to experience the notion that it is always preferable to persist under unfulfilled dreams than to succumb to suffering and live above hell as to solve the problem of existential discomfort. Fate is then allowed to reward the honourable in Rao's world as a means of affirming the life-line that is a dream; a melancholy source of moral direction that pains as much as it keeps us from self-destruction.
