As a fan of regional art cinema, it’s the best time to live right now. Especially more satisfying to realize that the current spate of Marathi cinema continues to enthral audiences by deviating from its commercial attitudes — also possibly the reason why it’s become harder for sensible cinema to find distributors, such as Kaasav, for example, which is disappointing. Nevertheless, it’s precisely this matter-of-fact approach of the scriptwriters, in that, deliberating emotions through personally identifiable characters have created some critically acclaimed and award-winning cinema such as Killa, Fandry, and Deool. In continuing with this trend, Ringan portrays realistic human values in an unvarnished personality, with a poignant tale of a struggling father and an adorable youngster against the backdrop of socio-economic repression in rural Maharashtra.
The title of the movie originates from the Hindu festival of Ashadhi Ekadashi held annually in the city of Pandharpur where a large number of devotees of Lord Vithoba (the ‘warkaris’) congregate to sing and dance making a circular formation that’s commonly referred as a ‘ringan’ in Marathi. It completes a beautiful analogy of this unique celebratory pattern in the film depicting a cyclic order of desolation or dejection, happiness or jubilation in a human’s life span. Which is precisely what a poor and heavily indebted farmer named Arjun Magar (Shashank Shende) has been experiencing in a drought-ridden village in Maharashtra . A widower, and surviving on meagre earnings from his parched land which hasn’t yielded any crops he’s on the verge of surrendering to his fate. But for his dearest son Abhimanyu (Sahil Joshi) and often overlooking his repeated transgressions, it keeps him away from becoming suicidal and to start believing in himself. Frustrated and dejected, he finally decides to dump his tragic past and undertakes a bold journey to Pandharpur braving hunger and fatigue to break free of his misery.
Ringan is a heart-wrenching and a powerful narrative representative of different world views. The perspective of a father facing a bleak future of hardships and later coming to terms with his ultimate destiny, and of a 7-year old in pursuit of discovering nuances in a web of personal relationships as each traverses life-altering situations. Honestly, the simplistic voyage capturing the highs and lows of a father & son’s bonding as they find a new meaning through their emotional & spiritual turmoil, it easily underlines Ringan’s value as one of the greatest cinematic experiences of our times.
