SUNRISE

Indian/France, 2014, 85 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Partho Sen- Gupta.

Sunrise is a police thriller set in the city of Mumbai, highlighting its darker side and police work. It is an Indian film with French financial backing.

While the film has an atmosphere of realism, with its moving into different time periods and with dreams and hallucinations, it is also quite surreal. It is also surreal in its style of photography, light and darkness, especially darkness.

From a linear point of view, the film concerns a police inspector whose six-year-old daughter was to be picked up from school but is abducted. The film goes back to the days of the wife’s pregnancy and her relationship with her husband. However, the abduction has had a physical and mental toll on the wife.

There are scenes of the police Inspector at work, seemingly a loner, often driving alone in his car, sitting at his desk, the little boy in the office bringing tea around to the other officers, one reading poetry, the other on the phone and compiling files.

There is also a little boy who hangs around the police station, with the other police wanting to be rid of him, explaining that his father is violent towards him – then the police are called out to the house, finding the father dead, stabbed, the wife grieving, the children upstairs playing, and the young boy covered in blood with a knife.

In the boy’s hand is a card with the name of the nightclub on the back, Paradise. In reality and in dream, the police Inspector has visited the Paradise, sitting amongst the audience, seeing a group of rowdy men harassing the girls dancing on the stage, one showering them with money – and, in one of the sequences, real or imaginary, the inspector punches one of the men.

In the meantime, the film shows the background, extremely seedy, of sex slavery in the city, a matronly woman being in charge, dressed beautifully in a sari, easily lying to the police as she conceals the girls in the roof when the premises are inspected. The girls are young, having been abducted, forced into prostitution and dancing in the club. The film shows a young girl has been abducted, is taken in charge by a sympathetic dancer who then goes out and is bashed.

When the Inspector goes to the Paradise, he imagines going behind the stage into a long tunnel, finding the girls, seeking out his daughter, her appearing and calling out to him.

The film is atmospheric, inviting audiences into the underworld of Mumbai, of the pressures on police work, on the sleazy cruelty of the sex trade, and the personal anguish of the family whose daughter has been abducted.