On Sooni Taraporevala’s new film Yeh Ballet

A lockdown-era recommendation for today: Sooni Taraporevala’s Yeh Ballet, which is on Netflix. There’s so much I enjoyed in this film about two lower-class Mumbai boys, Asif and Nishu, who join a dance course taught by a visiting Israeli-American named Saul, and find circumstances and personal demons getting in the way of their natural talent for ballet.

It was only after watching the film that I realised this was a fictionalised expansion of a short documentary Taraporevala made a few years ago, about two boys who won a scholarship to a ballet school abroad. Interestingly, one of those boys, Manish Chauhan, plays a version of himself in this feature. The other role is played by Achintya Bose, and they are both utterly convincing.

Plot-wise, Yeh Ballet follows a familiar arc – like countless other stories about sport or competition, it is about using something (in this case a dance form) to achieve self-worth, overcome prejudices and pull yourself into a better world. But even if this is an old narrative type, ballet is a very unusual choice for the plot MacGuffin – especially given that these are boys from a very particular setting. This allows for commentary on social perceptions around young men and what they are “supposed” to be doing with their lives, and it intersects with other societal fault lines and divides: religion, class. Asif, a Muslim, participates in Hindu festivities and gets in trouble when he is caught dancing with a Hindu girl. (“We let you people stay in this country, and you piss on us?” he is told.) Nishu feels humiliated when he overhears his rich friend’s parents chastising her for bringing him to the house for ballet practice. (“Drug-resistant TB lives in the slums,” the mother says with the supercilious conviction of one who believes that deadly viruses travel from the poor to the rich, not the other way around.)

In any case, it’s about execution, not concept – and this is where the characteristic Taraporevala warmth and poise comes in. Like her earlier film as director, Little Zizou (which unfolded in a very different milieu), Yeh Ballet finds a hard-to-achieve sweet spot between quirky humour (verging on slapstick) and the emotionally layered moment. Take the Saul role, played by Julian Sands. I have a couple of fond memories of the actor from long ago, and was pleased by the sight of him doing “balle-balle” moves at a very Indian wedding. (This is definitely not something I would have predicted when I saw Sands play Percy Shelley in Gothic as a child.) Early in the film, though, I was worried that Saul would mainly be the gora as comic relief. This both happens and doesn’t happen. The character rolls his eyes a great deal when he sees the students he is saddled with, there are communication problems, he takes a pratfall in an early scene; but even this fall triggers something in the serious teacher who recalls the position of the foot that tripped him and sees potential in it.

And eventually the Saul track becomes just as poignant in its way as the two main tracks – like Nishu and Asif, he is an outsider trying to find dignity and purpose in a new world. Different forms of marginalisation circle each other. Asif and Nishu may be unprivileged and know what it's like to be bullied or discriminated against, but that doesn't stop them from making little digs at their fish-out-of-water teacher, exchanging wry remarks about him in a language he doesn't understand. One of the nice things about this film is how it shows this wariness in these characters' interactions while also allowing the narrative to gradually move towards a place of kinship.

Of course, this type of story, when it heads for an uplifting climax – the little miracle or deus ex machina – will always feel somewhat pat; that comes with the terrain. But Yeh Ballet does the little things so well (the sparring between the boys, the depiction of two initially gruff fathers who stand up for their sons: one saying you’ve probably got your talent from my side of the family, the other saying it’s a gift from Allah, so how can it be “haraam”?) that it’s easy to go with the flow, to believe in these characters and their journeys, and to overlook the minor clichés.

P.S. as I have written in earlier pieces about the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar (one link here), music and dance in many old Hindi films serve an equalising function, helping to erase or at least blur class, caste or gender lines, or to soften the expected “manliness” of male protagonists. Yeh Ballet in some ways belongs as much in that earlier tradition as in the tradition of more contemporary, “edgy” films like Gully Boy.